History
The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute is built on a history that stretches back to the 1920’s, decades before it was officially founded in 1969. In 1923 Lee Strasberg, then a young actor just beginning to find his way in what was quickly emerging as a new American theatre culture, sat in the audience for the performances of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) during its legendary American tour. For the first time, the American theatre witnessed the extraordinary artistic possibilities of ensemble theatre as effortlessly realized by these Russian masters. When the MAT’s American tour finished a year and half later the American theatre would never be same. For Lee Strasberg – who would soon become one of the theatre’s most influential voices – Stanislavsky’s example inspired his “life in art”. The inspiration Strasberg received from Stanislavsky’s MAT guided him as he contributed his own insights, procedures, changes and advances to what is known as both the Stanislavsky ‘system’ and the ‘Method’. In time, Lee Strasberg’s work would travel the world and revolutionize acting and directing on stage and in film. In fact, modern film acting is virtually synonymous with the ‘Method’.
In 1925, the growing influence of Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre on Lee Strasberg’s thought brought him to the doors of the recently opened American Laboratory Theatre. The “Lab”, as it was affectionately called, was founded by Maria Ouspenskaya and Richard Boleslavsky, two former actors of the Moscow Art Theatre and more importantly were founding members of its ‘system’-based First Studio. Both were among the leading exponents of the ‘system’ with Ouspenskaya being a graduate of the first carefully designed curriculum based solely on the ‘system’ at the Adashev Studio in Moscow (1909-1911). Ouspenskaya and Boleslavsky remained in the United States after the MAT returned to Russia as they hoped to introduce the ‘system’ to American theatre practice. Of the many students who passed through the “Lab’s” doors, it was primarily Lee Strasberg who carried the “seed” his teachers planted into the heart and soul of international theatre and film practice.
In the mid 1920’s, Strasberg began his professional journey, initially as a young actor in Broadway’s Theatre Guild, then as one of the first important directors in the American theatre and, finally, as one of the world’s premier acting teachers. Strasberg’s early work as the director of the Christie Street Settlement House’s drama division on the Lower East Side of New York City gave him the opportunity to experiment and perfect as a director and teacher the lessons he had learned from watching the MAT and from attending the Lab. Lee Strasberg was part of the exciting cultural ferment being created at that time on New York’s Lower East Side by the recent waves of Eastern and Southern European immigrants. These men and women along with their children were poised to profoundly change the “New World” they now claimed as their adopted home, particularly in the performing arts. Almost from the start, Strasberg showed an uncanny knack for releasing an actor’s innate talent and for using the ‘system’ in ways Stanislavsky himself would not fully understand and use until years later. Although Strasberg did not call his highly successful approach ‘The Method’, this is where what became known as ‘The Method’ was born.
In 1931, Lee Strasberg, along with Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford gathered together 28 actors to create what would become the single most influential theatre in the history of the United States: the Group Theatre. Members of the Group Theatre included such notable actors as Stella Adler, her brother Luther Adler, Ruth Nelson, Morris Carnovsky, Robert (Bobby) Lewis and John Garfield; as well as, the future film and theatre director, Elia Kazan and the soon to be noted acting teacher, Sanford (Sandy) Meisner. In fact, Sandy Meisner often joked that he was Lee Strasberg’s oldest professional student. The Group Theatre was based on what was once called a “true” theatre or a “real” theatre or as the Russians say “a theatre family”: a permanent company of actors, sharing a common aesthetic and craft devoted to plays embodying the experience of “the life of their times”. Strasberg was the Group’s primary director during the first six of its ten year existence and was solely responsible for training its acting company in what were still considered the wildly experimental techniques of the Stanislavsky ‘system’. Strasberg’s success was such that even today the Group Theatre is still considered the finest ensemble of actors to have ever existed in the American theatre and it existed in the middle of Broadway !
With the Group, Lee Strasberg’s work as a director and teacher focused on six of the many elements of the actor’s craft which would come to comprise his mature ‘Method’: improvisation, affective memory (sense and emotional memory), action analysis/ given circumstances, interpretation, imagination and organic theatrical style. These elements were employed during Strasberg’s rehearsals with the Group Theatre acting company and in the special classes he taught for the members of the Group. Outside the Group, a demand was growing for Strasberg’s special skills as a teacher of acting and throughout the 1930’s Lee Strasberg continued to develop his ‘Method’ with both young inexperienced actors and Broadway professionals.
Strasberg spent the early 1940’s in Hollywood as director of screen tests for young actors the film studios were interested in signing to a contract. It was said that at least 80% of the actors Strasberg coached and then screen tested were hired by the Studios. By 1947 Lee Strasberg was back in New York to participate in and ultimately emerge as a leader in what was soon to become the “Golden Age” of Broadway and the American theatre. Plays considered to be some of the major works of the 20th century appeared during this time; the works of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Horton Foote, William Inge, Clifford Odets and Edward Albee just to name a few. Elia Kazan, Strasberg’s former student from the Group Theatre, established himself as the outstanding director and leading artistic voice in American theatre and film with such classics as the stage versions of All My Sons, A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Kazan’s movies included among others the film version of the before mentioned A Streetcar Named Desire, as well as East of Eden and On the Waterfront. Kazan’s work created a new star, a man whose acting would quickly define the future of film acting and personify the artistic values Strasberg’s ‘Method’ represented – Marlon Brando.
Behind the scenes of this golden age of theatre on Broadway was something new, an organization of actors, as well as directors and playwrights called a “studio” – The Actors Studio. The Actors Studio was created in 1947 by former Group Theatre members and thus students of Lee Strasberg: Elia Kazan and Robert (“Bobby”) Lewis with the administrative assistance of Cheryl Crawford. By 1948, Robert Lewis had resigned from the Actors Studio and Elia Kazan began to look around for someone to lead the Studio. He wanted Lee Strasberg as Kazan is on record saying Lee Strasberg was that natural phenomenon – a born teacher. Strasberg accepted an invitation to join the Actors Studio in 1948 and in 1951 he was named its sole Artistic Director, a position he held until his death in 1982. By the mid-1950’s, Lee Strasberg’s name was synonymous with the Actors Studio and what was being called in the press ‘The Method’ was Lee Strasberg’s way of working with actors to obtain truth, reality and organic theatricality in performance.
Under Lee Strasberg’s inspiring leadership, the Actors Studio became one of the leading artistic movements in international theatre and film. This was partially due to the brilliant young actors who were drawn to the work of the Studio and who soon emerged as a new generation of film and theatre stars – James Dean, Kim Stanley, Geraldine Page, Susan Strasberg, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Maureen Stapleton, Julie Harris, Shirley Knight, Jane Fonda, Anne Bancroft, Shelley Winters, Patricia Neal, Eli Wallach, Rip Torn and Ben Gazzara to name just a few. But something more fundamental was involved; the work and craft underlining their success was in no small part due to the training they received from Lee Strasberg. At the Studio, Strasberg turned his attention from the creation of an ensemble and a theatre to the development of the individual actor’s talent and the freeing of that talent from unnoticed social and/or personal habits of behavior which restricted or masked the organic expression of thought, feeling and desire in acting. It was during this time that Strasberg developed special exercises and procedures for tackling the problems of habitual personal and social expression in the actor. These are the now famous “Song and Dance” exercise and “Private Moment” exercise. The future of ‘The Method’ would see the expansion and deepening of Strasberg’s understanding and procedures for eliminating the unnecessary restraints often unconscious habits of non-expression place on the actor’s talent and imagination.
In 1963 and 1973 Lee Strasberg was invited to the former Soviet Union (today’s Russia). These trips provided Strasberg with the opportunity to investigate the evolution in theory and practice of the Stanislavsky ‘system’ in its home country. What Strasberg discovered became a subject of great concern for the rest of his life. From Lee Strasberg’s informed point of view, much of what was and is undoubtedly essential in the training and application of the famous ‘system’ had been lost in the former Soviet Union. There are a multitude of political, social, scientific and artistic reasons for this, too many to adequately cover in this brief essay. To Strasberg, it appeared the largest part of this ‘lost’ material centered on the understanding, training, development and application of Stanislavsky’s initial and crucial discovery on the road to the ‘system’ – affective memory (sense and emotional memory). The conscious training and artistic inspiration provided by affective memory in the work of the actor was conspicuous by its absence in the former Soviet Union. Without what Stanislavsky called “training and drill” in the individual elements of the ‘system’ – tapping the affective memory (sense and emotional memory) being the ultimate goal of all of these elements – the special quality that defines ‘system’-based or ‘Method’ acting is difficult if not impossible to create. In the vernacular, this unique quality of ‘Method’ acting is known as “feeling the emotions of the character” but in Stanislavsky’s precise terminology it is called in Russian: perezhivanie. Perezhivanie is commonly translated into English as experiencing but a more precise rendering of Stanislavsky’s complex meaning is best captured through the use of the word – (re)experiencing.
Affective memory is the source of truthful acting’s special quality – (re)experiencing.
Those who doubt this fundamental tenet of Stanislavsky’s work need only turn to a section of a 1937 letter which Stanislavsky sent to his American friend and translator Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood – written a year before Stanislavsky’s death – which is quoted on pages 75-76 in Rose Whyman’s groundbreaking study of the ‘system’: The Stanislavsky System of Acting (Cambridge University Press, 2008), Contrary to what most people engaged by the ‘system’ believe, in this historically important letter Stanislavsky offers an emphatic statement supporting the all-important role of affective memory in his ‘system’ and in creative acting:
“As regards affective memory – the appellation belongs to Ribot. He was criticized for such terminology, as there is confusion with affect. Ribot’s appellation has been abolished and not replaced with a new, definite one. But it is necessary for me to name the main memory on which almost all our art is based. I have called this memory emotional, that is, the memory of feeling.
It is untrue and a complete nonsense that I have renounced memory of feelings. I repeat that it is the main element in our creativity [emphasis added]. I only had to renounce the appellation (affective) and to attach significance to memory suggested to us by feeling, that is, that on which our art is founded, more than I had previously.”
Strasberg’s experiences in Russia inspired him to try and save the practice behind what could be called the lost term of the ‘system’ – “training and drill” – i.e. training and drill in the individual elements of the ‘system’/‘Method’; the elements on which the special quality of (re)experiencing in acting is primarily built and insured. Throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s, Lee extended and refined the unique sequence of sense and emotional memory exercises he had developed over his long career. The individual and double or “twosome” sensory exercises of the 1930’s through the 1950’s were now expanded into what were called “threesomes”, “foursomes” and so on – the (re)creation and (re)experiencing of multiple sensory objects of attention at the same time. The “Private Moment” and “Animal” (physically re-creating an animal’s behavior on a human being) exercises were seamlessly woven into this “training and drill” sequence. The numerous exercises Lee Strasberg developed to consciously train and apply the emotional memory aspect of affective memory were also now part of this exercise sequence. These emotional memory-based exercises included the “Place” exercise, the “Personal Object” exercise and the famous “Emotional Memory Exercise” (often called by its older name: the Affective Memory Exercise). All the sensory/emotional work was further refined by the addition of “Daily Activities” (physical actions), “Speaking Out” and Exercise Monologues or Songs to the realities created by the affective memory-based sensory and emotional exercises. The subtle psycho-physiological-physical layering into each exercise (based on a scale of ever-increasing difficulty) of the many elements of organic human behavior (senses, feelings, will, physical actions, words, etc.) which create truthful acting is one of the supreme achievements of Lee Strasberg’s life and work.
In addition to the evolution of the affective memory-based exercise sequence, Lee Strasberg changed the form of the relaxation exercise he had previously taught from the 1930’s until the late 1950’s. The influence of discoveries made in the later part of the twentieth century concerning the psycho-physiological-physical nature of human behavior as well as Lee Strasberg’s personal interest in the ancient Chinese marshal art of T’ai Chi led him to deepen the complexity and thus training goals of his relaxation exercise. He now added what he called “abstract” or unhabitual movement to the essential psycho-physiological-physical concentration process that leads to muscular freedom and relaxation. Sounds were also incorporated into the relaxation process. Both the movement and sounds were used to sharpen the actor’s awareness of self and thus release the actor from the power of unnoticed habits of conventionalized behavior and/or non-expression.
In the late 1970’s, American movies entered what has been described as a “Golden Age” of filmmaking. A large part of this brief but profoundly influential period in Hollywood was the emergence of a new generation of ‘Method’ actors: Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Ellen Burstyn, Jack Nicholson, Sally Field, Harvey Keitel, Estelle Parsons and Robert Duvall to name a few. In now classic films such as The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, China Town, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Taxi Driver, Mean Streets and many more, this new generation of ‘Method’ actors – under the guidance of directors equally devoted to the depiction of the complex realities of human behavior – captured the attention and admiration of audiences around the world. Their work came to define excellence and artistry in filmmaking and film acting. Among this new generation of ‘Method’ actors was a novice film actor unlike any other novice before or since – Lee Strasberg. Beginning with his Academy Award nomination for playing Hyman Roth in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, Lee Strasberg spent the last years of his “life in art” as he had begun them over fifty years before – acting.
By the time of Lee Strasberg’s passing in 1982, he felt that the method of training and drill of the actor’s psycho-physiological-physical acting instrument as well as its creative and always uniquely personal application by the individual actor to creative work on the play and the role which he had devised could, finally, be called The Method. The Method preserves the complete foundational teachings of Stanislavsky – with adjustments added from the extraordinary work of the genius Russian theatre director Yevgeny Vakhtangov – while incorporating in this ongoing tradition the research, originality, experience, scholarship, discoveries, insights, imagination and unparalleled erudition of Lee Strasberg’s genius.