Foundations of Performing Arts
Theatre Workshop
Winter, 2003

From the book ACTORS ON ACTING: the theories, techniques, and practices of the great actors of all times as told in their own words.

Edited with introductions and biographical notes by Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy. New Revised Edition. Crown Publishers, New York, 1949, 1954, 1970.

Pages 621-629

A M E R I C A
LEE STRASBERG (b. 1901)

Originally in: Lee Strasberg: Strasberg at the Actors Studio, edited by Robert H. Hethmon. New York: Viking press, 1965, pp. 74-87, passim. Copyright (c) by Lee Strasberg and Robert H. Hethmon. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of The Viking Press, Inc.

The best-known acting teacher in America, Lee Strasberg is credited with turning Stanislavsky's Russian system of acting into an American "Method." Although his contributions to acting and to theatre in America are the subject of acrimonious debates between disciples and critics, there is little doubt that his early work in the Group Theatre was one of the major avenues through which a new approach to acting reached the American theatre, and he has been one of the most influential figures in acting for almost forty years.

Born in Austria-Hungary, he was in business as a wigmaker when he became interested in acting at the Chrystie Street Settlement House. The visit of the Moscow Art Theatre to New York in 1923 spurred his decision "to take a crack at the theatre," and he found his way to the American Laboratory Theatre recently organized by Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, former members of the Moscow Art Theatre. Here Strasberg absorbed the major ideas on which his teaching and practical work have been built. According to one biographical sketch, "he still has the notes taken on his first day in Boleslavsky's class." He pursued his career as an actor by becoming a member of the Theatre Guild corps, where he met Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford with whom he was to found the Group Theatre in 1931.

Strasberg not only directed the first production of the Group Theatre, Paul Green's House of Connelly, but also undertook the training of the actors based on his interpretation of the Stanislavsky method learned from Boleslavsky, and the writings of Vakhtangov and Michael Chekhov. His main emphasis was on the creation of "true emotion" through improvisation and exercises in "affective memory." It was his concentration on emotional recall and on the actor's use of his personal circumstances rather than the "given circumstances" of the play that was to be a source of theoretical conflict with some of his colleagues in the Group Theatre and at a later date between Strasberg's "Method" and other interpretations of Stanislavsky. Stella Adler's work with Stanislavsky in Paris in 1934 was a turning point for Strasberg's relationship with his co-workers in the Group Theatre, for Miss Adler brought back word from the master that they were overemphasizing the emotional memory exercises. Strasberg at first felt that "Stanislavsky had gone back on himself," but then tried to modify his work, while defending his approach as a peculiarly American version of Stanislavsky, whom it was unwise to follow rigidly. Years later in a letter to Christine Edwards that appears in her study of The Stanislavsky Heritage, Strasberg stated: "By saying that the Group Theatre used an adaptation of the Stanislavsky Method, we mean that we emphasized elements that he had not emphasized and disregarded elements which he might have considered of greater importance."

When Strasberg left the Group around 1937, he continued his directing career with The Fifth Column, The Big Knife, Peer Gynt, and others, but seemed to find his true role when he returned to teaching in the late 1940s-in private classes, at the American Theatre Wing, and, from 1949 on, at the Actors Studio. Although he was not among the founders of the Studio, he began to train a new generation of actors and prepared them for the private, psychological dramas popular in the 1950s.

For over a decade Strasberg at the Actors Studio provided what professional actors in America seemed to need: a place to extend their skills and technique. For some it served as a home, a school, a casting office, a psychoanalytic couch. The work of the Studio and its Method actors, whose names compose a Who's Who of American theatre in the period-Julie Harris, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, David Wayne, Eli Wallach, Paul Newman, Karl Maiden, Kim Stanley, Geraldine Page, James Dean, Ben Gazzara, Anne Bancroft, Shelley Winters, and Marilyn Monroe-made copy not only for theatre pages, where their "fetishes" and stereotypes were debated, but also for news and gossip columns. The directors Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Harold Clurman, all formerly associated with Strasberg, drew heavily on his Studio actors for their important productions. Despite criticism from many quarters of the cultishness of the Studio, Paul Gray points out in his important chronology on the Stanislavsky method in Tulane Drama Review, that "Strasberg had obviously found a key-he could bring certain qualities to the surface." Strasberg told Gray, for example, that "Kazan usually casts people who can use the Method because lie expects them to get a lot of work done by themselves. But he casts people who he thinks have a certain something deep inside them-which if it could come out would be essential to the role. To succeed, then, he would have to find some way of bringing this something to the surface." Strasberg elaborated his exercises, including the highly controversial one he calls "the private moment," as ways of getting at the "certain something" in the actor and freeing him for revelations onstage. There is ample testimony from leading actors of his capacity, in Kim Stanley's words, of "nurturing" talent and "making it go."

In the decade of the sixties, there developed a strong feeling, however, that without a theatre, without plays and productions, the actors of the Studio tended to reveal only their own personalities. When the Actors Studio reorganized after the departure of Elia Kazan to his post as head of the new Lincoln Center Repertory Theater and tried its hand at production, including Strasberg's The Three Sisters, its basic approach was questioned. It was argued that Strasberg's intensive focus on "The Actor and Himself" did not prepare Studio members for the new demands of contemporary theatre, but many actors and directors continued to acknowledge his profound influence on their development.

Strasberg's extensive, detailed, highly personal comments on actors' work in the Studio has been edited from tapes in Strasberg at the Studio, from which the following selection is drawn.

The Actor and Himself

The extraordinary thing about acting is that life itself is actually used to create artistic results. In every other art the means only pretend to deal with reality. Music can often capture something more deeply than any other way, hut it only tells you something about reality. Painting tells something about the painter, about the thing painted, and about the combination of the two. But since the actor is also a human being, he does not pretend to use reality. He can literally use everything that exists. The actor uses thought-not thought transcribed into color and line as the painter does, but actual, real thought. The actor uses real sensation and real behavior. That actual reality is the material of our craft.

The things that fed the great actors of the past as human beings were of such strength and sensitivity that when these things were added to conscious effort, they unconsciously and subconsciously led to the results in all great acting, the great performances accomplished by people who would say if asked, "I don't know how I do it." In themselves as human beings were certain sensitivities and capacities which made it possible for them to create these great performances even though they were unaware of the process.

The actor's human nature not only makes possible his greatness, but also is the source of his problems. Here in the Studio we have become aware that the opposite is also true, that an individual can possess the technical ability to do certain things and yet may have difficulty in expressing them because of his emotional life, because of the problems of his human existence. The approach to this actor's problem must therefore deal first with relieving whatever difficulties are inherent in himself that negate his freedom of expression and block the capacities he possesses.

All actors who have worked at their craft have found it hard to describe what they have done. Stanislavsky had difficulty because he didn't think abstractly. But this was wonderful because it kept him from arriving at the abstract conclusions with which most people had previously satisfied their minds. Most people suppose they have really solved something when in fact they have only made an impressive formula. It means something to them but is not cogent enough to mean anything to anybody else.

The clearest and most precise statement about acting to be found is a fifteen page essay written by the great French actor Talma-one of the greatest actors of all time. In it he states everything you need to know about acting. For example, sensibility without control or intelligence is wrong; there must be a unification of inner and outer resources; intelligence and intellectual control must be involved to ensure a proper use of all elements. Talma's essay is the best ever written about acting, but nobody can understand it who has not already found out what it means. It has made no impression on the theatre because it is abstract.

One of the most brilliant descriptions of the actor's problem comes from Jacques Copeau. He describes the difficulties the actor has with his "blood," as he calls it. The actor tells his arm, "Come on now, arm, go out and make the gesture," but the arm remains wooden. The "blood" doesn't flow; the muscles don't move; the body fights within itself; it's a terrifying thing. To someone on the outside this sounds like verbalization or poetry. But we know, because we have often felt what it means to stand on the stage and know that what you are doing is not what you mean to do, that you meant to move your arm differently and you meant to come over to the audience with case and warmth, and instead you're standing there like a stick. Copeau calls it "the battle with the blood of the actor."

Copeau was also the first to bring to my attention the marvelous phrase Shakespeare used about acting. Remember where Hamlet says, "Is it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, in a dream of passion, could force his soul so to his own conceit...?" Isn't it monstrous that someone should have this capacity? The profession of acting, the basic art of acting, is a monstrous thing because it is done with the same flesh-and-blood muscles with which you perform ordinary deeds, real deeds. The body with which you make real love is the same body with which you make fictitious love with someone whom you don't like, whom you fight with, whom you hate, by whom you hate to be touched. And yet you throw yourself into his arms with the same kind of aliveness and zest and passion as with your real lover-not only with your real lover, with your realest lover. In no other art do you have this monstrous thing.

The basic thing in acting is what William Gillette calls "the illusion of the first time." It must seem that this has never taken place before, that no one has seen it before, that this actress has never done this before, and that in fact she's not an actress. Even in stylized forms of theatre, unless you feet that what you are seeing is somehow at that moment being creatively inspired, you say, "Well, he's repeating," or, "It's very good, but seems mechanical; it seems imitative," or "It seems as if he's getting tired of it." The conditions of acting demand that you know in advance what you are going to do while the art of acting demands that you should seem not to know. This would appear to make acting impossible, but that is not so in practice. It is just that there is a slight confusion about the problem.

A piano is a precise instrument. It exists outside of yourself. When we say that the pianist is doing something real, we mean that he knows the music, that with a definite finger of a particular hand he will hit a certain note, and that he knows he means to hit it with a certain amount of energy and a certain amount of feeling, and therefore not only of physical pressure but also of rhythmic and mood pressure. However-and this is what preserves the illusion of the first time-when his hand comes down on the piano, because it is a real instrument and cannot be misled by the pianist's intention, the sound that comes out is the precise result of the amount of energy that he employed. But the actor has no piano. In the actor pianist and piano are the same. When the actor attempts to hit on some key of himself, on some mood, thought, feeling, or sensation, what comes out is not necessarily what he thinks he should have hit, but what he actually hits. He may consciously follow the same procedure which he employed on a previous occasion to evoke the desired response, but instead some unconscious pattern may welt trigger an entirely different and unwanted response. There is no such situation in any other art....

Edwin Booth was an intelligent actor though never an actor of passion. One day he was playing Hamlet. His daughter was sitting in a box, and as he started to speak about Ophelia, thoughts of his daughter’s being trapped in Ophelia's situation came to his mind, and he was very moved. He became emotional. Tears flowed. And he was shocked and surprised when people at the end told him, "It was a very bad performance you gave today. What happened?" He assumed that it should have been a good performance.

The human being who acts is the human being who lives. That is a terrifying circumstance. Essentially the actor acts a fiction, a dream; in life the stimuli to which we respond are always real. The actor must constantly respond to stimuli that are imaginary. And yet this must happen not only just as it happens in life, but actually more fully and more expressively. Although the actor can do things in life quite easily, when he has to do the same things on the stage under fictitious conditions he has difficulty because he is not equipped as a human being merely to playact at imitating life. He must somehow believe. He must somehow be able to convince himself of the rightness of what he is doing in order to do things fully on the stage.

When the actor comes off the stage, he often knows that something went wrong, but because of the ego that is involved in acting he is usually ashamed and afraid to ask what people are referring to when they say, "What the hell happened today?" It is not merely that the actor fears he was bad. He is much more afraid that he will find out he was fooling himself by thinking that what was bad was really good. That would mean that he literally doesn't know what is happening on the stage, that he goes on without knowing what is going to happen. He is then in a desperate situation. To go on then, he must have either an absence of ego-which is impossible-or a degree of faith that is equally impossible.

In the modern theatre we have begun to be aware of the intrinsic relation between the capacity of the human being and what happens to that capacity when he starts to act. The things that affect the actor as a human being condition his behavior and his achievement on the stage to a much greater extent than is commonly recognized....

In life, life itself is a sure standard, because if you deal with life unreally, it reacts in such a way that it forces you to correct. On the stage, and in art generally, mistakes are never noticed unless somebody is sensitive enough, willing enough to think. The audience comes into the theatre inactive and becomes active only as a result of what the actors do. Therefore e, the basic problem for the actor is not how he deals with his material in terms of his audience, but how he begins to make his material alive to himself. Once he has carried his understanding of the play beyond conventionally conceived textures and experiences, he must then meet the problem of how to evoke and create these fuller and more real textures and experiences on the stage.

In regard to this problem there are two schools. One solves the problem by very good observation; this is the French school, which was dominant in the training of the actor until modern times. The actor of the French school at its best recognizes what is going on in the scene and then tries to find out how he should behave accordingly. He asks himself, "What must I choose to do?" The best French acting and the best German acting are quite superb. The details are finely arrived at. They can differentiate between a girl's being half excited and her half not knowing what she's excited about and her being half frightened. They are able on each line to do something-a flicker of the eye, a movement of the hand, some little look, some breathless little heaving-which manages to capture the image of what they are trying to create.

The other school, our school, starts basically the same way. In all good acting the actors perceive the reality of what is to be acted, but the ways of arriving at it differ. When it is a matter of suggesting and demonstrating, we can do that as well as anyone else, because that is easy. But we believe that the actor need not imitate a human being. The actor is himself a human being and can create out of himself. The actor is the only art material capable of being both the material and the reality so that you almost cannot tell the two things apart. Only in theatre do we have the emotions, soul, spirit, mind, and muscles of the artist as the material of art. We believe that a greater fusion of all these elements with the reality of what is to be acted can take place than is accomplished by the French school. We therefore have ways in which we advise you to work. Basic to these is a recognition of the great difference between conventional reality, which most good actors settle for, and the kind of reality envisioned by our school.

Conventional reality makes no sense. It does not excite the audience. It does not tell the audience what the scene is really about. It is willing to be effective, but nothing beyond effectiveness emerges. We believe that art has the function of giving the audience something without which it would be less-less human, less alive, less amused and entertained, not on a light level but on' the topmost level of which theatre is capable.

Once when two people worked here on a scene from Macbeth, an observer from abroad came over following the session and with great sympathy said, "Now if you really want to work on Macbeth, I can recommend some books for you to read." And I said, "The books should have been sent to Shakespeare; obviously they would have helped him a great deal." The actor is constantly being interfered with by the idea that if you send him a couple of books and give him the right ideas and explain the scene to him he will be a great actor. Whereas, what we try to come to grips with here is the basic process of creation, which exists in all the arts, which is the same in all the arts, and which has always been the same.

Mrs. Siddons, who was probably the greatest Lady Macbeth of all time, has told bow, when she had to play certain parts, she would stand backstage and watch the entire play before she made her entrance; otherwise she could not act the scene. She didn't know about getting into the scene the way that we pretend to know. She didn't know about the psychology of imagination. She didn't know about concentration as a definable element of consciousness. She didn't know any of the things that Stanislavsky and others have brought to our attention. She knew only the actor's problem of appealing to his imagination. She, one of the greatest actresses of all time, had the same difficulty of whipping herself into a scene, of getting herself in the mood, of starting herself in the play that we do. Yet she understood what the play was about as well as anyone.

The appeal to the imagination, to the unconscious and the subconscious, is the strongest lever in artistic work. The essentials of the creative mood or moment, when something begins to happen, when the actor unconsciously begins to work, are relaxation and the presence of something that stirs the actor subconsciously. This something is not the kind of mental knowledge that gives the actor answers that have no meaning for him. This something is not the kind of subconscious answer that brings him alive, feeds him, makes his imagination work, makes him feel, "I can now get up and act. I would like to act. Things are working for me now."

I am not talking about not knowing what one is doing. I do not mean hysteria or hypnosis or anything like that. I mean employing the unconscious of subconscions knowledge that we have, the experiences that we have stored away but which we cannot easily or quickly put our hand on by means of the conscious mind. I mean employing in acting the knowledge that functions in dreams, where we often come up with things that seem to make no sense, with things that happened many, many years ago but which we have long supposed to be forgotten....

If there is not the willingness to conceive, to go, to take the imaginary thing and see what can happen, all the actor's work, no matter how good it may be, will stop short at a certain point.

The essential thing for the actor is to use himself, to be willing to trust and to go with the scene, himself, and the audience. On the stage the actor cannot be one-third actor, one-third critic, and one-third audience. He must be 99 percent actor and a little bit critic and a little bit audience. If he is 100 percent actor, that is no good. He does not know what he is doing. There has to be one little bit left that makes him aware of what he is doing. The actor never permits himself to go out of control--though the point at which the actor goes out of control is usually much beyond the point where he begins to fear he will go out of control.

The actor must guard against a search for perfect solutions. Neither on the stage nor in life do we find perfect solutions. However, often when you know that something has to be there to move you and you are still willing to go on the stage without having found that something, although you say to yourself, "Isn't that funny? I can't find an experience that really moves me that strongly," the audience will often see you creating exactly the right kind of degree of experience. An actor need not do a thing 100 percent in order to do it. A little coffee is coffee. A little of anything always contains the ingredients of the whole. A drop of blood contains all the elements of blood. On the stage, if we are willing to concentrate on and give ourselves to a problem, we are already dealing with that problem. The willingness to go step by step without worry about whether you have the 100 percent is the big secret in acting.

In the human being there is expression when he is least concerned about it. The actor is an instrument that pays attention. Something happens to him as a result of paying attention which is pure expression. It is happening even when he thinks nothing is being expressed. I'm not talking about energy. I'm not talking about loudness. I'm not talking about strength of expression. I'm talking about the expressiveness which is part of the fundamental equipment of the human being and therefore of the actor.

Acting exists in every human being. Its extent differs with different human beings; that makes for the degrees of talent. Inspiration is within the actor; something starts it off. If you push a button and no electricity is attached, nothing happens. Electricity comes only from where electricity is, not from where the button is. In the actor both electricity and button are usually unconscious. Often the button seems to be external to the actor, but it is not. When a lot of people are watching the same thing, and only one is inspired, the inspiration is not in the thing being watched; otherwise all the watchers would be inspired. Inspiration - the appeal to and functioning of the actor's imagination - is within the actor. The problem of creation for the actor is the problem of starting the inspiration. How does the actor make himself inspired?

Other artists are free as to when they create. In them inspiration can take place spontaneously, even accidentally. They can wait for it. They can recapture it by correcting what they have already done. We can't. Fortunately, the human being is built with a natural need to repeat. He wants to repeat, and he sets himself to repeat, but unfortunately the second time he repeats coldly what he did the first time out of impulse. So in acting we not only need to repeat, but we have to watch that the impulse stays fresh. If the impulse does stay fresh, the response and expression that it gives rise to will invariably tend to repeat. Little by little the repetition conditions the actor, so that whenever this particular impulse comes, the need for the associated expression comes.

ACTRESS G: Can you contrive an impulse?

STRASBERG: That's what we constantly do. The central thing that Stanislavsky discovered and to a certain extent defined and set exercises for was that the actor can be helped really to think on the stage, instead of thinking only in make-believe fashion. Once the actor begins to think, life starts, and then there cannot be imitation. "Make-believe thinking" is a mental idea of thought, a paraphrasing of the character's lines rather than the kind of thought a human being really thinks. Before Stanislavsky, actors were criticized as conventional or mechanical or imitative, but no one had ever set himself the problem of defining exactly what that means. The actor obviously wants to be good, original, and striking. Stanislavsky was the first to realize that the cliché, the conventional idea of what is to be accomplished in a scene, satisfies a very strong need both in the human being and in the actor; that the cliché functions as a habitual response; that it is at best a caricature of what really happens in life; and that once the habitual response is interrupted by something the actor does not expect, the cliché vanishes because the actor then really has to think on the stage.

When Actress H was doing The Millionairess here, and she stopped and I said, "Don't throw her the line. No line. Go on," at that moment something happened. Earlier she had forgotten a line and had asked for it and had gotten it, and nothing had happened. She walked around. She was just acting, but the next time, when she was forced to stop, and thus something in her had to take hold and think, with that real thought something then began really to happen. Wonderful things came from her, a freeness, a looseness, real laughter. A whole new range of colors was released in her and therefore in the play.

The actor must have full belief in whatever he thinks and says on the stage. A good deal of routine acting work merely consists of finding substitutes for that faith and belief. But when the actor can really believe, when he allows himself really to think, when his imagination really functions, he does not need cliché and preconceptions, because this natural process of acting makes him feel, "I'm working," and something begins to happen in him, and from that he gets the certainty and security to go head.

Stanislavsky’s basic point is that his training work is not intended directly for production on the stage. The training work reaches the means by which the actor incites this imagination, this thing that takes place and makes him feel, "I think I know what it is. I can't quite put it into words. Let me do it." Then the actor wants to act. He does not quite know what he wants to do, yet he's impelled to go ahead. He is creative. Stanislavsky’s entire search, the entire purpose of the "Method" or our technique or whatever you want to call it, is to find a way to start in each of us this creative process so that a good deal of the things we know but are not aware of will be used on the stage to create what the author sets for us to do.