Bombast to Beckett

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk Woodward has contributed many posts to Rick On Theater since I launched it in March 2009—122, including several multi-parters.  Most of Kirk’s pieces have been on theater or other performing arts, notably music, and he’s covered a broad range of topics within those areas.  One of the areas of theater on which Kirk’s written is, necessarily, acting and actors. 

[As a sometime actor himself, and a director and acting teacher, Kirk’s well-positioned to write about acting.  (It also doesn’t hurt that he’s also a produced playwright, in which capacity he’s had to work closely with actors as well.  And let me not forget that his late wife, Pat, was an accomplished actor, teacher of acting, and director as well.)

[Back in March 2022. I published Kirk’s review of Isaac Butler’s book The Method, his exploration of the popular acting style based on an American interpretation of the techniques of Konstantin Stanislavsky.  Kirk recently reread The Method and did some reconsidering and expanding of his responses.  “Bombast and Beckett” is my friend’s later thoughts on the book.

[Let me add that I also trained as an actor at HB Studio, the American Academy of Dramatic Art (briefly), and the T. Schreiber Studio (with the late Lee Wallace [1930-2020]), and I have an MFA in acting from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University (when it was still the School for the Creative and Performing Arts).  I had a short career on the stage, doing some teaching and turning to directing in the last few years.  I have some experience from which to judge Kirk’s conclusions, and I agree with them entirely.]

One of the best books about theater in general, and about acting in particular, that I have read is The Method by Isaac Butler (Bloomsbury, 2022), a “biography” of the approach to acting that may be said to have begun with the work and writing of the great Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938). I’m reading the book for the third time, and I continue to find new and interesting things in it. (For a review of and commentary on Butler’s book, see “The Method – a Review,” posted on this blog on 12 March 2022.)

At the end of the book is this provocative passage:

Today, the major challenge to an actor is not being heard, or seen, but seizing and holding an audience’s attention. One thing that art can offer us is a chance to be a pure spectator, to discard for a moment the discomfort and anxiety of always performing and to simply experience. But it turns out we often find these islands of solace anxiety-producing. We feel the pull to check in with the outside world, the worry that we might be waiting in the wings while a big moment passes us by onstage. It is this drive in the audience that actors must fight against. The ever-escalating battle for the finite resource of a viewer’s attention encourages both storytelling and acting in which the choices are big, simple, and clearly communicated. . . . Now acting and writing head instead toward clarity, worried that a surfeit of mystery and subtext risks committing the cardinal sin of art: boring the audience.

I wrote a friend that:

Butler points out how closely related styles of acting (and playwriting, I’m sure) are to the society they exist in – maybe “the environment they exist in” is more accurate. David Byrne [the singer and composer, formerly leader of the rock group Talking Heads; b. 1952], in How Music Works, claims that the environment is as much the creator of art as the artists are.  Anyway, as Butler says, the acting style of Cary Grant would have been completely out of place in Streetcar, and Brando’s acting would have been baffling in Philadelphia Story.

That may just be another way of saying that acting styles and fashions change. However, something he says at the end of the book has made me rethink some of that narrative. Something is radically different for theater (and movies) now in a way that’s more than just changes of styles. For the first time people don’t have to go to the theater – it’s entirely optional in a way that it wasn’t, say, in 1900, where there were extremely limited alternatives. Not only do they not have to go – they’re afraid to, because something more interesting may be happening somewhere else at exactly that moment, as illustrated by the number of people consulting their phones during plays, and also by the number of ways you can multitask art, for example by streaming while texting. What style of acting does that call for? FOMO, fear of missing out, is driving our media, and what kind of theater can keep up with that?

No sooner had I written those words than I began to regret them, or at least to rethink them. Should I have? Jason Zinoman, in his column “On Comedy,” posted on the New York Times website on December 31, 2024, titled “For Comics, Honing Jokes Has Taken a Back Seat to Marketing. That’s Not Good.,” quotes the comedian Isabel Hagen (b. 1991 or 1992):

Every day instead of writing, I sit and think: I should post a clip of stand-up. What clip will get mean reactions that spark fights in the comments and therefore feeds the algorithm and gets me more views? Should I go into my folder of bikini photos and post one with the caption ‘lol hi’?”

Zinoman notes that “the major change has been the proliferation of video,” and then he adds, “The current ethos is to throw everything at the wall as fast as possible and see what sticks.”

“Hagen speculates,” the Times columnist asserts, “that the accelerated speed of technological change is what’s behind the need to grow careers at the same rate”; however, he wonders: “Do we want to live in a world where quality is so easily compromised to get more attention? Should we really be happy with a cultural system that incentivizes artists to spend more time selling their wares than developing their work?”

The stand-up Hagen “fears that we are moving to a culture where we’re just looking to be distracted.” She concludes, “If distraction is the goal, the loudest and most persistent ‘artist’ will win, and many may forget why they entered a creative field in the first place.”

If what Zinoman and Hagen say is true of live comedy performance, what can we say about theater? Is it likely, is it even possible, that live drama can compete in a short-attention-span world?

Whether or not it was literally correct for me to have said that “For the first time people don’t have to go to the theater,” I am certainly not the first or only person to observe that attention spans are getting shorter while the availability of easier, faster, and more disposable means of entertainment are proliferating.

At the moment, for example, one can stream a series of movies, series, and concerts on the cell phone while doing any number of other tasks, or doing nothing. How can theater compete with that?

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that paradoxically what seems to be the great weakness of theater – the proliferation of faster and more available kinds of technologies – may be its strength. The “Third Law of Motion” of Isaac Newton (1642-1727), which states that “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” applies to society as well, perhaps not in every specific but certainly in general.

Technology today is producing a reaction – for example, people deliberately doing without their cell phones or computers for varying periods of time. For those fed up with things technical, theater in its basics can be powerfully attractive. Theater can be performed anywhere, under any circumstances, even without technological assistance if appropriate. For example, I’ve staged plays in living rooms with no settings or properties of any kind.

[Many of Kirk’s ideas in this section are reminiscent of the foundational theories of Polish director and theorist Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99), considered one of the founders of experimental theater. Early in his career, Grotowski devised what he called “poor theater” (see Towards a Poor Theatre [Simon and Schuster, 1968]), which eliminates all the aspects of theater that he considered “extraneous” (i.e., “spectacle”).

[Poor theater entails little to no costuming, props, or elaborate sets. Grotowski relies on the abilities of the actors and uses nontraditional performance spaces (i.e., not conventional theaters). It’s essentially the opposite of commercial theater. Grotowski believed that theater shouldn’t be compared to television or film and shouldn’t try to emulate or compete with them. ~Rick]

Will theater in years to come resemble theater as we know it now? I don’t know, and certainly on Broadway these days we’re seeing plays that make elaborate use of technology, Will that kind of large-scale production survive? The monetary costs of technology can be enormous, and in addition, as always, there’s the problem of attracting audiences. Will a play that tries desperately to use cinematic techniques be as popular in its way as a movie?

We shall see. Regardless, live theater is always an alternative. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. It can be simply staged. It needs something to say, but it doesn’t necessarily need elaborate and expensive ways in which to say it.

However, my major subject in the letter I quoted above wasn’t so much about the survival of live theater as about the impact our intense current technological environment might have on acting. Here too I find myself rethinking my initial panic, for the following reasons.

There are of course countless theories about acting – what it is, what it means, how to do it. It might make sense just to ask actors what they do, and quote them, in order to define the craft, and there are excellent books that do just that, for example Actors on Acting by Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy (Three Rivers Press, 1995). However, actors’ thoughts on their craft are all over the place, and there may be discrepancies between what performers think they do and their actual behavior.

Similarly, in the last hundred years or so there’s been no shortage of acting teachers and writers on the craft. One might wonder how there’s anything more to be said, although of course it keeps being said anyway. Is it possible to find a synthesis somehow?

Perhaps we can look at acting this way (although of course there are exceptions to every rule).  Actors’ work typically sorts itself into three different areas. Actors work on themselves, their bodies, minds, feelings, spirits. They also work (typically) on the script of the play (e.g.: Aaron Frankel’s [1921-2018] How To Do Homework course at HB Studio; see “An Actor’s Homework,” 19, 22, 25, and 28 April 2010) or on other material provided by the creator(s) of the play. And they work with a group of other people – production staff, audience, but in particular with other actors.

Self, script, other actors. It seems sensible that a theory of acting would incorporate all three aspects of the craft, making a sort of “three-legged stool” capable of supporting almost any kind of acting.

This is not always the case. In the Twentieth Century, three of the major teachers of acting in the United States were Lee Strasberg (1901-1982), Stella Adler (1901-1992), and Sanford Meisner (1905-1997).

Although the following is an oversimplification, Strasberg may be said to have prioritized the actor’s own inner self, through a technique known as “affective memory.” Adler was particularly noted for the emphasis she put on script analysis. And Meisner based his teaching on the interaction between actors, devising exercises to bring them into close communication with each other.

Each, then, is best known for emphasizing one of what I have described as the three major elements of acting. Each also, I believe, would have said that of course all the elements of acting – internal, script-oriented, and relational – are important to a performer, and that of course an actor would have to be skilled in all of them. And after all the three famous teachers learned their craft in the same place – the Group Theatre of the 1930’s, out of which came The Method.

In practice, however, I suspect, actors are likely to use what might be called a “toolbox” approach to acting, drawing on a range of techniques depending on what is needed at the time. Butler in The Method makes it clear that many actors who swear by the approach of one of the great teachers (or of other teachers, or of principles outlined in numerous books), nevertheless in practice use a combination of techniques as necessary.

Butler writes that we can

go to many rehearsal halls in America and you’ll see a process divided in equal fourths into work around a table, staging, refining, and tech. The director and actors will talk about beats and structure a scene by its actions, will try to create staging that is informed by the characters and their needs. Visit a scene study class in America and you’ll likely hear the teacher ask the student some variation of “what does your character want? What is in their way? What are you doing to get it?” You’ll see them try to activate the mind, will, and feelings of the actor. You’ll hear them say the words “given circumstances.” You’ll hear actors alternate between the third person and first when discussing their characters. . . . You’ll hear them talking about being present in the moment, or really listening to their scene partner, or the steps they’re taking to stop indicating so damn much.

Every word in that paragraph is a description of standard American acting practice. It’s what I’ve learned and worked with and taught in my own experiences in theater. The elements of the description originated in various places and have been passed down to today by generations of actors, directors, and teachers who included elements from the various “schools” of acting and applied them to the actors’ selves, script study, and teamwork.

Actors who approach their work with a mixture of internal work and physical relaxation, intelligent script analysis, and the ability to talk and listen in the present moment to the other actors in a play, are in a position to expand from that base to almost any style of acting, from detailed realism to stylized period performing, from mumbling to mesmerizing, from bombast to Beckett.

Because, particularly in this country, an actor’s career is so precarious, so strenuous, so uncertain, an actor becomes skilled in adjusting, in rolling with the punches, in taking advantage of what’s available. As long as the foundations of an actor’s craft as I’ve described them are sound, an actor can and will maneuver from a solid base.

That is why I feel my letter, although accurate enough in laying out the problem, was wrong to expect a crisis in acting. This is not to say that there are not – or will not ever be – crises in society, in the economics of entertainment, in delivery methods of performance. There will be. There are, right now. (See “A Crisis In America's Theaters,” 13 September 2023.)

But the actors who have learned the pillars of the profession – sound work on themselves and their minds and emotions and bodies, capable script work, and the ability to “live” in performance with others – should be well prepared to weather the storm.

[When I read “Bombast to Beckett,” I had some reactions to several of the things about which Kirk had written.  That happens a lot, not just with Kirk’s pieces, and the reactions aren’t usually in disagreement, but are often commentary on or support for what the writer has said. 

[These were my thoughts on the post—my responses to what I was reading.  I’ve decided to append them pretty much as I wrote them on Kirk’s draft of the article.  I've done this before: my four posts of commentary on Kirk’s Art of Writing Reviews back in November ’09 were entirely composed of my remarks, made in marginal notes, on what I was reading.

[When I taught writing to college students, I told them that writing, especially essay-writing, was a sort of conversation between the writer and the reader(s).  That's what an essay is supposed to do: make the reader think, look at something from a fresh angle, ask questions.  In an extended version, the “reader” would write another essay in response (the other side of the conversation), then the original writer or another essayist would chime in, and so on.  Well, what I’m doing here is a perfect example of that, and this afterword will be my contribution to the conversation.

[What I’m going to do here is comment on some of the things Kirk said in “Bombast” that jogged my mind and made me think about all kinds of ideas.  That's a good thing, I think.

[To his first quotation from The Method, Kirk invoked FOMO as a motivating force in present-day acting.  This, in a way, is what drives Tom Stoppard’s (b. 1937) 1966 absurdist comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: two (inconsequential) characters who are out of the room when significant actions occur, try to “glean” (a word they use extensively in one scene) what’s happening around them. 

[In Act I of this Hamlet-derived play, The Player admonishes the courtiers to “. . . look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.”  But in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s situation, when someone like Hamlet, Gertrude, or Claudius finishes a scene with them and leaves the stage, the two courtiers are left behind while the others enter a scene of great moment “somewhere else.”  (The reverse also occurs: when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern leave a scene, they enter into oblivion, while a scene of great moment takes place where they left.) 

[Stoppard makes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to piece together what went on in their absence—and they always get it wrong.  I maintain that one of Stoppard’s favorite themes is How do we know what we think we know? It’s the central theme of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Arcadia (1993).  In Arcadia, piecing together what the characters missed is something of an intellectual exercise, but in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, misinterpreting what happened when they weren’t present, leads to the courtiers’ deaths.

[I pointed out to Kirk that his discussion of eschewing spectacle and tech on stage sounds very Grotowskian.  I suggested Kirk give the Polish director and theorist credit and he responded that “a reference to Grotowski is fine if you think it will be useful”—I did, as you can see—"no harm in expanding readers’ frames of reference, I guess.”

[By the way, I always found it interesting, in the days when I was researching the work of experimental stage director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97; see, among other posts on ROT, “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro,” 16 April-7 May 2023), that he laid claim to being an acolyte of Jerzy Grotowski, who was fundamentally anti-tech, while Leo himself loved tech. 

[Shapiro’s productions were low-tech (but not no-tech) due to budget, not artistic philosophy.  He once told me, after I saw one of his shows in which he had some very effective low-tech visual effects—he was very good at that—that he wished he’d been able to afford holograms. (Kirk noted: “That is a funny paradox with Leo.”)

[Kirk speaks of the impact of the "technological environment might have on acting,” which made me think that artificial intelligence is already considered a direct threat to acting and actors.  AI was at the center of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike against movie and TV producers (14 July-9 November) and the almost-simultaneous Writers Guild of America strike against the same industries (2 May-27 September).  

[According to the unions, AI makes possible "artificial" actors and acting, NHI (no humans involved).  What impact could be greater?  Among the goals of the actors’ strike was the prevention of AI from replacing actors on set by creating virtual copies of actors’ faces, bodies, and voices.

[(The writers’ demanded that scripts, dialog, or plots generated by AI not be considered literary or source material—meaning machines can’t be eligible to receive any writing credit and thus take both creative credit and payment out away from WGA writers.)

[The effect of these developments, if any, on the nature of the work itself (writing or acting) hasn't been openly discussed as far as I know—except the possibility of putting actors and writers out of work entirely if producers and directors can assemble Franken-scripts and Franken-casts instead of hiring live writers and actors.

[One frightening change in the field that occurs to me is that in the (near) future, actors may be hired to create AI templates, like mo-cap files, to be stashed and then used later in myriad movies, tv shows/commercials, and videos, morphed into other “actors” and inserted into scenes over and over again.  Sooner or later, once the technology has advanced, there’ll be fully generated virtual productions without actors, a director, designers, techies, or ushers! 

[Back in 2021 (in a post called "Computers and Actors, Part 1" [4 October]), I ran a 1987 Time magazine article on the pre-AI precursor of this potential, "Dreaming the Impossible at M.I.T." by Philip Elmer-Dewitt.  It was about a computer program that let playwrights create a virtual representation of their plays w/out hiring actors and a studio and putting up a workshop production of their scripts.

[Kirk’s response to these comments was that my points “are extremely important”—but that “developing the thought of electronically created actors would derail” “Bombast to Beckett.”  You can see that’s he’d be right.

[As to Kirk’s brief discussion of actors talking about their techniques and practices, I’d add that there’s also the apparent fact that actors, even the most talented performers, aren’t the most articulate about what they do.  They often either use acting jargon (of which there are many different “vocabularies” for all the “countless theories,” as Kirk indicates, plus hybrids) or incoherent explanations made up of things teachers, coaches, or directors have said to them and their own unmediated descriptions of their techniques.  At least that’s been my observation. 

[I guess that suggests a corollary to the saw that "those who can't do, teach": Those who can do, often can’t teach.  Acting is such a personal and individual endeavor, it’s not easy for artists to explain or describe what they actually do clearly to someone else.

[Kirk’s response to this remark was: “You’re absolutely correct.  I was tempted to mention that, but [I] didn’t feel that was important enough.”  As far as “Bombast” is concerned, he’s probably right—but the next time an actor is a guest on a talk show and the host asks about her or his craft, note how coherent the actor is.

[When Kirk refers to books by actors writing about their own techniques, I thought another excellent example, in addition to the anthology collection of Actors on Acting, is, of course, Uta Hagen’s (1919-2004) Respect for Acting (Macmillan Publishing Co., 1973).  My dad gave me a copy in 1974, when I got home from the army ready to go to the American Academy of Dramatic Art.  

[That copy got so well-thumbed, it was falling apart, and so full of marginal notes, underlining, and highlighting, it was hard to read the original text.  I was teaching acting then and ended up buying a new copy so I had a clean one to lend to students.  (I should note that my first acting teacher at HB Studio and the Mason Gross School was Carol Rosenfeld, a student of Hagen’s and my main model as a teacher.)  Kirk agreed that Respect was “a really fine book, one of the very best of its kind in my experience,” but he didn’t feel expanding his examples beyond the one book would advance his point.

[Kirk points out that the “three-legged stool” that comprises an actor’s preparation for a role necessarily requires that "actors work on themselves."  Possibly many readers know that the original Russian title of the Stanislavsky book we know in English as An Actor Prepares (translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood; Theatre Arts, Inc., 1936) is (in literal translation) "an actor's work on himself" (Russian: Работа актёра над собой (Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1938) – romanized: Rabota aktyora nad soboy).  “Which is a better title, I'd say,” replied Kirk to my reminder.  I’ll also note further that a 2008 retranslation by Jean Benedetti of that seminal acting text is entitled An Actor’s Work (Routledge).

[Regarding the things Kirk specified that actors work on, "Self, script, other actors," I asked if he would consider that "place," meaning the work space (i.e., not just the theater and the stage/acting space, but also the set), is important, too.  I contend that Ihe space in which actors work, both in rehearsal and in performance, has an effect on the acting.  I offer some illustrations:

[When the Group Theatre was doing Johnny Johnson (1936; see “The Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson," 18 November 2019), their only musical, they rehearsed in a small, intimate theater.  When they moved into the much larger theater where they performed, many witnesses reported that the production suffered. 

[In his Homework class, to impress upon us the importance of establishing a sense of place, Aaron Frankel recounted that when Jack Klugman (1922-2012) took over the role of Oscar in the Broadway première of The Odd Couple in November 1965, he actually lived in the apartment set at the Plymouth Theatre for several days to establish a relationship with what was supposed to be his home. 

[Years ago, in an acting class, I was assigned the Watchman’s opening monologue from Aeschylus’ (ca. 525/524-456 BCE) Agamemnon (ca, 458 BCE).  When I read the play, I realized that I had visited the ruins of the place where the play is set, the city of Mycenae, of which Agamemnon was king.  I’d stood atop the Lion Gate, which is restored, looking out over the Plain of Argos down to the Aegean Sea.  I’d been in that place in real life only a year or two before this class, so it wasn’t hard to envision what the Watchman sees when he spots the signal fires from Troy telling the Greeks that the war was over.

[(As a director, I have worked on this aspect of a performance once or twice, most memorably in Ward Six (Drama Committee Repertory Theatre, NYC, 1979), a stage adaptation of a short story by Anton Chekhov (Russian; 1960-1904) in which most of the cast were patients in a psych ward, but the performance space was a store-front black box with suggested, non-Realistic scenery.)

[Kirk responded to my point: “It’s very important, probably next in line, but I wanted to limit my list to what the actor brings into the room, so to speak.  You’re certainly correct about its significance.”  In Respect for Acting, Hagen includes “place” as one of “the essentials to examine in order to define” what makes any given moment in a character’s existence “real.”  She wrote, “Since place is crucial, let me remind you [to] examine every aspect of it. . . .”

[Kirk quotes Butler’s statement in The Method that “actors alternate between the third person and first when discussing their characters,” depending on what training system the actor follows.  For instance, Uta Hagen, and therefore Carol Rosenfeld (my teacher), stressed the first-person relationship to the character.  They felt it reinforces the identification of the actor with the character, which was their interpretation of the Stanislavskian approach to creating a character.  (I can’t remember if Hagen says anything about this in Respect for Acting—Kirk said he couldn’t either—but Carol said it to us in class.)  

[Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), on the other hand, and therefore Leo Shapiro (a follower of Brechtian theater theories, alongside Grotowski’s), eschewed character identification, both for the actor and the audience.  Kirk agreed, asserting, “Yes, Brecht loved using the third person.”

[Leo said frequently that he didn’t see the dramatis personæ as “characters,” but as “roles,” by which he meant their functions in the story/scene.  For example, in Children of the Gods (Shaliko Company, 1973; see “Children of the Gods: Launching The Shaliko Company (1973),” 19 November 2021), his collage of several Greek plays, he didn’t see Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Menelaus, Orestes, or Electra as characters, but as “[t]he greedy King, the unforgiving Queen, the sacrificed Virgin on the altar, the stormy Uncle, the wounded, disillusioned Young Hero, the Sister who has been unhinged by the thirst for revenge.” 

[I try to explain this dichotomy from Leo’s perspective in “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013.  Kirk’s response to this comment: “That’s an extremely interesting comment.  By the way, I find in working with actors that even the most method-oriented actors will literally alternate between ‘s/he’ and ‘I’ constantly in discussions, with no reason for the differentiation that I can tell.”]

'The Method' – a Review

 by Kirk Woodward[I’ve published many articles on Rick On Theater on the subjects of acting and actor-training.  Some were by me—I trained as an actor and have an MFA degree in acting—and some have been by other authors. 

[One of those other writers has frequently been my friend Kirk Woodward, also an actor (though primarily a playwright, composer, and director).  Kirk’s also a great reader and has contributed reports on many fascinating books, both about theater and other fields.  Now he comes back to ROT with a review of a new book about one of the most famous theories of acting and actor-training, The Method.

[Isaac Butler’s The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act is the latest in a long line of books and articles about director and teacher Lee Strasberg’s groundbreaking adaptation of the theories and teachings of Konstantin Stanislavski, the Russian founder of modern Western acting, the dominant technique of most of the 20th century.

[One interesting fact about Butler’s The Method is that it’s not a rave as far as his experience with and judgment of the acting style is concerned.  He’s well worth hearing out, though . . . and so is Kirk.  ~Rick]

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022) is a “biography” of an approach to acting that was first identified and codified in Russia, brought to this country by refugees, taught by a raft of colorful characters, modified by teachers, directors, and books, embedded in this country’s consciousness amid numerous social changes, and ultimately absorbed into the mainstream of entertainment here and worldwide.

The ultimate victor among “Method” approaches was the one taught for decades at the Actors Studio in Manhattan. Butler writes: 

The Method has many definitions, but to instructors of stage acting, it refers very specifically to the techniques and values taught by Lee Strasberg [1901-1982], the most famous and prominent adapter of [Konstantin] Stanislavski’s ideas in the English-speaking world.

(Stanislavski lived from 1863 to 1938.) Butler writes that “The primacy of the actor’s lived experience, the necessity of breaking down both a role and a process into bits, and the goal of using a conscious process to access and manipulate inspiration are the foundation of Stanislavski’s ‘system’” (the Russian’s name for what became known as the Method).

Most prominent among the “techniques and values” developed by Stanislavski and central to the Method is the practice of Affective Memory, in which an actor, through exercises, learns to locate, call up, and reexperience highly charged emotional moments in the actor’s past, with the aim of ultimately being able to apply them to the emotions of a character in a play.

Interestingly, Butler says, “While the ‘system’ would always be associated in America with naturalism, Stanislavski first developed it in order to bring psychological truth to abstract, symbolist works,” which is quite the opposite of what I had imagined.

Butler says that in an acting class he took at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. in the 1990’s,

There were two goals . . . . First, the class would be able to observe how strong emotion actually worked, as opposed to the cliched ways we indicated emotion onstage. The other purpose was to help us find potential keys to unlock our emotions so we could use them in our work.

There are three interesting elements to that report of his acting class experience. The first is that, as far as he knew, the Studio Theatre’s instructors were not specifically committed to the Method at all; by the 1990’s they almost certainly considered it outdated and, as taught by Strasberg, even dangerous.

The second is that those two goals described above are a good high-level description of the Method, particularly as it was taught by Strasberg, even if the teachers did not profess to be committed to it.

The third is that for Butler it was dangerous – he feels he became emotionally damaged by Affective Memory, and he left acting altogether.

Butler knows theater first hand.  (If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have been likely to say, for example, that “In rehearsals, directors perform more than actors do.” It takes having “been there” to know that.) Today he teaches theater history and performance at the New School in Manhattan. He co-wrote The World Only Spins Forward, a narrative of the success of Angels in America by Tony Kushner (b. 1956). He has hosted podcasts on Shakespeare and the creative process, and co-created 2015’s song cycle Real Enemies. He is an excellent guide to the world of theater history.

In his Introduction Butler efficiently addresses the two enormous currents of opinion about acting, that it is an “external” or an “internal” matter (that is, based on the observation and presentation of observable traits, or on a character’s psychology). Assuming that’s a real dichotomy (the argument is never finished), the Method definitely leans toward the latter.

Before reading this book I thought I was reasonably familiar with the history of acting. I realize now that I hardly knew anything; I have learned a great deal from this volume, and will certainly reread it. Out of a wealth of information, let me present a few examples from early chapters of the book.

I knew almost nothing about the relationship between the two men who founded and led the Moscow Art Theater (MAT – and not exactly its official name) in its first phase: Stanislavski and the splendidly named Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858-1943). For that matter, I didn’t know that Nemirovich-Danchenko was a theatrical artist in his own right, a director, playwright, and teacher.

I had assumed that his and Stanislavski’s relationship was roughly equivalent to that of Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) and George Balanchine (1904-1983), who together created and ran the New York City Ballet. Kirstein dedicated his career to furthering Balanchine’s and invested a great deal of money in it.

“The only justification I have is to enable Balanchine to do what he wants in the way he wants to do it,” Kirstein wrote. He handled the administrative side of the company, allowing Balanchine the opportunity to choreograph freely.

On the other hand, Stanislavski (a stage name, incidentally – I hadn’t known that), although he led on the artistic side, was the one who had the money, and he refused to use it to help underwrite the new MAT. He and Nemirovich-Danchenko had different opinions as well on artistic matters from the beginning.

They more or less agreed to split duties as Kirstein and Balanchine did, but neither was comfortable with the arrangement; they argued, then fought, then stopped speaking altogether. Yet their theater somehow progressed.

I did not know how close the MAT came to closing, not just once but many times. In fact Butler shows that its entire history was fraught with peril, some of it from inside, some external, as first the Czar and then the Communists endangered both the enterprise and the lives of those engaged in it.

Of course, generally speaking, all theater is precarious financially, unless it receives a state subsidy or some other regular flow of funds. In Europe, some theaters (particularly in Germany) enjoy such subsidies; in the United States, basically none have, with the exception of the Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939), part of the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945).

However, the MAT was precarious in life-and-death ways as well. The director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), who began his career working with Stanislavski and developed his own approach to acting, ended up murdered under Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) because of his artistic opinions, which the regime rejected, and he wasn’t the only one to pay that price.

I did not know that Stanislavski throughout his life was uncertain just how his “system” worked, an uncertainty that fed into endless disputes, particularly in the United States, about exactly what he meant and whether he meant it only provisionally or permanently. 

The story goes on, and so, for me, did the surprises, as the Method took shape and was transmitted from Russia, later the U.S.S.R., to western Europe and the United States, to become, like the immigrant population that brought it over, assimilated into the culture. Among the most influential of those who landed here were Richard Boleslawski (1889-1937), Michael Chekhov (1891-1955), and Maria Ouspenskaya (1876-1949), all of them major contributors to the field of acting instruction.

[See “Konstantin Stanislavsky and Michael Chekhov: Realism and Un-Realism,” posted on this blog on 2 May 2011, and the three-part profile of Michael Chekhov, 2, 5, and 8 November 2019.]

Similarly to what happened to Freud’s approach to psychoanalysis, the Method was ultimately modified and supplemented until it’s inaccurate to say today that many of our major actors are Method actors at all.

In fact – another surprise – two performers frequently described as outstanding examples of Method actors really aren’t. Marlon Brando (1924-2004), whose work for many embodied the Method, denied that Lee Strasberg taught him anything; he credited his teacher Stella Adler (1901-1992), whose approach spectacularly diverged from Strasberg’s in 1934. Robert DeNiro (b. 1943) has typically approached his roles through immersive external character study that is not part of the Method at all.

Butler says that “what he [Stanislavski] was describing was, at its core, ineffable.” That fact did not stop many from trying to describe the ineffable as the years went on, through teaching, and in books, beginning with The First Six Lessons (1933) by Richard Boleslawski (aka: Boleslavsky) and Stanislavski’s The Actor Prepares (1936).

But why “ineffable?” What’s so difficult about describing how acting works? The answer surely is that life is complex, and acting, which in some way or other imitates life, borrows from that complexity. As a result, acting is a bundle of opposites, including such enormous pairs as spontaneous and planned, mundane and extravagant, practical and spiritual, entertaining and educating, and so on.

These pairs continually synthesize themselves in whatever the actor is doing at the moment. Sometimes one element predominates, sometimes another. I referred earlier to Stanislavski’s uncertainty about exactly what his “system” was and how it worked. We should look at this uncertainty as a virtue more than as a fault. If acting is anything, it is a continual process of discovery. It changes as life changes.

And then, in a way, it doesn’t – another paradox. If we imagine two actors, perhaps one from 1722 and one from 2022, being able to meet and compare notes, on the one hand they would find their acting styles vastly different, and the same would go for the theories and techniques they applied to their craft.

On the other hand, they would immediately relate to each other as they traded stories about performance catastrophes, backstage quarrels, shortcuts for remembering lines, abusive theater managers and directors, missing paychecks, and so on.

So “it’s a mad world, my masters,” this world of acting, and The Method does it justice, particularly as it describes the remarkable group of characters who populate the story along the way. For illustration I will pick just one story, which perhaps actors may relate to. Lee Strasberg, directing a play for the Group Theatre (1931-1941), was often particularly demanding of his cast.

During a rehearsal, an actor made a small physical mistake, which she immediately corrected. Strasberg asked her, “Why did you do that?” She said it was a mistake, forget it, let’s move on. Strasberg wouldn’t let up. He kept demanding, “Why did you do that?” while the rest of the cast waited.

Finally another actor, known as one of the nicest in the ensemble, said quietly to the person next to her, “Now I’m going to kill him.” She charged Strasberg, fingers open to strangle him. Two other actors held her back. Strasberg ran from the theater and quit as director of the show.

Not your usual rehearsal story, but then The Method features an outlandish cast of characters. Butler is an excellent guide through the thickets of personalities, and theories, too. He recognizes that schools of acting, like other artistic trends, don’t come out of a vacuum; they both react to and intensify what’s going on in society around them. About the wide range of acting styles in recent decades he writes:

The end of the Method era in American culture had no single source. No new Stanislavski arose to lead a war on the prior generation’s hokum. The Method suffered instead the same fate that befell the postwar consensus in which it had been so firmly ensconced. Both began to lose their grip on America in the mid 1970s as the blockbuster, the inflation crisis, and revelations of decades of government wrongdoing struck the nation simultaneously; both stumbled into the 1980’s, punch-drunk and overmatched by a new vision of American society and its citizens. Before, our tax dollars went to advance the common good; now they would be returned to us so we could express ourselves through our purchasing power – helping others, the conventional wisdom went, through helping ourselves. Before, we were bound in common cause – individuals, yes, but part of a society and dedicated to its advancement; we were now to be consumers in a marketplace.

One wonders if it would be possible today for a “school” of acting to raise the almost religious fervor that culminated in the Method: the belief that changing the way people acted on stage would also change the world.

This seems an outlandish hope today, but it was a commonplace during much of the history described in The Method, emerging first in the minds of Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko, and appearing most spectacularly in the Group Theatre (1931-1941), with Harold Clurman (1901-1980) quite literally preaching the doctrine that society needed a new approach to acting that would change the way it saw itself.

Sometimes that expectation almost seemed to happen, as with the production of Waiting for Lefty (1935) by Clifford Odets (1906-1963), a play that vividly presented the struggle between labor and capital – but certainly did not resolve it.

Does acting change us or reflect us? Another conundrum! In any case, acting is no longer limited to the stage, film, and television. It has sprawled along with the diffusion of types of media. It would be fascinating to know how a book would describe the next thirty years of acting styles and techniques.

It’s a sure bet that there will be plenty to say. Meanwhile, we have The Method to give us a vivid and useful look at where we’ve come from.

[Before there was Strasberg’s Method, or even Stanislavski’s System, there was François Delsarte, the first man who tried to codify and systematize the training of actors.  I posted a profile of Delsarte, whose theories were the founding principles of the American Academy of Dramatic Art (founded in 1884), on ROT on 4 January 2014; see “The Father of Actor Training: François Delsarte.”]

*  *  *  *

After this report was published, Kirk Woodward returned to Butler's book for “Bombast to Beckett” (13 January 2025). For more on the subject of method acting, click on the link.

"For Paul Newman's 96th birthday, his lost cinematic masterpiece," Part 3

by Allan M. Jalon

[This is the concluding section of Allan M. Jalon’s article on Paul Newman’s never-released film version of Anton Chekhov’s one-act play On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.  If you’ve been reading Parts 1 and 2, you know what a remarkable tale this is.  (If you haven’t read the beginning installments—posted respectively on 5 and 8 February—I strongly suggest going back and picking up the start of this endeavor.]

The play’s full title is “The Dybbuk, Between Two Worlds” [in which Michael Strong appeared in 1975 at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum; see Part 2]. It presents the troubled divide between the religion-steeped past and secular assimilation, the same transition that members of the Natapoff family (and many families) had experienced in Russia, and then in America. The play’s history runs like a thread through Jewish progress from the Old World to the new. It was written in Russia — originally for Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theatre, though it never had a production there — and got staged in Yiddish in New York in the 1920s. Now it was playing at the main theater complex in L.A.

Still, when Strong was onstage in “The Dybbuk,” in costume as a Polish Jew, did he feel connected to his Jewish identity? Strong’s childhood home felt “more Russian than Jewish,” his son told me, adding that the Natapoff family had no custom of Jewish practice or even celebrating holidays. Garfein said he’d had Strong and Shalet to his apartment for a few Seders [the ceremonial meal for Passover].

I’ll let Ellen Strong have the next-to last word: “Acting was his religion.”

My final words on this question offer a reminder that these were decades of a specific evolution — the merging of Jewish and American identities. Mike Strong was an American Jewish actor, while other people of his generation, with widely varying interest in the specificities of Jewishness, were American Jewish poets, American Jewish teachers and American Jewish politicians. It seems so obvious a statement, until one considers the decades of change it had taken until immigrants and their children could feel less like strangers here.

Garfein had moved to L.A. in 1964, joining Newman to establish the Actors Studio-West, an outpost of the New York group. He also got together with Strong and Shalet, growing closer to Strong than they’d been in New York. Ellen Strong recalls his “very social” presence at parties of about 10 people, mostly actors, in the backyard of their house. “Everyone would be telling stories and laughing about scenes going wrong, actors getting injured while doing stunts,” she recalled.

Garfein and Strong went to star-studded Hollywood parties. “We didn’t go to stupid parties,” he said. “It was always Kazan or Strasberg’s parties.”

They spent frequent Sunday mornings together at Garfein’s apartment, in a high-rise along Sunset Boulevard, “talking mostly about what we were doing — theater, movies.”

Strong and Garfein were two Actors Studio friends whose relationship was rooted in Chekhov-like indirection, the fissures between what was and wasn’t stated, remembered and left behind. Garfein said he and Strong got as close “as brothers — I was the younger brother,” but the two never spoke about the deep shadows surrounding them.

Garfein told me he never spoke to Strong about his youth in the Slovakian town of Bardejov [then part of Czechoslovakia]. In 1942, the family moved from Slovakia — a brutal Nazi ally that had begun deportations by then — to the relative safety of the Hungarian town where the Garfeins lived for two years. The family was swept up and placed on trains to Auschwitz in the massive Hungarian deportations of 1944.

In Auschwitz, Garfein told me, he lost 19 members of his family, including his mother and sister, on a single day, May 23, 1944; he was 13. His name was then Jacob Garfein, and his hair was red, not today’s airy white. (Iraj Abde, our mutual friend at Barzini’s Market, told me he buys 19 yahrzeit candles for Holocaust Remembrance Day each year.) [Yahrzeit is Yiddish for ‘anniversary’; the candles are memorials that Jews light in memory of loved ones on the anniversaries of their deaths.  They are also lit at Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, and Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah).]

It’s hard to reconcile his carefully modulated voice, his hints of infinite grief, with the man I’ve watched stroll buoyantly down Broadway. He details labor camps and death marches across Europe largely to lay German rail lines. He names nine camps across Poland and Central Europe where he stopped before English forces set him free at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. He was sent to a Swedish recovery center and from there, in 1946, to New York.

On his iPhone, he carries photographs from a Swedish newspaper, showing him as a flesh-and-bones teenager in Sweden.

Michael Strong, meanwhile, never spoke of being Cecil Natapoff, the son of an immigrant mail carrier in the Bronx who read Shakespeare in Yiddish. By hiding in a cemetery, Strong’s father had survived a pogrom in 1903 that killed hundreds of Jews in a Belorussian town called Gomel; I learned this from Susan Strong, the family historian. Strong never spoke of his brother. Gus Natapoff was seven years older than he, a prodigy who gained admission to Harvard for graduate work in advancing areas of science and engineering at a time when admission quotas limited the number of Jews.

He drowned in a swimming accident at a Harvard pool in 1938, just as Cecil Natapoff was starting his acting career, three years before he changed his name to Strong.

Alan Natapoff, a Strong cousin, is a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied the impact of space travel on the human body. He grew up taking pleasure in Michael Strong’s work, and believes that Strong’s relationship with his elder brother —“the family never recovered from his death” — at least partly drove his acting ambitions.

“I didn’t know he had a brother. I never heard the name Natapoff,” Garfein said. “To me, he was Michael Strong. I knew he was Jewish, but we didn’t talk about the past.”

Grant, who wrote about her Jewish family (and how she endured the Hollywood blacklist) in a memoir called “I Said Yes to Everything” [2014], saw Strong and Shalet in L.A. She echoed Garfein, saying: “We didn’t talk about who we were like that. We were part of the tribe of actors. I never knew he was Cecil Natapoff. He never knew I was Lyova Rosenthal. Mike Strong. Lee Grant. How American can you get?”

[This is from Wikipedia: “The Hollywood blacklist (1946-1960s) was the colloquial term for what was in actuality a broader entertainment industry blacklist put in effect in the mid-20th century in the United States during the early years of the Cold War. The blacklist involved the practice of denying employment to entertainment industry professionals believed to be or to have been Communists or sympathizers. Not just actors, but screenwriters, directors, musicians, and other American entertainment professionals were barred from work by the studios. This was usually done on the basis of their membership in, alleged membership in, or even just sympathy with the Communist Party USA, or on the basis of their refusal to assist Congressional investigations into the party's activities. Even during the period of its strictest enforcement, from the late 1940s through to the late 1950s, the blacklist was rarely made explicit or easily verifiable, as it was the result of numerous individual decisions by the studios and was not the result of official legal action. Nevertheless, it quickly and directly damaged or ended the careers and income of scores of individuals working in the film industry.”]

But Garfein and Strong shared a delight in Yiddish theater stories. The Yiddish theater was in Strong’s blood. He sat in the 55-cent balcony seats of such theaters when he was a boy. Maybe when he stood on the stage of the Orpheum for Newman’s film, he was looking into a theater where he sat with his parents as a boy and felt the first stirrings of actor inspiration.

We know Strong worked on Broadway with Joseph Buloff [1899-1985], the Yiddish acting star who’d been brought from Europe by Maurice Schwartz [1890-1960], impresario-star of New York’s Yiddish Art Theater. It’s a good guess that Buloff gave him the following Schwartz story.

It seems Schwartz had a bad-great night playing Hamlet — in Yiddish, of course. He gave the gravedigger scene’s famous line — “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him. . .” — and blanked out. He looked to the prompter’s box, but it was empty, nature having called. Recovering his composure, Schwartz improvised: “Poor New Yorick, I know it. . . .”

His New York immigrant audience went crazy, it seems, as he went on: “Oh, poor New Yorick, I know it. It is our city, New Yorick, the city of our struggles, but it also holds promise for better times. . . .”

In 1968, Garfein directed Shalet and Strong in a short play about a honeymooning couple’s post-coital fight about the height of a great conductor. It was called “How Tall Is Toscanini?” [written by Calder Willingham, 1922-95; performed at UCLA’s Actors Studio West Workshop.] Strong and Garfein met, and Garfein showed him his “big directing book” filled with analytical notes for his actors.

Strong didn’t want to see it, saying he’d find his part on his own.

Garfein asked him, “Well, what do you do?’

“He said: ‘I put the character on the ceiling. Then, I lay on my bed and talk to the ceiling. That’s where the character lives. I ask questions: What job do you have? Introduce me to your mother and father. What are you doing right now? And the character talks back from the ceiling, and I listen to what he says. So, use your big book after you see what I get from the ceiling.’”

From 1969 to 1970, Strong enjoyed an unusually visible career moment. Working in “Patton,” he wove through the film as the title character’s ever-helpful chief of staff, Brig. Gen. Hobart Carver, and flinched in pain when his boss declared his willingness to work with ex-Nazis.

With the film on screens nationwide, Strong toured the country in a key role in Miller’s play “The Price” [1967], directed by Miller. He played the troubled middle-aged policeman Victor Franz, one of two brothers at war over an inheritance. Critics loved him. “Strong hovers between goodness and weakness” [“Arthur Miller Directs 'Price' at Hartford,” 4 Mar. 1970], wrote Dan Sullivan of the Los Angeles Times. The Washington Post’s Richard Coe [1914-95] judged Strong to be “strangely more perceptive than Pat Hingle’s original” [“‘The Price,’” 28 Oct. 1969; Hingle, 1924-2009, played Victor Franz in the Broadway première, 7 Feb. 1968-15 Feb. 1969].

On February 17, 1970, Kazan wrote him a letter that shows how acutely Strong’s admirers felt his unachieved potential. After seeing Strong’s glowing reviews from the road, the director wrote, “See, if you keep working, and you can stand the waiting, you finally get what you deserve.”

In Chicago, where “The Price” was onstage at the gorgeous old Studebaker Theater while “Patton” played on local screens, a Chicago Daily News reporter saw a good story in Strong as a veteran actor in the limelight. He interviewed him for a rare feature focusing on just him. Midway through it, Strong pulled out his wallet, removing a “fading, well-creased” clipping of The New York Times’s tiny rave of “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.” He told the reporter that he wished this “teething ring” of Newman’s directorial skills “might be shown as part of a Paul Newman retrospective.”

It seems the star of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” [1969] never forgot his directing debut, either. Amram visited the actor in his dressing room one night a few years before his 2008 death. “All Paul wanted to talk about was that film with Michael Strong,” the composer told me. “He asked, ‘Do you have or do you know anybody who has a copy of our film, ‘On the Harmfulness of Tobacco’? I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ He said, ‘I want to see it again.’ And he looked melancholy.”

THE GRAVE

In Diane Shalet’s book, “Grief in a Sunny Climate,” Michael is already dying of stomach cancer. He’s still well enough to join the narrator-wife at a cemetery somewhere near L.A. to pick out his grave site. They find one and lie down on it, under a tree with a “cluster of dark green needles.” He tells her a Chekhov short story about a young actor who visits the grave of a dead stage star who has been forgotten.

Shalet’s fictional alter ego recalls how, referring to a once popular police series, her husband had once told her, “I wasn’t put on earth to do ‘Baretta’” [ABC, 1975-78]

And the narrator created by Shalet (who would die in 2006) explains: “Passionate about the theater, uncanny in his sense of truth; and chameleon, he could create the psychological and physical reality of another human being.” She recalls exercises that they’d used to enter a role: “Wrap yourself in the circumstances. . . .Talk and listen with the illusion of the first time. . . . Acting is life chosen.”

Then there were the trials of the barely famous: “When we walked down the street he had the finger-snapping recognition of the public: “Aren’t you. . .? Click, click. . . . ”Aren’t you. . . Glenn Ford [1916-2006]?’ Michael would mumble and ask me, ‘Are you disappointed I’m not as famous as Burt Lancaster [1913-94]?’”

Finishing that passage, I asked myself: Why, without the Newman film’s second life, would Michael Strong remain so buried by time? With all his talent and commitment, why didn’t he get another truly visible break in films? True, he was more of a character actor, but why didn’t he find the notice earned by others of that broad type, like Karl Malden, his closest actor friend, or Eli Wallach, with whom Strong’s daughter says he socialized?

Was he too versatile? Not sufficiently distinctive? Too much the good soldier, not assertive enough in some back-lot sense? And is it fair to raise a question about whether a fine actor might have won more success than the substantial degree he found? Isn’t the risk of going under-recognized in the big world’s eyes so rooted in the acting life that it’s misguided to second guess such a career?

The more often I watched “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco,” the more resonant the scene in which Chekhov’s character peers into that empty theater with baffled eyes became for me. I sensed the meaning it might have for many artists working in different fields who hold somewhere in their minds the question: “Will this work of mine be seen? Will it be heard?” The sight of Ivan Nyukhin — staring as his belief in his connection to others drains away — became a kind of symbolic moment that guided how I understood the film and the filmmakers. It’s only a reporter’s guess about the past, but I’ve become sure that both Strong and Newman constructed that scene of the unwatched actor on the Orpheum’s stage in 1959 to dramatize the possibility they lived with of making art and being answered with silence.

Still, while Paul Strong is convinced his father did what he did for mostly the sake of doing it, that he “cared more about art than stardom,” he wonders if he may have hidden frustration about his career. He asked me, “If Kazan admired him so much, why didn’t he give him a small part in ‘On the Waterfront’ [1954], or another of his classic films?”

He wanted to know if I’d found any answers to the mystery.

I told him my reporting had only deepened it.

In fact, if there’s one person I’d like to trouble from the grave for this story — besides Newman and Strong — it’s Kazan. I’ve realized how closely the lives its major figures wove through his career. He directed Newman in the [Sweet Bird of Youth (T. Williams), 1959-60]. Garfein considered him a mentor. Amram composed for him repeatedly [Splendor in the Grass (1961), The Arrangement (1969)]. He directed Strong [After The Fall (1964-65), Marco Millions (1964), The Changeling (1964), Incident at Vichy (1964-65); all stage] and worked with him at the Actors Studio.

None of those four men was blacklisted, but I can’t conjure Kazan’s memory without thinking of his having named names in the Hollywood blacklist era. His autobiography, “Elia Kazan: A Life” [1997], is one of the most complex books of self-narration I have read: a thick, confounding knot of history-making talent and betrayal. Still, his affection for actors ran deep, as the Strong papers show.

Michael Strong died of stomach cancer on September 17, 1980. He was 62. On October 3, without addressing it to Shalet or anyone, Kazan wrote what looked like a condolence note. He wasn’t at Strong’s funeral — Malden, who called Strong “my dear friend” in his memoir, was there — so it wasn’t a eulogy. He signed its typed sentences, an elegy for one actor and for a world of New York actors who called the theater home: “At one time in my life, for perhaps 15 years, I had a family in the theater, a small family of actors, because I trusted them to understand me and give me everything of which they were capable.

“Mike was one of this family. And he was capable of a great deal. But beyond and above his work there was a unique quality of sweetness, of goodness, so rare today. Of course he was competitive — that’s a necessity as the world spins today; one pays for excessive naiveté — but this career orientation never dimmed the sterling light of his realest self. There was never a day that I went to rehearsal and found Mike waiting that I didn’t feel better for the sight of him.”

THE HARMFULNESS OF AVOIDANCE

Garfein was in Paris when Strong died. Shalet called him from L.A. with the news. She also called him — possibly just before or right after he died — to tell him that Strong had asked her on his deathbed to bring Garfein the Newman film. He’d asked that she fly to France and hand it to him in person.

Ellen Strong, who cared for her father with Shalet till the end, recalls no deathbed request. But she says her father was “very proud” of the film, and that Shalet visited Europe after he died, so “it is very plausible that it happened just as Jack Garfein says.”

In fact, the film box bears a peeling strip of tape on which printed black letters say “For Jack Garfein.”

“Diane told me, ‘Mike wants you to have this movie,’” Garfein told me. “That’s what she said.”

And he fell silent, the Garfein energy giving way to a hard, inward look.

I asked, “What happened next?”

His hand gave the air a lost-looking swipe. Silent, he stared at the space of pale sofa beside him and repeated: “She came to Paris. She said that on his deathbed, Mike said: ‘Give it to Jack. He’ll know what to do with it.’ I’m the one he called after Newman gave it to him. He trusted me. He knew I respected his work immensely. He knew I understood it was the best he could do, his pinnacle as an actor. I put it away somewhere in some closet, and I never looked at it again.”

I asked him what could have stopped him from watching a film that a dying actor-friend had told his wife to carry across the Atlantic to give to him, with a clear sense that his friend dreamed it could finally be seen when he was gone?

“I knew Paul had taken his name off of it,” Garfein answered. “I was afraid that, if Paul found it a disappointment, I’d find it disappointing, too. I respected Paul’s opinion. I wanted to remember the way Mike did it at the Actors Studio. I was there the first time he did it in a class, in front of Strasberg. Strasberg thought it was astonishing. Everyone did. I didn’t want that memory to be wiped out by something mediocre.”

After Shalet handed Garfein the box with the film in it, he stashed it in a closet in his Paris apartment, where it stayed, untouched, for another 34 years.

LOST IS NOT ALWAYS LOST

In 2012, while still living in Paris, the 82-year-old Garfein visited New York and met an articulate 37-year-old Russian-Jewish immigrant (“75% percent Jewish,” he said, with a teasing smile) named Natalia Repolovsky [b. 1976; m. Garfein, 2019]. Born in Sochi, the site of Russia’s recent Olympics [winter 2014], she grew up there and trained as a classical pianist in Moscow. She’s tall, with a willowy bearing, and states clear views in her Russian accent.

She met Garfein, far more diminutive, 45 years her senior, at a dinner party that also figures into a tangled tale they gleefully tell me, about a production they were supposed to see together earlier of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”— a story that ends with them seeing it separately and hating it.

[The only New York staging of Uncle Vanya (first produced, 1899) around the time Jalon reports that Garfein and Repolovsky met was an Off-Broadway production of the Pearl Theatre. It was mounted at the company’s home on West 42nd Street (Theatre Row), east of 11th Avenue, known as the Peter Norton Space, in September and October 2014. 

[Of the production, the New York Times’ Laura Collins-Hughes (“On a Russian Farm, Where Frustration Grows,” 24 Sept. 2014) said that “there’s a lopsidedness to the telling” because “performances by” some cast members “are funnier and more fully realized than those by” others. Collins-Hughes added that “with the strong imbalance in the principal roles, . . . poignancy goes missing”; “in place of the sadness that should be there, we feel only emptiness.” 

[The translation, by Paul Schmidt, was apparently contemporary, as the Times reviewer, who liked it, characterized it as “vibrant” and “loose-limbed” and asserted, “There’s no groping through layers of musty language to find our connection to Chekhov’s” characters.  Other notices (Time Out New York, Village Voice) were equally non-committal-to-negative.]

In 2014, Garfein returned to New York to move in with Repolovsky, and brought with him a certain tired-looking brown box with an old film in it.

“We were unpacking,” she recalled. “And I saw it. Just laying there amid his things. I asked, “What’s that?” And he said, ‘Oh, it’s an old film of a play by Chekhov.’ And I asked, ‘What play?’ And he told me, and I had never read this play. I had never seen it performed. I said, ‘We have to see it.’”

Garfein hesitated, but Repolovsky insisted.

“I said, ‘We have to see it. Anything Chekhov, I will go and look,’” she recounted. “Even if it is bad, it is bad Chekhov!”

They faced a problem of time and technology. The film was locked onto the roll that Newman had handed to Strong and Shalet to Garfein, an artifact of the long era when Americans went to a movie theater to see a movie. So, Garfein called Lori Styler [b. 1954], a friend and a connection to his past.

Her father, Herman Styler, was a freelance journalist who wrote about Garfein’s brief talk at a United Jewish Appeal dinner shortly after he arrived in New York in 1946, at the age of 16. One of the first and youngest Holocaust survivors to emigrate here, he’s now one of the last who lives.

He placed the old film box with the print in it into her hands; she took it to be digitized, and brought it back with the film on a DVD disc. That evening, he nervously watched Repolovsky slide the DVD into place, and they watched as some visual static crossed the print. Credits rolled past the spot where Newman’s name might have been.

And Michael Strong came wandering down the street, dressed as Nyukhin. He stopped at the theater door, corrected his name, and starred in his slow storm of words and silences.

When the film ended, Garfein and Repolovsky told me, they sat “in silence,” contemplating the decades that it had been left to the dark. “I knew that I was wrong,” Garfein said. “Paul was wrong to be disappointed, if that’s what happened.”

“It was a revelation to me that an American actor could perform Chekhov in a way so Russian,” Repolovsky told me after I’d returned to watch the film again, this time with both of them. “This combination of misery and humor that is so big a part of Chekhov was so natural for him. It was not an American performance of a Russian play. I’ve seen those, and I have been disappointed a number of times.

“There is such a big difference between the two cultures. American culture is a success culture, always about winning, while Russia has a culture of elegant failures, and that is what this film is about. I watched Michael Strong, thinking that he gets it. He understands, and it comes from a very deep place.”

Repolovsky didn’t know, when we watched the Newman film that evening, that Michael Strong was a Russian Jew, that he’d grown up hearing the language in which Chekhov wrote his play. When I’d done that piece of reporting, I told her. Her eyes wide, she looked at me like I’d handed her a key and she’d unlocked — well, a closet. “See,” she said. “It makes total sense.”

Without Repolovsky’s émigré antennae, Garfein says, the film might have stayed lost. He had no plan to look at it. “I brought it back to New York, thinking I’d donate it to some institution, maybe Lincoln Center, and then I could take a tax write-off,” he said candidly. At one point, I told Garfein I’d found a Chekhov quote to be in order: “One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake” [from The Personal Papers of Anton Chekhov, ed. 1948]. He smiled broadly, and asked me to email it to him.

Repolovsky is clear that this ungodly mistake should be corrected, saying the film “must be seen.” Garfein said he’s taken steps to make a film about the Newman film, one that will be “more than a documentary,” though he’s declined to elaborate.

But last April [2016], the director of “Something Wild” visited a studio at TCM and helped the popular Robert Osborne [1932-2017] host a screening of his best-known film. That visit resulted in early exchanges about a possible showing of the Newman film.

Osborne may end up introducing it in just the kind of Newman retrospective that Strong envisioned as a showcase for his Chekhov tour-de-force. “At this point, a Newman evening is what I have in mind,” TCM’s [senior v.p. of programming and production Charles] Tabesh said.

Still, I wonder: Who actually owns this orphanlike film? Such a film isn’t likely to bring a windfall, but who can profit from it? I asked this to Eric Schwartz, a leading attorney on film copyright issues. “Copyright law is often murky for unfinished or abandoned projects,” he told me.

Amram registered for copyright protection for his music; Newman didn’t take that step. Garfein — possession being nine-tenths of the law — owns the physical print, but copyright law governs intangibles, and that could thwart his right to profit from screenings of the imagery.

Amram said that he will “be a mensch, not a gangster kind of guy,” and isn’t looking for money because he wants only to “get this film seen.” Still, if the Newman family claims to own the copyright, it could create a problem, Schwartz said, especially if it has documents that place control in family hands. Tabesh said TCM lawyers have looked into the rights question deeply enough to feel “comfortable” with it, but he added, “We will check with the family.”

For members of the Strong family, watching TCM together is a tradition. They spoke in interviews about stars of the decades between 1930 and 1980 with whom Michael Strong performed, including Frederic March [1897-1975; An Enemy of the People (play), 1950-51], Lee J. Cobb [1911-76; The Emperor's Clothes (play), 1953; The Young Lawyers: The Victims (TV), 1971] and Ethel Merman [1908-84; Gypsy (play; understudy Herbie), 1959-61]. When they watch Cobb, they’re aware he was one of Strong’s two favorite actors. The other was Paul Muni [1895-1967], with whom Strong probably never acted but whose disciplined intensity he emulated, and for whom Paul Strong is named.

Three generations of the Strong family spent the past summer [2016] on the Maine coast, in a house on an inlet that reaches out to the Atlantic and has been in the family for decades. There, Paul and Susan Strong have shared old movies with their two grown children — who call Michael Strong “Grampa Mike” — and two grandchildren. Michael, 9, is named for the actor. He and his sister, Sophia, 11, spent part of the summer at a theater day camp. When I mentioned his name to them, they said they hadn’t heard of Paul Newman. But they knew a lot about Michael Strong, and they’d heard about “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.”

I made a last call to the family to tell Paul Strong about TCM’s plan to show the film. In his deep, quiet voice, he said: “Robert Osborne once mentioned my father’s name. He was about to screen a film with him in it. Then he suddenly said his name, and I’ve remembered that ever since.

“They’ve shown him in ‘Detective Story,” and we’ve watched that,” he added. “But if you ask me what it means that they will show this film after all this time? There really are no words for it.”

[TCM had scheduled On the Harmfulness of Tobacco along with 1968’s Rachel, Rachel and 1972’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds for “Newman Directs” on Sunday, 26 March 2017.  In February, however, Garfein pulled out of the arrangement with the network on the argument that airing the movie for a nationwide audience would impede the success of an independent documentary about the Newman film the director planned to make.

[As a result, TCM aired only Rachel, Rachel and Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds that Sunday night at 8 and 10 p.m.; On the Harmfulness of Tobacco wasn’t shown as originally announced.  Garfein died on 30 December 2019 and, as far as I could determine, never made the Newman documentary.

[The Film Society of Lincoln Center, however, scheduled the Chekhov movie along with Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds for Monday, 20 February 2017, the first time since 1962 that the film would be seen in public; that screening was still planned.]

Allan M. Jalon won two 2015 Simon Rockower Awards [given for “Excellence in Jewish Journalism” sponsored by the American Jewish Press Association] for his Forward feature stories, “My Opa’s Story of World War One’s Other Fight” [7 Sept. 2014; Opa is German for ‘Grandpa’] and “A New Jersey Tale of Two Alfred Doblins” [27 July 2014].