Method Acting Reconsidered

Method Acting is one of the most popular and controversial approaches to acting in the United States. It has not only shaped important schools of acting, but has been a fundamental constant of all American acting. This insightful volume explores Method Acting from a broad perspective, focusing on a point of equilibrium between the principles of the Method and its relationship to other theories of performance. David Krasner has gathered together some of the most well-known theater scholars and acting teachers to look at the Method. By concentrating on three areas of the Method - its theory, practice, and future application - the collection will serve to inform and teach us how to approach acting and acting theory in the 21st century.

Method Acting is one of the most popular and controversial approaches to acting in the United States. It has not only shaped important schools of acting, but has been a fundamental constant of all American acting. This insightful volume explores Method Acting from a broad perspective, focusing on a point of equilibrium between the principles of the Method and its relationship to other theories of performance. David Krasner has gathered together some of the most well-known theater scholars and acting teachers to look at the Method. By concentrating on three areas of the Method--its theory, practice, and future application--the collection will serve to inform and teach us how to approach acting and acting theory in the 21st century.

Method Acting is one of the most popular and controversial approaches to acting in the United States. It has not only shaped important schools of acting, but has been a fundamental constant of all American acting. This insightful volume explores Method Acting from a broad perspective, focusing on a point of equilibrium between the principles of the Method and its relationship to other theories of performance. David Krasner has gathered together some of the most well-known theater scholars and acting teachers to look at the Method. By concentrating on three areas of the Method--its theory, practice, and future application--the collection will serve to inform and teach us how to approach acting and acting theory in the 21st century.

Winner of the 2016 George Jean Nathan Award Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-Drama provides a new understanding of a crucial chapter in American theater history. Enelow’s consideration of the broader cultural climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s, specifically the debates within psychology and psychoanalysis, the period’s racial and sexual politics, and the rise of mass media, gives us a nuanced, complex picture of Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio and contemporaneous works of drama. Combining cultural analysis, dramaturgical criticism, and performance theory, Enelow shows how Method acting’s contradictions reveal powerful tensions inside mid-century notions of individual and collective identity.

Acting (Re)Considered is an exceptionally wide-ranging collection of theories on acting, ideas about body and training, and statements about the actor in performance. This second edition includes five new essays and has been fully revised and updated, with discussions by or about major figures who have shaped theories and practices of acting and performance from the late nineteenth century to the present. The essays - by directors, historians, actor trainers and actors - bridge the gap between theories and practices of acting, and between East and West. No other book provides such a wealth of primary and secondary sources, bibliographic material, and diversity of approaches. It includes discussions of such key topics as: * how we think and talk about acting * acting and emotion * the actor's psychophysical process * the body and training * the actor in performance * non-Western and cross-cultural paradigms of the body, training and acting. Acting (Re)Considered is vital reading for all those interested in performance.

Women, Method Acting, and the Hollywood Film is the first study dedicated to understanding the work of female Method actors on film. While Method acting on film has typically been associated with the explosive machismo of actors like Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, this book explores an alternate tradition within the Method—the work that women from the Actors Studio did in Hollywood. Covering the period from the end of the Second World War until the 1970s, this study shows how the women associated with the Actors Studio increasingly used Method acting in ways that were compatible with their burgeoning feminist political commitments and developed a style of feminist Method acting. The book examines the complex intersection of Method acting, sexuality, and gender by analyzing performances such as Kim Hunter’s in A Streetcar Named Desire, Julie Harris’s in The Member of the Wedding, Shelley Winters’s in The Big Knife, Geraldine Page’s in Sweet Bird of Youth, and Jane Fonda’s in Coming Home. Challenging the longstanding assumption that Method acting’s approaches were harmful to women and incompatible with feminism, this book argues that some of Hollywood’s most interesting female actors, and leading feminists, emerged from the Actors Studio in the period between the 1950s and the 1970s. Written for students and scholars of Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Gender Studies, Women, Method Acting, and the Hollywood Film reshapes the way we think of a central strain in American screen acting, and in doing so, allows women a new stake in that tradition.

Insightful, focused case studies of screen performance from diverse directors with a range of contemporary styles and approaches.

'Every day, thousands of women enter acting classes where most of them will receive some variation on the Stanislavsky-based training that has now been taught in the U.S. for nearly ninety years. Yet relatively little feminist consideration has been given to the experience of the student actress: What happens to women in Method actor training?' An Actress Prepares is the first book to interrogate Method acting from a specifically feminist perspective. Rose Malague addresses "the Method" not only with much-needed critical distance, but also the crucial insider's view of a trained actor. Case studies examine the preeminent American teachers who popularized and transformed elements of Stanislavsky’s System within the U.S.—Strasberg, Adler, Meisner, and Hagen— by analyzing and comparing their related but distinctly different approaches. This book confronts the sexism that still exists in actor training and exposes the gender biases embedded within the Method itself. Its in-depth examination of these Stanislavskian techniques seeks to reclaim Method acting from its patriarchal practices and to empower women who act. 'I've been waiting for someone to write this book for years: a thorough-going analysis and reconsideration of American approaches to Stanislavsky from a feminist perspective ... lively, intelligent, and engaging.' – Phillip Zarrilli, University of Exeter 'Theatre people of any gender will be transformed by Rose Malague’s eye-opening study An Actress Prepares... This book will be useful to all scholars and practitioners determined to make gender equity central to how they hone their craft and their thinking.' – Jill Dolan, Princeton University