A personal assessment of Hollywood’s favourite acting buzzword
Method acting is a derivative of Stanislavski’s System that was taught to American students — Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner and Robert Lewis, to name a few — by two of Stanislavski’s best students, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya.
There are several interpretations of The Method, inspired by Stanislavski’s System of acting, developed by many actors and theatre practitioners.
The three main versions of The Method — Lee Strasberg’s, Stella Adler’s and Sanford Meisner’s.
Robert Lewis, another of Strasberg’s colleagues at The Group Theatre, also developed his own version, albeit slightly less well-known.
Each focuses on different aspects of Stanislavski’s original works.
For example, Strasberg concentrates on the psychological development of the character to create a believable scene onstage, whereas Adler focuses on the sociological considerations in the process of building a character.
Meisner, with his somewhat unorthodox methods, concentrated upon the behavioural forming of a character.
Lewis, Meisner and Adler all veered away from Strasberg’s emphasis upon the use of “affective memory”, since after Adler visited Stanislavski himself in Paris, Stanislavski discarded his ideas on “sense memory”. Instead, they would preach the use of imagination in building and developing a character.
In my personal experience, different actors require different methods in acting — some prefer to delve into their own memories and recall them to achieve the correct emotion, and others prefer to imagine themselves as the character and ‘act’ the emotion.
I find that I fall into the latter of the two.
Of course, there are variations as to different methods of acting, but these two are, in my opinion, the extremes.
My biggest challenge so far whilst learning about The Method (since, as theatre is an art, it is a constant learning process) is finding a memory relevant to the emotion which I am trying to portray.
Most plays tend to have the exaggerated, concentrated depiction of real life on stage, and, having led a relatively short life so far, and a life, thankfully, with few traumatic experiences, I find that my repertoire of emotions that I have genuinely felt is too short for me to play the parts that I would want to.
Therefore I have developed my own personal take on The Method, one that suits my current stage in life.
I separate my lines into units and work on them individually at first, finding the emotions that are being portrayed in the piece, and experimenting with other emotions that seem not to fit to help me not to get stuck in the same stream of thought of specific emotions for certain units.
Then I search my own memories to see if I can find one suitable for that unit.
If, however, I cannot find one relevant, or the emotions it evokes do not fit into the context of the play, or I think that it is not strong enough, I ‘fill in the gaps’ of the emotion using my imagination and the extensive research that I have done on the character’s history or personality.
The research one does for a character is, in my acting experience, invaluable.
One cannot understand the character, cannot imagine oneself as the character, unless careful and meticulous research is undertaken.
As a writer alongside my acting, I find that re-writing my lines or re-creating scenes to build my character’s history, and it is sometimes from the character’s ‘memories’ that I develop my emotion, not my own.
I also noticed that in my earlier acting experiences, I found it difficult to get out of character, having tried to relate to the character to the extent that I did, and having done the research for the character so deeply that the character seems real.
In order to find a barrier between myself and the character, I make it my mission to find the right costume quite early on in my development of the character — of course it is subject to change as I build the character — and rehearse in costume so that when I take it off I am myself again.
I find that the costume helps me to ‘be’ the character, if I feel I look, walk, behave, like the character, then I can develop the psychological aspects of them, as Adler says:
“Everything you say, everything you do defines your character. The outside is what counts most in character. Your physical self is the most interesting thing in character.”
Body language is equally as important, I have to clear my own ‘canvas’ of personal movements — first I have to be aware of them to erase them — and then I can, as the character, see what comes naturally and modify it to look as believable as possible.
There is something about The Method that I don’t quite understand.
Gene Wilder said that, when he was asked to recall a time when he felt pain during a ‘sense memory’ exercise at The Actor’s Studio, he used his memory of having his tooth drilled by a dentist:
“After three or four minutes of recalling that drill — how it looked and how it smelled and even how it tasted as it bored into my tooth — I felt the pain so sharply that tears came to my eyes. Now I understood what a sense memory was.”
I do not understand how it is possible to relive the pain of the moment — to me, pain is not an emotion, it is a physical sensation.
If Wilder was attempting to re-create the fear or anxiety that he had felt at the time, I would understand the use of the process.
It could be like trying to make yourself feel a sensation, not an emotion, such as attempting to force oneself to be cold, or hot.
If the pain that Wilder was supposed to be feeling was mental, emotional pain, such as the pain of losing someone, then the use of ‘sense memory’ would have made sense.
However, of Strasberg’s variation of The Method, I strongly agree that Relaxation is the first exercise that should be undertaken every rehearsal.
It is vital for each actor to be comfortable in a rehearsal so that their minds and their imagination can flow freely, and they can develop their character with a clear mind and without hesitation.
Strasberg said that it is through relaxation that tension disappears and concentration can be captured and held:
“Actors tend to be sabotaged by tensions and distraction, so these are important aides in process.”
Steve Vineberg recognised the importance of the departure of tension, since he made the observation that Strasberg “often took tension as a sign of emotional excessiveness and his relaxation exercises fought against it”.
Tension was, to Strasberg, the “occupational disease” of the actor, and defined it as the unnecessary use of muscles — or the use of muscles that do not portray to the audience the psychological changes that the character/actor is going through at a certain point.
The benefits and challenges of Method acting are, I think, subjective to each actor who uses it.
It can be adapted using the various different versions developed by the practitioners who created it — Adler, Strasberg, Meisner, Lewis — for each individual.
Since I personally find it more successful to use my imagination to find the correct emotion for a piece rather than my own life experiences and my own emotions, I think that the main challenge of Method acting is the ‘sense memory’ exercise that was developed from Stanislavski’s first ideas.
However, by means of benefits, I think that the techniques for building a character (not the emotion, unless one looks at Adler’s ideas) using research, and the idea of each actor relaxing before starting a rehearsal, both allow the imagination to create a three-dimensional, believable character.
Bibliography
A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method by Lee Strasberg, 1988, Plume Books
The End of Acting: A Radical View by Richard Hornby, 1992, Applause Books
Twentieth Century Actor Training by Alison Hodge, 1999, Routledge
Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio: Tape Recorded Sessions by Lee Strasberg and Robert H. Hethmom, 1992, Theatre Communications Group Inc.
Acting: Onstage and Off by Robert Barton, 1993, Thompson Learning
The Art of Acting by Stella Adler, 2000, Applause Books
(Article first appeared on Medium)