Strasberg Analyzes Acting and Audiences

"The American public often appreciates the theatre and applauds wildly, but it doesn't really understand acting," Lee Strasberg told a capacity crowd at New Lecture Hall last Thursday. Speaking on "The Actor in the Theatre," the renowned artistic director of the Actors' Studio gave the first of three lectures on facets of the theatre sponsored by the Summer School.

"We are on the verge of creating a new, great theatre. We have today a larger number of good, if not great, playwrights than at any other time, with the possible exception of the Elizabethan era. It all depends on understanding the actor, on training our audiences to know what acting really is," Strasberg stated.

What are the chief requisites for a great actor or actress? "Most people will list a great voice and a good-looking body," he said. "But the greater performers have lacked one or both of these--David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Eleanora Duse, Pauline Lord and Helen Hayes, for example." In the movies, even such "good but not great actors" as Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and John Garfield were not able to get anything but villain roles for a long, long time.

"The conventional criteria just don't hold up," Strasberg said. "But something does happen when these people come on the stage. The basic requirement is this: the capacity to be excited by imaginary stimuli. The actor must be able to reproduce a reaction to a situation at will.

"Actors use their own personality more than any other craftsmen," he added, "but the truly great actors are those who can go beyond their own personalities, who can transmute and transform them."

But what about non-realistic acting? "No matter what the style is," Strasberg said, "the same capacity of imagination is demanded--even in the most formal theatre, like the Noh drama of Japan. The result must be convincing and believable in any kind of theatre. The two greatest feminine performances I ever saw were given by Duse and Mei Lan-Fang; and the latter was the more notable achievement, for it had to overcome the greater handicaps." (Mei Lan-Fang was the foremost Chinese actor, and head of the Ching-Chung Monastery, who specialized in female impersonations). "In all kinds of theatre, the basic emotions are always the same; only the techniques of handling them differ."

Shakespeare

"I believe Shakespeare was Shakespeare," Strasberg continued, "and that he was an actor." He said the best clue to Shakespeare's ideas on acting is not to be found in Hamlet's oft-cited directions to the Players (Act iii, 2), but rather in Hamlet's 'O what a rogue and peasant slave' soliloquy (Act ii, 2), especially the lines, "Is it not monstrous that this player here,/ But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,/ Could force so his soul to his own conceit/ That from her working all his visage wann'd,/ Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect,/ A broken voice, and his whole function suiting/ With forms to his conceit?"

He also talked about Moliere as another actor-playwright who combatted the conventional acting of his day.

What Does an Actor Create?

Since an actor has his lines furnished to him, just what does he create? Strasberg answered, "An actor creates character; he creates a new human being." From the 18th century he cited the example of David Garrick's interpretation of King Lear, in which Garrick "showed for the first time the whole process though which a person actually goes insane." And from the 19th century he mentioned Edmund Kean's conception of Shylock as an Italian Jew only 38 years old, and said he wished somebody else would dare to try this approach sometime.

Another creation of the actor, Strasberg felt, is the feeling of humanity. "All the other arts can only come close to capturing a sense of humanity; acting alone can really do it."

He outlined the "strange sequence" of 19th-century British acting, from which American acting derived much. "American acting has not yet solved all its problems. But it began to come into its own only after World War I." Still, he felt that already the U.S. has seen some modern performances that compare with the supremely brilliant ones in the past abroad, and cited Jeanne Eagels in John Colton's Rain (1922), Pauline Lord in Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted (1924), Alfred Lunt in Ferenc Molnar's The Guardsman (1924), and Laurette Taylor in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (1945).

Walter Huston's 'Othello'

Strasberg said he wanted to conclude with "a most moving experience." Where-upon he read the short article, 'The Sucess and Failure of a Role,' which the late Walter Huston contributed to the fascinating anthology Actors on Acting.

Here Huston described his New York performances in the title role of Othello during the first weeks of 1937, and their reception. He regarded his opening night performance as the finest achievement of his whole career. "I never felt better on any stage that I did that night," he said. The next day the critics unanimously panned him because "I was not ferocious enough, and I did not rave and rant." Realizing this was his first critical and commercial flop in 13 years, he decided toward the end of the play's brief run to act the role as the critics wanted. He "tore through the performance like a madman, and hammed the part within an inch of burlesque," as any adolescent could have easily done. The result was that the audience loved it. "But the performance was no good," Huston said. "My subdued conception...is far superior to giving the role the works," and he concluded that if he had to do it all over again he would have to reach the same interpretation.

The reading of Huston's remarks pointed up Strasberg's concern over "the lack of a trained audience." And it was particularly timely in view of Earle Hyman's current recreation of the same role at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut (which I discussed at some length in these pages two weeks ago).

Hyman did the role of Othello off-Broadway three or four years ago. Though I was not able to see it, I understand it was a wild and explosive interpretation. Since then Hyman has thought a great deal more about the part, and now performs it in a controlled crescendo. He has felt driven toward Huston's kind of "subdued conception." The difference is that Hyman accomplished in three years what took Huston three decades.

Yet a couple of the New York critics this summer took exception to Hyman's new approach; they wanted him to writhe and blaze furiously. One of them, now the most influential critic, made the same criticism he had voiced about Huston's conception 20 years ago.

I do not mean to question the critics' verdict on Huston's performance. It was probably no more than good, especially since Huston had to play opposite a poor Iago; whereas Hyman's is a great performance. What I am questioning is their evaluation of Huston's conception (and there is a big difference between conception and performance). Huston's conception was right then; all the critics and most of the audience were wrong. Hyman's conception is right now; a few of the critics and audience are wrong.

All this perhaps indicates that the public today is better able to judge the theatre than it was two decades ago. But Strasberg is correct in emphasizing that much progress remains to be made in this regard, that for the first time we have today the possibility of a well-trained audience.

No Grudge

Still, Strasberg holds no grudge towards critics as a group, as he pointed out in the concluding question period. "The audience gets the critics it deserves. And on the whole they are responsible men. The trouble comes from their impact on the commercial aspects of theatre. But they are important go-betweens in the theatre experience." He wished, however, that critics could "get behind a performance," could attend rehearsals and so forth, so that they would really know exactly who was responsible for what in the finished production.

A member of the audience stated that a Danish drama critic with decades of experience and love for the theatre had finally concluded that the three chief traits in the acting profession were egotism, eroticism and exhibitionism. This elicited a vehement rebuttal from Strasberg, who then took his leave, like Marechal Villars from Louis XIV, by exclaiming, "God save me from my friends; I can protect myself from my enemies!"

Strasberg was introduced by William B. Van Lennep, Curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection. The renowned director Tyrone Guthrie will give the second lecture in this series on August 1. The final talk will be presented by playwright Denis Johnston, professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, on August 8.