The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act [Paperback]

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, Nonfiction

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 BYTHE NEW YORKER,TIME MAGAZINE,SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE,VOX,SALON,LIT HUB, ANDVANITY 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, fromThe SeagulltoA Streetcar Named DesiretoRaging 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--andlÐ