The Actors Studio in the Early Cold War

Abstract

AbstractThe Actors Studio has come to be identified as “the home of the American Method,” which is often seen not “merely as an approach [or] the locus of American acting since the late forties [but also] the goal toward which serious American acting was striving” (Vineberg 1991, 1, 20). In many accounts of film acting, the formation of the Actors Studio is described as a watershed, with productions emblematic of nineteenth‐century theatrical realism and work by the Group Theatre in the 1930s framed as developments that led toward the kind of modern American acting that finally became fully realized because of acting techniques formulated by Lee Strasberg. However, in theater and performance studies, it is well known that actor training “did not begin and end with Lee Strasberg, the Method, and Marlon Brando” (Watson 2001, 61, 70) and that practitioners have been rejecting the “domination of the Method” since the 1960s, to the point that in universities and professional schools “Method acting has fallen out of favor” (Krasner 2000, 6).