An Actress Prepares: Women and “The Method” by Rosemary Malague (review)

A zeitgeist now exists in which the actress takes center stage in a host of new plays that feature the actress as a dramatic character—Venus in Fur (David Ives), Stage Kiss (Sarah Ruhl), Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (Christopher Durang), The Commons of Pensacola (Amanda Peet), for instance—a moment enhanced by Rosemary Malague’s vibrant scholarly analysis of Method acting from a feminist perspective. As the author points out in her opening chapter, there are numerous studies written on the Method, but none to date has tackled its inherent gender politics on a large scale.

An autobiographical thread running through Malague’s argument accounts for her ability to straddle the great divide between practice and scholarship. She was trained as an actor in the early 1980s, and continues to implement much of what she learned then in her own dual roles as teacher and theatre artist. However, because, as she explains, “my early experiences with ‘the Method’ were confusing and unhappy” (4), she questioned the process and pursued a scholarly path that would allow her to understand. Throughout, Malague comments to her reader, like an actor’s aside to the audience; this first-person commentary points out key questions about her actor training and underscores key points she makes throughout.

An Actress Prepares: Women and “the Method” has six chapters. The first is a fine overview of feminist theory linked to performance and acting from the 1980s and beyond. Malague resurrects a short though significant essay, “The (Female) Actor Prepares” by Linda Walsh Jenkins and Susan Ogden Malouf, which pinpoints two crucial concerns of the book. The first is the way in which a vulnerable young actor is exposed to a guru-like teacher or director, and the second point follows from this: how such authority requires the female student/actor to relinquish her autonomy to potential exploitation, both sexual and psychological. Four case studies follow in her provocative analysis of actor training.

In the second chapter, “Emotional Control: Lee Strasberg as ‘Big Daddy’ of the Method,” Malague continues her homage to her feminist foremothers by unabashedly referencing Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement’s coedited collection Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theater as if Gender and Race Matter (1993). Malague explains that “in the tradition of American actor training, Big Daddy is, in fact, a real person,” and generations of students have absorbed “his” teaching methods. This chapter sets the scene for Malague’s real work: an introductory rationale, summary of other critiques of Strasberg, an overview of the Method pedagogy, source publications selected for specific analysis, exercises establishing the basic vocabulary, and key moments that specifically focus on gender “incidents,” primarily those that demonstrate the chapter’s title: emotional control. The examples start from the early days of Group Theatre and move forward to the Actors’ Studio, including Strasburg’s work with Marilyn Monroe (“a cautionary tale”) (62).

The chapters that follow are equally impressive in terms of their detail and analysis. In chapter 3, “Script Analysis: Stella Adler’s Feminist Subtext,” Malague explains how Adler was, by many accounts, Strasberg’s bête noir, regularly challenging him while a member of Group Theatre. She was sometimes livid over his refusal to take any serious consideration of the text; while “[s]he resisted directorial manipulations,” her anger combined with a commitment to understand Stanislavski’s intent by personally seeking him out and convincing him to teach her his system. And she insisted that her students learn to read “especially with a feminist sensibility” (110). Malague further considers Adler’s work playing Jewish mothers, thus providing an important dimension that links gender to race and ethnicity.

Sanford Meisner joins Adler and Strasberg in chapter 4, “Exercises in Repetition: Sanford Meisner and ‘Instinct.’” He acted in the majority of Group Theatre’s productions, but today is celebrated for his teaching that created and established a new technique. Drawing on Meisner’s documented teaching—primarily extensive video material—Malague analyzes and challenges his “determined anti-intellectualism” (146) in which...