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The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act
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About This Book
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, Nonfiction NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 BY THE NEW YORKER , TIME MAGAZINE , SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE , VOX, SALON, LIT HUB, AND VANITY FAIR "Entertaining and illuminating."-- The New Yorker * "Compulsively readable."-- New York Times * "Delicious, humane, probing."-- Vulture * "The best and most important book about acting I've ever read."--Nathan Lane The critically acclaimed cultural history of Method acting―an ebullient account of creative discovery and the birth of classic Hollywood. On stage and screen, we know a great performance when we see it. But how do actors draw from their bodies and minds to turn their selves into art? What is the craft of being an authentic fake? More than a century ago, amid tsarist Russia's crushing repression, one of the most talented actors ever, Konstantin Stanislavski, asked these very questions, reached deep into himself, and emerged with an answer. How his "system" remade itself into the Method and forever transformed American theater and film is an unlikely saga that has never before been fully told. Now, critic and theater director Isaac Butler chronicles the history of the Method in a narrative that transports readers from Moscow to New York to Los Angeles, from The Seagull to A Streetcar Named Desire to Raging Bull . He traces how a cohort of American mavericks--including Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and the storied Group Theatre--refashioned Stanislavski's ideas for a Depression-plagued nation that had yet to find its place as an artistic powerhouse. The Group's feuds and rivalries would, in turn, shape generations of actors who enabled Hollywood to become the global dream-factory it is today. Some of these performers the Method would uplift; others, it would destroy. Long after its midcentury heyday, the Method lives on as one of the most influential--and misunderstood--ideas in American culture. Studded with marquee names--from Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and Elia Kazan, to James Baldwin, Ellen Burstyn, and Dustin Hoffman-- The Method is a spirited history of ideas and a must-read for any fan of Broadway or American film.
Reviews
"A well-researched cultural history sure to please theater and film buffs."
"Butler makes an airtight case for the Method as an artistic revolution on par with other mid-century advances, from improvisation in jazz and stream-of-consciousness in fiction to the flourishes of abstract expressionism in painting ..."
"As an author, Butler accomplishes what the Method's devotees sought to do in their performances, bringing color and dimension to figures who might have been boxed into archetypal roles (omniscient godhead or exploitative charlatan) and presenting them to us in all their brilliant, infuriating complexity."
"[Butler's] book amounts to a print-form master class in the Method ..."
"Butler has produced an essential study of this hugely influential theory and practice of American acting."
"The theater has its allure, but one often thinks that Irving Berlin's 'There's No Business Like Show Business' could profit from the bracing corrective of Noël Coward's 'Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage.' Isaac Butler's intense, deeply researched, historically alert, well-written, eminently readable (and gossipy) The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act explores the art of acting with sufficient depth and clarity to support both positions ..."
"Like a good 19th century omniscient novelist, Butler hops seamlessly among his characters' points of view while recounting their lives and times ..."
"Butler spends almost no time on the Method's more expansive legacy—the fascinating question of how it filtered into American culture and where it continues to live with us."
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