What a production! Isaac Butler has packed The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, his essential history of America's hallmark acting style, with tales of political intrigue, stories of stratospheric triumphs and epic failures, and scenes of backstabbing and petulance played out by--and this should go without saying--a first-rate cast.
Before the Method, an acting performance wasn't evaluated in terms of how "true" it felt. As Butler tells it, the seeds of change were planted in Russia in 1897 during a meeting between playwright and acting teacher Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and theater director and actor Konstantin Stanislavski, the visionary of the two and namesake of the future acting technique. The pair spent what turned into an 18-hour lunch "plotting a theatrical revolution": disappointed with the performances they were seeing onstage, they decided to start a theater company devoted to teaching actors to work toward a more naturalistic style.
When New Yorker and theater devotee Harold Clurman was visiting Paris in 1922, he was bowled over by a touring production of The Cherry Orchard put on by Nemirovich and Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre. Without realizing it, Clurman "had found his purpose," Butler writes. "In a few years, he would study the Moscow Art Theatre's techniques, and help dream a new era of American theater into being." With Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford, Clurman founded the Group Theatre in New York in 1931, attracting a roster of formidable teachers, among them the legends Stella Adler and Elia Kazan. Disagreements could turn so fiery that some instructors stormed off to teach elsewhere, but each remained committed to steering actors toward a more true-to-life style that would become, in Butler's words, "a transformative, revolutionary, modernist art movement, one of the Big Ideas of the twentieth century."
There were Big Egos to match. Butler, who coauthored The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, doesn't skimp on the backstage dramas of the technique's best-known practitioners. The actors featured in The Method--among them John Garfield, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Kim Stanley and Marilyn Monroe--call to mind siblings bent on supporting and undermining one another in equal measure. Brando, for one, "responded to Dean's entreaties for advice with a recommendation that the younger man see an analyst." Too bad Dean couldn't have sought advice from Butler: his book amounts to a print-form master class in the Method. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: This comprehensive history of the great American acting style is the present and likely future standard-bearer for books on the subject.