Paula Strasberg’s Private Moment

Abstract

Paula Strasberg demands a Method reading. Wife of Lee Strasberg, coach to Marilyn Monroe, and victim of the Hollywood Blacklist, Paula Strasberg's life is only detectable through the stories of other (more famous) people, epitomizing the historical record’s indifference to women’s work. Those extant, conflicting traces of Strasberg—as crone, as radical, as overbearing Jewish mother—reveal how conceptions of art, femininity, and ethnicity circulated in the shadow of the postwar culture industries. In response, this speculative account, rooted in theatricality and play, reinstates Paula Strasberg into the history through critical-creative means.