The method, p.18
The Method, page 18
Later in the semester, they began scene study, taking roles in excerpted scenes directed by other students. More advanced students performed full one-act plays, occasionally for audiences. Boleslavsky critiqued the one-acts and scene work, while Ouspenskaya attended and took notes for future instruction. She also attended rehearsals of plays and coached the actors, giving them problems in class that related to their struggles onstage.
Boleslavsky taught through periodic lectures and his direction of the American Lab Theatre’s plays. His persona was the opposite of his partner’s. While “Madame” was severe and uncompromising, Richard was warm, avuncular, and modest; students were welcome to use his nickname, Boley. Ever secretive, he almost never spoke of Stanislavski or his past successes in the theater. Elizabeth Fenner Gresham, a student at the Lab, recalled the first time she sat in on one of Boleslavsky’s lectures. According to Gresham, about forty students trundled into the small auditorium at the Lab. By then, they had been there a month. They had been told to prepare “10 lines of comedy; 10 lines of tragedy; & 10 lines of ‘character’ for the maestro.” They were all, to a one, terrified. Boleslavsky, by then a large man, commanded a space when he walked into it. But at this moment, he sat, and warmly asked one of the students to recite one of her selections. She trembled with such intensity that she could not even begin speaking.
“Look at you,” Boley said. “You are terrified and you mus’ not be.” He then surveyed the room. “You are all shake like little leaves,” he said. Gresham realized in that moment that his voice was “beautiful,” and “full of sympathy.” He asked the girl to sit down and then told them, “close your eyes & think of the mos’ calm & beautiful body of water you have ever seen … You, with the red tie—you are not thinking of calm water … you, who are biting your finger—it will not find you calm water,” and so it went, from pupil to pupil, until they were calm. Only then would he watch the young woman whom he had called up perform her piece. One by one he watched the students. And then he said, “You have all worked hard for me, to try the very difficult. I will try for you. I will be ‘Juliet.’ ”
Here’s how Gresham describes what happened next:
We sat in motionless silence, watching this big man stand center stage, utterly relaxed, with bowed head. You could feel the thoughts—‘Juliet? Juliet!’—‘he’ll never do it.’ Then you could sense a sort of awed expectancy spreading over the group. We began to believe. We believed. And he still hadn’t moved …
After fully ten minutes, he lifted his head & spoke. And he was Juliet.
When he finished, a sort of moaning sigh came from 40 throats & he grinned at us. We loved him.
Boleslavsky was aware of his effect on his students, and he rejected the mantle of all-powerful guru. “Mr. Boleslavsky, you say, is genius,” he once told one of his classes. “You think he can make you good actor. He can make you big success. That is banana-sauce. Only you, with the truth you learn from the little woman in your class”—that is, Ouspenskaya—“can be actor.”
Boleslavsky was not a theorist. His true gift lay in his pragmatism; even his most philosophical flights were paired with concrete instructions. He would expound on emotion—calling it “the most important and most difficult and precise part of the work of an actor”—and explicitly reject using imagination to find emotion because “in art you cannot deal with unreal things.” But he also would give his students a step-by-step method for building a catalog of affective memories to use onstage that’s far more helpful than most writing on the subject. First, Boley explained, you simply notice when a feeling arises seemingly from nowhere. Perhaps you feel a loneliness that creeps up on you, unbidden. Next, you “catch” this feeling, like a moth in your hands, and try to figure out what sensory cue triggered it. Perhaps it was a cloudy day, and someone was barbecuing next door, and those two things together reminded you of when you first moved to a new city and didn’t know anyone. You then write this feeling and its trigger down in a notebook. A few weeks later, you should attempt to make yourself feel that loneliness again by recollecting not the actual emotion, but the gray light of a cloudy day and the smell of chicken hitting a hot grill. If you can accomplish this, you can then attempt to complete some kind of two-to-three-minute task, like going to get the mail while holding on to the feeling the entire time. If you keep doing this for various emotions, you will build a repertoire of feelings in your “golden book.” Then, as you study a role and see a moment that requires a particular emotional state, you can return to your golden book and summon it.
“This is very interesting,” Strasberg wrote in his notebook. This “way of working on a part is very near the psychoanalytic method.” Perhaps Strasberg was underselling his own enthusiasm, or perhaps he had not yet realized what he had stumbled onto. But these ideas would become central to his thinking about acting for the rest of his life. “What I had gotten was extraordinary,” Strasberg later said of the Lab. “It changed my entire perspective. I had read Freud and already knew the things that go on in a human being without consciousness, but they showed me what it meant. They gave me the key to things I’d seen, heard, and known but had no means of understanding.”
At the same time, he began to see his teachers’ limits. The actual work done on the stage at the American Lab Theatre did not particularly interest him. He felt that Boleslavsky was “not a creative artist” and that the Lab had failed to become distinctly American. After only a few months of study, believing he had gotten all he needed from the Lab, Strasberg struck out on his own to become a professional actor.
Soon after Lee Strasberg left, another seeker found her way to the Lab. Stella Adler had been, in her own words, “born into a Kingdom.” Her father, Jacob, and mother, Sara, were two of the most famous and beloved people in the Yiddish-speaking world. The Adler children—or perhaps, given Jacob’s world-spanning lechery, the recognized Adler children—began acting as soon as they could remember their lines and were treated like royalty. Stella began performing with her family at the age of five. After the performance, her father whisked her up. “She’s yours too!” he shouted as he presented her, feet dangling in midair, to the adoring crowd.
Acting was the family business, the bond that kept them together. When Stella wanted to spend time with her father, she’d watch him rehearse and prepare. By the time she was eight years old—when her father told her to go to the library and research the works of Baruch Spinoza so she could play the philosopher onstage—she knew theater inside and out. When the business made the Adlers rich, they moved uptown, out of the ghetto. Sara raised Stella for stardom and glamor. She had two governesses—one German, the other French—and took music and dance lessons. Sara traveled to Paris every year for the latest fashions, and she often took her daughter with her. As she grew up, Stella adopted a new accent to match the grandeur of her surroundings, one that made her sound as if she had been raised by old-money aristocrats in Connecticut and then sent to finishing school in London. Performance was her life. But the world outside the stage—particularly the worlds of school and normal children—made little sense to her.
By 1925, the Yiddish Theatre had stopped making sense to her as well, and yiddishkeit society felt increasingly confining. Her father had suffered a stroke in the summer of 1920 and was a shadow of his former self. Though still only twenty-five, Stella had already traveled internationally, made her Broadway debut, nearly died of tuberculosis, wooed Sergei Prokofiev, and married a dapper English violinist named Horace Eliascheff. Her illness had forced her off the stage for two years, but her husband’s inability to land work had shoved her back on. She modeled coats for a dollar an hour and borrowed money for basic necessities. Over a decade had passed since the peak of Jewish immigration to New York. Stella’s generation was assimilating, and Yiddish theater’s cultural prominence was collapsing as a result. It would never be a vehicle for a lifelong career as an actress, but she didn’t know what else to do.
As she had when she was eight, she went to the library in search of a solution, looking up “techniques of acting” in the card catalog of the midtown branch and pulling books off the shelves. One of the books may well have been My Life in Art, Konstantin Stanislavski’s recently published memoir—a memoir that contains almost nothing in its 583 pages about the technique of acting. A young man, his name unknown, his face never described, saw her in the stacks and began talking to her. He may have been a helpful theater enthusiast, or, given Stella’s remarkable beauty, he may have been hoping to pick her up. Either way, he asked her if she had seen the production of Troubetskoy’s The Sea Woman’s Cloak that was being put on in some kind of apartment in the Village. He believed it was connected to a school.
That day, Stella entered the American Lab Theatre’s performance space, which seated about twenty people. “I was astonished at a number of things,” she recalled later. “One, the absolute, fantastic production. The acting, and the audience. In the audience was a woman with a monocle, in black, and she was like a[n] etching …” That striking black-clad Cyclops was, of course, Maria Ouspenskaya. “I went to the Laboratory Theatre and I said I wanted to join them, and they took me in immediately.” Stella began studying there and joined the company, but from the start her relationship with the Lab was a stormy one. Boley offered her a role in The Scarlet Letter shortly after she joined, and she turned it down because it had no lines. She felt he never fully trusted her again.
While Stella was finding her footing at the Lab, Lee was beginning his career as a professional actor. Philip Loeb, the Theatre Guild’s casting director, gave him a few walk-on roles in the Guild’s shows. In one of the first—as a Ku Klux Klan member in John Howard Lawson’s Processional—Lee met a young actor and pianist named Sanford Meisner. The two became friends. Then, while waiting in a line to audition for a play, they met Harold Clurman.
Since returning from Paris, Clurman had apprenticed with the Provincetown Players and then begun working as a script reader and bit player for the Guild. He had seen Lee act—he remembered him as “very short, intense-looking, with skin drawn tightly over a wide brow”—and their shared background as Jewish intellectuals from the Lower East Side helped a series of chance encounters blossom into an intense friendship.
From the start, their bond was built on tutoring each other. Strasberg and Clurman were both cerebral, but their minds worked differently. Clurman loved music, the visual arts, literature, and poetry. Strasberg had developed a nearly monomaniacal interest in the theater. (Later in life, he would gain a second obsession in baseball.) Like Stanislavski and Nemirovich, one understood form, the other content. From Strasberg, Clurman learned that a play wasn’t simply the performance of a text; it was, as Boley had taught, the intermingling of direction, acting, design, and the spoken word, giving birth to something greater than any one individual component. Clurman taught Strasberg that the text was not merely “literary material” but “a vehicle of human meaning.”
Intrigued by Strasberg’s theories about acting and directing, Clurman ventured to the Chrystie Street Settlement to watch his friend experiment with affective memory and other techniques. As a kind of thank-you, Clurman arranged for Strasberg to meet Jacques Copeau, the legendary French stage director whom the New York Times had called “the arch-rebel of the French theatre.” Clurman knew Copeau from his time in Paris, and he invited him to Chrystie Street, where Strasberg staged a command performance of Copeau’s own play The House into Which We Are Born. The French master applauded warmly at the end and pronounced the show “very nice … very nice,” before elaborating, with a hint of Gallic ambivalence, that “we did it differently.”
Clurman stood up to translate whatever Strasberg would say in response, but his friend said nothing. In the years to come, Clurman would see this incident as part of a pattern: Strasberg masked feelings of inadequacy with imperiousness. The moment revealed Lee to Harold as “a man terrified by his own fears and insecurities.” Strasberg, for his part, averred that he simply had trouble speaking to other people. He hardly talked to his own family. The basics of social interaction were complete mysteries to him. He didn’t even say hello or goodbye to people because he didn’t understand what the words were for. “In my upbringing we never said ‘hello,’ ” he once explained. “Who said ‘hello’? My mother with her army of children and boarders and husband and God knows what else would take time from washing the floor to look up and say to me, ‘hello’? … And who said good-bye? What does that mean, good-bye? … What kind of nonsense is ‘good-bye’?”
Lee could be tough to get along with, Clurman knew, but his work at Chrystie Street demonstrated that he had cracked a mystery of the actor’s art. Strasberg, never a modest man, believed that he had something special too. One day, as the two men watched a particularly arduous Guild rehearsal in which an actor simply could not find the emotion that the scene required, Strasberg leaned over to Clurman and whispered, “I could get it out of her.”
By then, Clurman had begun to grow disillusioned with the Guild. Too often he saw good plays put on by good directors with good casts die onstage because no one had a clear point of view into the material, or any real understanding of how it spoke to people’s lives. Aaron Copland had begun to figure out how to create a new American sound in symphonic music, one that used the tools and techniques developed in Europe and adapted them to America’s yearnings, its mysteries and struggles, its potential and its pain. Someone needed to do this for theater. Perhaps Clurman—or he and Strasberg—could be the ones to do it.
•
Strasberg and Clurman enrolled in Boleslavsky’s 1927 course for directors at the American Laboratory Theatre. It is unclear whether Strasberg ever attended the class. Clurman took as much advantage of his time at the Lab as he could, auditing lectures and scene study workshops and sitting in on Boleslavsky’s rehearsals. Like Strasberg, he found the Lab’s productions lacking. It’s hard to convince the world that your work is of professional merit, he felt, when people in their early twenties are playing grandmothers.
Boleslavsky drilled his directing students in dramatic action. “When you are born,” he said, “the very first moment, you start to act; you start to do something.” A role in a play is “a collection of problems in which you wish and you do.” As in the “system,” the actor needs to find the problem for each moment and the action that suits that problem, using infinitive verbs to chart their desires. These actions are in turn dictated by the given circumstances. These basic ideas—that at the heart of a character was action, that action arose as a result of problems, that those problems could be determined through careful textual analysis and interpretive creativity, and that they could be phrased as infinitive verbs—were Richard Boleslavsky’s great gift to America. For much of the twentieth century, they became the standard by which character was explored and acting taught.
It is also likely that from his teaching we get “the beat” as a term of art in acting and writing. Stanislavski called a character’s basic unit of action a “bit.” When the task/problem changes, a new bit begins. Line the bits up, and you have the basic shape of your role, what Stanislavski called the throughline of action. When you feel overwhelmed, all you have to do is focus on the bit immediately in front of you. Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya both used this term. Owing to their thick Russian accents, however, “bit” was heard as “beat.”
During his time at the Lab, Clurman met Stella Adler, likely in March or April 1927. She had recently given birth to her daughter, Ellen. A year earlier, Jacob Adler, her father and Clurman’s hero, had died. His body lay in state at the Hebrew Actors Club, visited by tens of thousands of mourners. By 1927, her father’s death and her daughter’s birth created a financial crisis for Stella that only heightened her conflicts with the Lab. The Irving Place Theatre wanted her for their next season. Despite his normal restraint and warmth, Boleslavsky sent her a letter demanding “a note telling your reasons exactly for leaving the Lab, if you are leaving it,” and complaining that her late departure would throw their season into chaos because “I am building the repertory all around the people in the Lab, the people whom I want to see at their best.”
Stella’s reply, addressed to both Boley and Madame, shows how lost and resentful she felt by the end of that year. The theater, she wrote to them, was, “my home, my playground, my temple … I know no other life. I had no other home. This shelter lasted until my father[’]s illness.” The cost of her father’s funeral had nearly ruined the family, she explained. Stella survived this crisis, thanks in part to the Lab and its ideals, its promise that within a good actor could be born a great artist. But those ideals also had run aground on the hard realities of life in New York City. The Lab could not pay her well. When she wanted outside jobs, she had to beg “a committee of well housed, well fed, comfortable idealists” for special dispensation to act elsewhere, even for a single weekend. Now she had little choice but to look for other work. Her husband’s “nerves are all gone,” and he’d had to quit his job. She would soon have to borrow money to keep her family afloat. “The committee can’t keep me this time,” she wrote, defiant. “The people at the Laboratory Theatre who are faced with my problems have private incomes. The others do not permit themselves to have children.” Stella, as both a working mother and her household’s sole breadwinner, could clearly see the limits of the Lab’s collective ethos, even if no one around her could.
