Interchangeable Parts: Acting, Industry, and Technology in US Theater by Victor Holtcamp (review)

Scholarly monographs on acting tend to define their subjects narrowly. They might focus on a single teacher or theorist, or they might measure the impact of one company, school, or movement. This kind of narrowness allows for depth and erudition, so it has produced invaluable knowledge. But it can make broader trends and common foundations hard to see. For instance, scholars so exhaust themselves in disentangling the American Stanislavskians (Strasberg, Adler, Meisner, Hagen, et al.) from Stan-islavski and from one another, they have scarcely any energy left to unearth all the many assumptions these theorists share—not just with one another, but with most actors, teachers, and theorists throughout a century or more of US acting history.

In Interchangeable Parts, Victor Holtcamp highlights a few of these broadly shared assumptions, connecting them to broader trends in American culture. Those assumptions include: that acting is “a collection of disparate skills” or component techniques (11), that can therefore “be broken down into a system” (7); that “exercises” could be invented to develop each of the system’s component techniques (19); that these techniques “could be learned off-stage, rather than on” (18); and that the goal is to enable “precision, control, accountability, and stability” from scene to scene, night to night, and role to role (4). Holtcamp refers to this set of assumptions as “the idea that acting [can] be technologized” (7), and he hears in it the constant echo of modern American industrial values. This newly “atomized conception of an actor’s work,” Holtcamp argues, is related to the rise of “interchangeable parts manufacturing,” the “rapid assembly” of complex things “from functionally identical components” (11–12). By teaching people to see common objects as “assemblages of smaller and smaller identical components,” this industrial innovation encouraged people to think in subdivided systems, even (apparently) when they thought about art.

To keep us thinking on this level—seeing the forest, not the trees—Interchangeable Parts offers a panoramic view of US acting. In eight chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue, it ranges from stage to screen, from professional to amateur, from mainstream to avant-garde—and from the 1870s to the 1980s. Even within each chapter, Holtcamp’s argument ranges widely, holding one variable steady (usually chronology), while letting all the other variables go wild. Chapter 2, for example, tracks the impact of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” on acting theory in the 1910s and ’20s. But it assembles, for that purpose, an unlikely cast: not just E. Gordon Craig, but also Minnie Maddern Fiske, the Provincetown Players, and the minor critic and journal editor Luther Anthony. Because these figures share so little with one another, the habits of mind and turns of phrase they do share stand out in sharp relief.

The first three chapters lay three cornerstones for Holtcamp’s argument. Chapter 1 unearths the nineteenth-century origins of what it calls the actor’s “Dream of Scales”—the belief that actor training could be systematized with the help of exercises that, like musical scales, would help actors develop the component techniques of acting. Chapter 2 shows how theatre-makers of the 1910s and ’20s came to see acting as a reproducible process and acting theory as a “science” (that is, Taylor’s ideas of “scientific management”). Chapter 3 shows how these industrial logics crystallized into particular training regimens (for example, the one purveyed by the American Laboratory Theatre) and production tools (like acting editions, director prompt-books, and other tools enabling amateur revivals of professional work).

The last five chapters follow this industrial ideology of acting into different eras, aesthetic schools, and performing arts workplaces. Chapter 4 explores actor training in the silent film era, when ideologies of acting from the theatre encountered film’s “inescapable connection to technology and industrial practice” (158). Chapter 5 retells the early days of Stanislavski’s uptake in America, showing how Richard Boleslavsky and the Group Theatre...