The Method, page 20
On Tuesday, June 9, 1931, the company began working on Connelly in earnest. They read through the play, and Strasberg discussed the play’s “inner significance,” the idea that the dialogue could mean more than its words. In tandem with Clurman, he began to teach his method of acting. Lee led the actual classes, while Harold met individually with actors to tutor them in the new method, work on affective memory exercises, and counsel them. The Group believed that “the treatment of many artistic problems … was also superficial because it limited itself to these problems alone.” Working on the actors’ personal deficiencies would help them become better artists. Besides, life and art were, to the Group, one and the same.
From the beginning, Aaron Copland warned Clurman that this approach was a mistake. What is it that familiarity breeds, again? When Clurman brought this concern to Strasberg, Lee replied that the Group had to become close. They weren’t merely a bunch of tradespeople, they were creating something new: the first truly collective ensemble. Telling the truth about America required a more truthful approach to acting, and a new ensemble ethos. Both of these in turn necessitated absolute personal commitment from the company.
They were young and passionate and had little respect for one another’s boundaries. Soon the Group began pairing off. The men in the company formed a “Fuck Phoebe Club” based on their desire for Phoebe Brand, Strasberg’s old classmate from the Clare Tree Major School. She and Morris Carnovsky fell in love. Cheryl Crawford and a young actor named Dorothy Patten became a couple. Harold and Stella began their relationship in earnest before arriving that summer, and they fought constantly, as they would for the rest of their lives. The fights were at heart all the same: Harold wanted to be loved by Stella as passionately as he loved her, and Stella wanted freedom and respect. Paula Miller, another young actor in the Group, seduced Lee. Clifford Odets tried to get in on the action, sending daily love letters to fellow actor Eunice Stoddard, but his efforts came to naught.
Over the summer, Strasberg and Clurman’s instruction focused on improvisation and affective memory exercises. Strasberg would tell the actors they were trapped in a mineshaft and had to find a way out, and it was their job to create fully fleshed-out characters on the spot within that problem. Taking a page out of the MAT playbook, they would improvise their way through the action of a scene in rehearsal, worrying later about saying the lines as written. Strasberg also used improvisation to develop the staging for large group scenes of the play, particularly a sequence of nighttime revels where the cast drank, spun the bottle, and sang. Strasberg, always trying to figure out a way to add complexity to the work, told the actors to remember what it’s like when they don’t want noise complaints from the guy in the apartment next door. Could they have a party and worry about its boisterousness at once?
When it came to affective memory, Strasberg and Clurman pushed the practice farther than Boley and Ouspenskaya had. Boley told his students to catch feelings the way one might a fish, reeling them in whenever they tugged on the subconscious, recording the results in a “golden book.” Strasberg and Clurman were spelunkers, purposefully guiding sense memory explorations in search of elusive—and often traumatic—emotions. The Group learned to “take an exercise,” which meant using sensory triggers to summon affective memories in rehearsal and performance. Clurman would later say that Strasberg was “a fanatic on the subject” of true emotion, and that to the actors, “it was revelation in the theatre; and Strasberg was its prophet.” Harold had also accepted true emotion as his personal lord and savior. By the end of June, he gave a talk on the subject, which Phoebe Brand described in the Brookfield Diary with the enthusiasm of a recent convert. “Harold talked about the question which everyone has heard all his life—‘Should the actor feel his part?’ ” she wrote. “He showed what a foolish question it was. Imagine an actor in the group not feeling his part!”
Taking an exercise proved a revelation, but it also caused problems right from the start. “It feels just great to experience that groundswell of emotion rising in you and the temptation to self-indulgence is almost irresistible,” Bobby Lewis recalled. Relying too heavily on affective memory also risked an actor’s “com[ing] up with feelings that may be true to his reaction to a particular situation, rather than the emotion the character should have.” Broadway veteran Morris Carnovsky had put it more succinctly, asking Clurman in 1930, “What is this hocus-pocus?”
Taking an exercise at times threatened to lurch into self-parody. In one rehearsal, Franchot Tone paused between every single line to venture into the recesses of his past, searching for the correct emotion. Strasberg turned to Tone’s scene partner, Phoebe Brand, and admonished her for not working the way Franchot did. Brand explained that she couldn’t do it. She believed in Lee, believed in what he was teaching, but, in what would become a near-constant critique of Strasberg over the years, this constant turning inward to the self and backward in time meant the performances had no momentum and the play had no action. Strasberg was nonplussed. “Do it anyhow,” he insisted. Brand tried, but instead she forced out the emotions, performing them instead of living them. Strasberg grabbed her with one hand and with the other caressed her arm, urging her to relax.
Relaxation, to Strasberg, was key. If you weren’t physically relaxed, the muscle tension would impede the flow of your work, and of your emotions. But Lee was a difficult man to relax around. He was quiet, imperious, withdrawn. When he worried that he was showing emotion himself, he hid behind the sports section of a newspaper. He was also prone to rages, screaming at actors when they didn’t do what he wanted. The Group’s growing adoration for Strasberg over that summer only made him more difficult, his standards more demanding. “There came into his humble demeanor something tight and autocratic, driving and fierce,” Clurman said. “He would alternate between a childish self-indulgence in people’s good opinion of him and an almost sadistic fury when he was balked.”
In one scene, Morris Carnovsky—playing Uncle Connelly—had to climb onto a chair and raise his glass into the air. Carnovsky leaped up and hoisted the glass, only for Strasberg to tell him it was no good. Another clamor, another hoist, another dud result. After fifteen attempts to meet Lee’s standards, Carnovsky got fed up. “I was already an established name,” he explained later, “while Lee was a nobody.” He dropped the glass on the table in annoyance. Strasberg’s face drained of all color as the room grew silent.
At first, Lee said that they should move on, but when Carnovsky began his next speech, Strasberg started yelling at him. “You … are committing a central crime against the whole spirit of the Group,” he began, before launching into a diatribe about the ensemble ethos and how Carnovsky had committed the criminal act of breaking it. He worked himself into such a lather that Carnovsky became concerned for Strasberg’s health. “All right, Lee,” he said, softly. “All right.” Strasberg calmed down and the rehearsal continued.
“I knew the principle, but I also knew the practice,” Carnovsky said, decades later. “The principle of equality was there but the ass-kissing of Strasberg was also there. The principle applied to everyone else but not him.”
Before too long, the actors nicknamed Strasberg “General Lee.” It was affectionate. For the most part.
As the weeks went on, the Group developed a private jargon for their techniques. Besides “taking an exercise,” they adopted Ouspenskaya’s “giving a problem.” Strasberg also insisted the actors “take a minute” before they entered, spending sixty seconds recalling their character and their preparation. “Indicating,” a term that most acting students know today, referred to forcing and externally representing emotion rather than genuinely feeling it.
They were astounded by their own progress. In Brookfield, the Group became better artists seemingly overnight. As Odets wrote in the Diary, “How the hell is this … four days gone and yet so much done?? Here is something with more cogency than all the talks on theory during the past months in the city … a miracle like to the bursting of a chrysalis.” Perhaps, Odets felt, they were improving as people as well. “I am done! Done with chasing my febrile self down the nights and days. From the ashes to phoenix … I am passionate about this thing!!”
There were two malcontents in their company, however. The first was Franchot Tone. He was rich and a playboy, a lover of the stage but not of authority. Soon he began skipping Clurman’s afternoon talks and defiantly whittling bits of wood whenever Strasberg discussed technique during rehearsals. On the Fourth of July, he shot off fireworks first thing in the morning, then wandered throughout the grounds setting off firecrackers all day. Morris Carnovsky tried to get him to stop. “Franchot, for God’s sake, I can’t stand the noise.” Tone, pointing to Carnovsky’s Mozart records, responded, “And I can’t stand your noise!” and left in his car for New York City. Tone’s conduct tested the Group’s communitarian ideals. As their lone conventional leading man, he was permitted to get away with behavior that the directors would never have tolerated from anyone else.
Stella Adler had also grown unsure of the Group’s youthful enthusiasm and psychological technique. Her relationship with the Group would never be simple. She was both worldlier and more professionally experienced than the other members. If Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya, two gods of the stage, failed to instill in her the ensemble ethos, some shtetl upstart barely out of his twenties wasn’t going to do it either. As she would later say, she despised “being surrounded with nothing people who had no style. The Group was a disaster for me and they didn’t like me either. I didn’t fit. I loathed the rawness of life, that community eating and living and schlepping about. I was too conditioned to stardom.”
She stuck around, though. She loved Harold—for now, anyway—and the roles were good, providing her with the kind of work and development as an artist she lacked elsewhere. But the same hungers that brought her to the Group led her to chafe against it. Although her gifts would not be recognized for some time, Stella Adler was a genius in her own right, an autodidact and scholar like Strasberg, able to synthesize ideas like Clurman, possessed of every bit as much ego as the Directors and then some. Unlike Clurman and Strasberg, however, she was an actor, and a woman, with little say in the Group’s operations. The inevitable result of this incongruity was rage.
For now, however, giddy with love for art and one another, the Group could push aside most of their underlying conflicts. On their final night before moving back to the City, Clurman gave another inspirational speech, and they performed the play, without sets or costumes, for an invited audience. After the run-through, an actor named Margaret “Beany” Barker was asked by her manager how long she would be busy with her present engagement. “If our play is a success—twenty years,” she said. “If not—twenty years.” Hooked on their method, the Group departed Brookfield believing that nothing could stop them, ready to conquer New York’s unsuspecting theatrical establishment.
CHAPTER 11
It Makes You Weep
Critics had waited a long time for The House of Connelly to escape the limbo of the Theatre Guild’s programming process, and they greeted the Group’s delicate, graceful production with a relief that pushed into ecstasy. “In its utter simplicity of story and structure, in its flow and balance of mood, in its truth and sentience, [The House of Connelly] is more like a prose poem of the old South yielding to the new,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in his rave for the New York Times. “And it is abidingly beautiful.” Atkinson fell hard for Connelly’s poetic heart, and for the actors who put it across so sincerely. “Although the pace of their performance may seem a little self-consciously deliberate,” he wrote, “they play like a band of musicians … Their group performance is too beautifully imagined and modulated to concentrate on personal achievements. There is not a gaudy, brittle or facile stroke in their acting.”
The House of Connelly was a small hit, running from September to November 1931, and the reviews made it clear that the Group was on to something. Now all they needed was the right script that caught the national mood, and they’d break through. Instead their next show, 1931–, ran for just twelve performances. The third, Maxwell Anderson’s Night over Taos, managed thirteen. The year that started triumphantly in a caravan to Connecticut ended with a whimper. But the encouraging reviews for Connelly and their own passion were fuel enough to propel them into a second summer retreat at Dover Furnace, New York, and a new season of plays.
At Dover Furnace, the Group came into its own as a true creative ensemble. They gained a new member in Roman Bohnen, an alum of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and a crew of apprentices, including a recent Yale graduate named Elia Kazan.
Born into an Anatolian family in Constantinople in 1908, Kazan would grow up feeling he had been performing all of his life. At Yale, he gained the nickname Gadge, short for Gadget, for his willingness to make himself useful to whoever needed him. By the end of the Group’s 1932–33 season, he was serving as the company’s unofficial associate press representative and painting the signs for their plays. But beneath his ingratiating charm ran hot currents of ambition and rage, which would surface ever so briefly only to disappear behind what he dubbed his Anatolian smile.
Kazan had interviewed in the spring at the Group’s offices, then at the 48th Street Theatre on Broadway. He met Cheryl Crawford first. “Sit down,” she said. “The boys will see you soon.” In a few minutes, “the boys” called him in. He entered a poorly lit room and saw an owl of a man staring at him, unblinking. Sitting next to the owl were two hands holding the sports section of the newspaper. Slowly, reluctantly, the newspaper lowered, revealing the impassive face of Lee Strasberg. The owl introduced himself as Harold Clurman. Kazan immediately felt that he was being examined and that, as a “saturnine young man of uncertain race without the visible qualities an actor needs to make his way,” was found wanting.
“Well,” Clurman said, “tell us about yourself.” While Kazan started talking, the interview, if that’s what it was, became more and more like an uncanny dream. Strasberg gazed longingly at the newspaper, while Clurman rubbed the stubble on his face and muttered to himself that he had forgotten to shave.
Lee ran out of patience. “Tell us what you want,” he said.
Kazan couldn’t hold in his annoyance any longer. “What I want is your job,” he said. When he saw their reactions, he immediately retreated. “I mean I want to be a director.” Despite the awkwardness of this first meeting, the directors agreed to take Kazan on.
At Dover Furnace, the Group rehearsed two plays. Clurman again refused to direct either one. The reluctance of the Group’s chief theorist to put his ideas into action befuddled Strasberg and Crawford. Was Clurman scared? Paralyzed by indecision? They both felt that Success Story, John Howard Lawson’s scathing drama about a man sacrificing every ideal he’s ever held on the altar of corporate ambition, was tailor-made for Clurman’s ideas and abilities. But Clurman could not be persuaded. Finally, Strasberg said he’d do it. Cheryl Crawford agreed to helm The Party by Dawn Powell, which would eventually be retitled Big Night. Powell’s play approached the same themes as Success Story from a satirical point of view, telling the story of an ad man who tries to get his wife to sleep with a potential client. Crawford felt little connection to the material, but someone had to do it.
Big Night rehearsed first that summer, and as its cast was small, the rest of the company began to branch out in their experiments in the technique of acting, pushing their method into new territory. They took movement courses from the dancer Helen Tamiris, who created exercises rooted in physical action rather than traditional dance, challenging them to use only their bodies to express a problem and its emotional content. These classes were particularly beloved by Bobby Lewis, who, out of everyone in the Group, was the most devoted to the idea of style—as opposed to emotional truth—as the unifying thread of a production.
The Group’s hunger for all things Russian could not be sated. They moved from Stanislavski to his disciple Vakhtangov and prodigal son Meyerhold. Strasberg brought Russian-language articles and books on theater with him, and Mark Schmidt, a dishwasher at Dover Furnace, translated them. The company sat rapt with attention as, night after night, Schmidt read aloud about the First Studio, and Meyerhold, and Vakhtangov. Clurman would later compare their attention to that of the sultan listening to Scheherezade.
Inspired by tales of Vakhtangov’s and Meyerhold’s heightened physicality and style, they moved beyond their work with emotion and the problems of a text. Strasberg would give an actor a prompt of a single word, and they had to create an entire étude out of it. Odets, when given “America,” produced a pantomime of a businessman furiously rushing around his morning routine to get to his job on time, then arriving at an office where no work remained to be done. In another exercise, actors would repeat a phrase like “I must see you” over and over again, changing its meaning by shifting emphasis and tone. Strasberg had the actors play an entire scene in gibberish. The company performed animal pantomimes, created characters based on poses from paintings and sculptures, and played famous pieces of music in the style of a character invented on the spot. Clurman taught a class in which he gave the actors poems and instructed them to create nonliteral physical scenarios around them. The most famous of these was Bobby Lewis’s “Red Hamlet,” in which he paired the “To be or not to be” soliloquy with the gestures of a Communist rabble-rouser. By the end of the summer, the actors were putting all of this together into short sketches and plays. No longer were they mere vessels for Strasberg’s teachings and Clurman’s psychological diagnoses. They were independent, directing and teaching one another as they pioneered exercises that generations of American actors would eventually learn as part of their training.
