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.

The Group Theatre's 'Johnny Johnson'

(19 November 1936-16 January 1937)

[When I was a grad student at New York University, I wrote a paper in May 1984 for a class called 20th-Century Mise-en-Scene, an examination of the staging techniques in modern Western theater taught by the late Michael Kirby  (1931-97).  The paper was a reconstruction of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson, the company’s only musical, with book and lyrics by Paul Green and music by Kurt Weill.  The play ran at Broadway’s 44th Street Theatre from 19 November 1936—83 years ago tomorrow—to 16 January 1937.  

[In the course of my research, I read all the reviews I could locate and as many accounts from participants and later scholars as I could find.  I pored over photographs of the production and studied the ground plans of set designer Donald Oenslager.  

[I made slides of the photos and took them with me to Brooklyn (along with a rented portable projector) to interview Tony Kraber, one of the few cast members then still alive, so he could render commentary on the pictures, which I hoped would jog his memory of the then-47-year-old production.  I was also fortunate that at that time, I was acquainted with Sam Leve, a retired set designer, who had been Oenslager’s assistant.  In the end, I pieced together a description of the production from all these sources, picking out performance and staging details wherever I could glean them.  

[Kirby, then the editor of The Drama Review, proposed that I submit the paper to the journal, which was planning a Group Theatre issue, and the reconstruction was published as “The Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson (1936)” in the winter issue of 1984 (28.4 – T104).  It was my first published article.

[This post is a combination of my original typescript and the TDR version.  I have also revised it a little for Rick On Theater.]

Introduction

On Thursday, 19 November 1936, the Group Theatre (1931-41) opened its only musical play.  Johnny Johnson, with book and lyrics by Paul Green (1894-1981) and music by Kurt Weill (1900-50), played at the 44th Street Theatre on Broadway for a scant nine weeks—a total of only 68 performances—closing after the matinee and evening shows on Saturday, 16 January 1937.  It was an unusual play in many respects, and certainly would have had a startling effect on its audiences, who couldn’t really have known what to expect. 

According to Green:

The story of the legend—that is what I like to call the play—is the musical autobiography of a common soldier whose natural common sense runs counter to a sophisticated civilization.  The first act is a comedy, the second a tragedy and the third a satire.  That sounds crazy and maybe I can’t get away with it but that is what I have tried to write.

Green communicated his antiwar message in a succession of expressionistic scenes, pervaded by songs, ballads, marches, and hymns by Kurt Weill.

The play, subtitled “The Biography of a Common Man,” told the story of Johnny Johnson, an honest, truth-loving fellow who volunteered to be a soldier in the “war to end all wars.”  Green explained his choice of the leading character’s name in the News-Week review: “The character is named Johnny Johnson because war records show that there were 30,000 Johnsons in the American Army.  Three thousand of them were John Johnsons.” 

Johnny, a tombstone-carver, is introduced at the dedication of a peace monument he’d carved, just at the moment President Woodrow Wilson proclaims war.  His romantic fiancée, Minny Belle Tompkins, is enraptured by the glories of prospective martial heroism, and Johnny goes off to enlist at the local recruiting office. 

He’s put through army training with some difficulty and shipped off to France.  At the front, he contracts a private peace with a young German soldier, whom Johnny sends back to carry a message of peace and brotherhood to the other German soldiers. 

Wounded, Johnny is sent to a hospital from which he escapes with a canister of laughing gas.  He doses the Allied Supreme Command with the gas and temporarily succeeds in calling off the war.  He’s sent home to a lunatic asylum where a mad psychiatrist diagnoses him with as suffering from “peace monomania.”  Finally released, Johnny’s reduced to selling toys on a street corner—not very successfully, however, since he doesn’t carry tin soldiers.

The Origins of the Project

Johnny Johnson was a departure from the Group Theatre’s usual realistic and naturalistic productions coming “out of the Group Theatre’s suggestion, stimulation and actual assistance.”  The idea was spawned early in 1936 after Kurt Weill arrived in America.  The Group had become intrigued with Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, and they befriended him.  Stella Adler (1901-92) eventually suggested Weill write a musical play for the Group, and Weill proposed an American version of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, which had been done with some success in Germany by Erwin Piscator in 1927.

Harold Clurman (1901-80) visited Paul Green, who’d written the Group’s first play, The House of Connelly (1931), at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  While he was there, Clurman learned that Green had fought in France in World War I and “had an intimate acquaintance with the American soldier of that day.”  He passed on Weill’s proposal, and Green expressed interest.

Returning to New York, Clurman told Cheryl Crawford (1902-86), who, with Clurman  and Lee Strasberg (1901-82), made up the Group’s ruling triumvirate, that Green was the playwright for the job.  When Green definitely agreed to collaborate, Crawford and Weill went to Chapel Hill to start work on the scenario.  Crawford served as “coordinator” and the project became her “adopted child.”

Money being in short supply, the Group customarily spent the summer at an adult camp.  This time it was Pinebrook Club Camp in Nichols, Connecticut.  Clurman was named managing director of the Group, assuming authority over executive decisions.  As he and the Group tried to work out some internal problems, they awaited the arrival of the playwright who’d promised them scripts.

When Green arrived  with his script of Johnny Johnson, it was still unfinished.  It needed more work, and Green took it back to Chapel Hill.  At the summer’s end, Green returned to Pinebrook with the finished rehearsal script, and work began only a week or so before the Group moved back to New York.

The Music

The play that Paul Green wrote for Kurt Weill’s music was what he had come to call “‘symphonic drama’ . . . a ‘sounding together’ in the true meaning of the Greek word.”  From the very start, he said, “I wanted a musical score to be part of the script,” for “without music there could be no war . . . .  Music has always been an integral part of fighting.” 

Weill’s music, the first he wrote for the American stage, was based on American folk and popular songs.  It ranged over several genres, but filtered through his own European sensibilities.  It was variously described as “haunting,” “tuneful, gay and touching,” “lovely,” “seemingly careless, really profoundly sensitive,” “weird,” and “dramatic.”

The musical style itself wasn’t as striking as the way it was interwoven with the book.  A Group advertising flyer for the production explained:

While this is a play with songs, it is not a musical show.  The singing arises naturally from the situations of the imaginative story and the verses of the song flow as simply as the prose of the speech.

In  a theater more accustomed to operettas (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat, generally considered the first American book musical, was presented only nine years earlier) and revues, such a production would doubtlessly attract attention.  The Brooklyn Eagle remarked, “All through the proceedings, the players stop at intervals to sing . . .,” and the New York Post called it “a new form in Broadway theatre . . . in that it introduces songs and incidental music regularly through the performance in an artless, haphazard manner . . . .”  The clearest description of how Weill’s music melded with Green’s script is provided by composer Marc Blitzstein:

. . . Weill has practically added a new form to the musical theatre.  It is not opera, although it partakes of the ‘number’ form of Mozart.  And it is decidedly not revue-form.  It owes something to the movies, but it is much more attached to the script.  Take the spot where the exasperated Sergeant tries to put Johnny through all the military paces, and winds up saying—“and you won’t learn, and so the hell with you!” [Act I, scene 4].  As he starts (speaking), the music insinuates itself into his speech, and his enumeration of the maneuvers gains momentum and dash by becoming rhythmical and percussive—until the final expletive, when the music drops out.

As for the performance of Weill’s music, critics nearly unanimously agreed that the Group’s actors weren’t trained singers.  The New York Sun said simply, “They act better than they sing.”  The production’s intent, however, was to present ordinary characters who sing—not professional singers.  The Group had no intention of presenting, nor did Green and Weill write, the usual sort of musical comedy.  Green intended to make the music an integral element of the play—his meaning of “symphonic drama.”  Speaking of Roll Sweet Chariot (1934), his first attempt at this kind of play, Green explained:

I found that in trying to express the inner lives and turmoilings . . . I was having to call upon nearly all the available elements in modern theatrical art . . . .  Folk song and poetry were needed here.  Likewise dance and pantomime and chorus voices.

Lehman Engel (1910-82), musical director of the production, described his encounter with the cast in rehearsal: “There were no singers in the cast, and the songs were worked on chiefly from an acting point of view.”  This, in fact, was precisely what Green wanted and what Weill had written.  As proof of this, there are two independent pieces of evidence. 

In the 1957 MGM Heliodor recording of Johnny Johnson, performers not generally known as singers were cast in the lead roles.  The record producers were probably trying to be true to the Green and Weill’s intentions using people such as Burgess Meredith (1907-97), who sang Johnny, over “legit” singers.  In addition, Lotte Lenya (1898-1981)—who was married to Kurt Weill—also sang on the record, and her unique performance style sounds unmusical to the uninitiated, as were 1936 critics. 

Even the musically knowledgeable could misjudge this new this new style, as Lehman Engel noted with some embarrassment.  He had just met the Weills, and didn’t know that Mrs. Weill was Lotte Lenya.  They were having tea at Engel’s Greenwich Village apartment:

In my desperate need to make conversation, I spoke of The Threepenny Opera with sincere enthusiasm but added that the female singer on a recording I had was terrible!  The Weills smiled indulgently and said that I must have the French recording.  No, I persisted, I had the German one.  It was then I found out that the singer was Lotte Lenya, my guest!  In my young life I held pear-shape vocal tones sacred, and it was to be many years before I could comprehend any other kind of singing.  When I did, I was to worship at the shrine of Lotte Lenya.

With this realization, it’s understandable that the Group would not bring in outside singers to enhance their vocal quality and that as “actors first and singers second, they would have delighted [Bertolt] Brecht with their lack of musical sophistication.” 

The Sets

As soon as the Group returned to New York, construction began on the scenery.  Donald Oenslager (1902-75), who’d been engaged as set designer, determined that “the first act . . . required poetic realism . . . .  The second act . . . employed expressionism . . . .  The third act . . . required distorted settings.”  There were problems, however, putting his concepts into practice. 

First, after Oenslager had made plans for the set according to his own design principles—an outgrowth of the New Stagecraft of Adolphe Appia and E. Gordon Craig—the Group directorate insisted he reconceive the production from an expressionistic point of view.  This caused some difficulty for Oenslager, who was not particularly interested in Expressionism. 

The second problem developed when Oenslager, in a hurry between appointments, left his new drawings in a drug store.  Having lost his second set of plans, he quickly drew a third set in time for construction to begin.  He felt his last-minute rush might have given his designs some serendipitous spontaneity. 

The production was out-of-the-ordinary for the Group, whose reputation had been built on Realism and Naturalism.  Johnny Johnson was “the only Group play that turned away from naturalism in all its elements . . . .”  Lee Strasberg, however, maintained that this was not as unusual as the public thought: “In many of our shows, we really used the principles of abstract art . . . .  [I]n productions like . . . Johnny Johnson, we used modern art forms.”  The overall effect of Oenslager’s “geometric setting”—which suited Green’s three-divisional script—was striking:

The warped perspective created by the exaggeratedly raked floor of the interior platform setting for this play, somewhat derivative of [Nikolai] Akimov’s work in the Soviet theatre after the First World War, helped create the mad whimsy of the play.

This, of course, was not how every critic saw it.  Blitzstein, who admired the music so much, didn’t respond to what he called “the hodgepodge scenic styles in the staging of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson . . . .” 

The scenery was mostly drab colors, gradations of black and white with a “sepia tint.”  The only sets with bright colors were the most starkly mad scenes: the Allied Supreme Command at the Château de Cent Fontaines, which had red, white, and gold appointments; the psychiatrist’s office, with its “red and white desk slanting at an angle of forty-five degrees . . .”; and  in the forensic arena in the insane asylum, also appointed in red and gold, and draped with American flags. 

In the remaining scenes, color was mostly absent, except for the opening celebration scene where color accent was provided by costume pieces such as ribbons and bows, mostly on the little girls.   

Furthermore, to enhance this subdued appearance, the show was spot-lit, illuminating small areas of the stage while leaving the rest in ambiguous darkness.   Even the indoor scenes had the appearance of being lit from one source that pinpointed a particular spot on the set, such as the psychiatrist’s raked desk, with the rest of the stage in increasing shadows receding into darkness.

This shadow effect was exaggerated by the vast stage at the 44th Street Theatre.  By all estimations, the theater was too big for the show.  The large musical house, with its 20- by 30-foot proscenium opening, necessitated that Oenslager design sets too big for the play.  Even with the vast sets, however, the stage area had to be reduced for what was primarily an intimate show, and this was done with lighting, enhancing the ambiguity of the space surrounding the performers.

The Rehearsals

Shortly after returning to New York, Clurman found that his duties as managing director as well as some personal difficulties were overwhelming, and he relinquished the directorship of Johnny Johnson to Lee Strasberg.  Rehearsals had already begun at Pinebrook with the Group’s usual discussions about meaning and content with Green and Weill, who were both in residence by this time.  Sessions continued in New York at the Belmont Theatre, a small house on 48th Street, with improvisations and experimentation.

The Group acting style, a heightened Realism, had by this time been set, and Strasberg saw no cause to develop a different style for Johnny Johnson.  (It’s worth noting here that Strasberg was one of the principle developers of the Stanislavsky-derived acting style known as the Method.)  Sam Leve (1908-99), Oenslager’s former student at the Yale School of Drama and assistant for Johnny Johnson, recalled that though the sets and physical production were heavily expressionistic, the acting, for the most part, was realistic.  In fact, only the “eccentrics” of the play were in any way exaggerated—the High Command, the psychiatrist, and the Brothers in the asylum debating society.

The music, too, was rehearsed in the Group’s usual manner.  Lehman Engel recalled:

The preparation of Johnny was unique among musical shows,  Since it was done with actors saturated in the Stanislavsky Method according to the gospel of Lee Strasberg, the show was studied, improvised, and dissected for  period of about three months prior to the beginning of actual rehearsals.

Many of the songs, in fact, were not even assigned to specific actors until just before performances began.  The whole cast learned and rehearsed the score, except a few songs that had been specifically written for certain performers, such as Private Harwood’s “Cowboy Song: The Rio Grande,” which had been written for Tony Kraber (1905-86).

The ensemble work that the Group had established over the five years of their existence was evident in their rehearsals, as well as the subsequent performances.  Again, Lehman Engel recalled that the company members “were especially considerate of each other’s neuroses and idiosyncrasies, which were legion.”

Then the production moved from the 500-seat Belmont to the 1400-seat 44th Street Theatre.  Lehman Engel described the consequences:

I recall one dress rehearsal when the actors had to encounter Donald Oenslager’s scenery for the first time.  The chief problem suddenly became one of self-preservation in climbing out of World War I trenches and of making costume changes with no allowable time.  The acting problem then became secondary despite the protest of the director.

In this state, Johnny Johnson went into previews.

The Previews

The show was conceived and rehearsed on an intimate scale.  Spectators at Belmont rehearsals were “very moved.”  In the smaller theater, “the production seemed charming: informal, unpretentious and sweet.”  But the company had no choice—only the 44th Street Theatre was available.  Johnny Johnson moved in and was “suddenly dwarfed and the light-handed informality of the performance lost its effectiveness.” 

Clurman’s fears of the effects of the larger theater were borne out: “Our actors’ voices sounded so small they were occasionally inaudible; Donald Oenslager’s sets . . . now appeared monstrous; the performances now looked amateurish.” 

The move to an unfamiliar space, the large set—19 scenes—and the Group’s financial problems all conspired to make the previews a disaster.  The orchestra was under-rehearsed, the actors got lost; “after the first five minutes . . . half the audience left.  By the end of the performance there were no more than twenty people in the auditorium.”

The opening was delayed for two days.  Musical numbers were cut and sets were abandoned (“New York Harbor” and “A road somewhere in France”).  The company stayed up every night till early morning “polishing, cutting and revising . . . .”  According to Clurman, the show improved each night, and by opening night had gone from 19 scenes to 13.  Clurman was astounded: “The performance went smoothly, and the audience appeared wildly enthusiastic.” 

The Response

The press response to Johnny Johnson ”was critically favorable, but discouraged all but the cognoscenti from seeing it.”  The audiences, however, generally enjoyed the show so much, many returned several times.  In the words of the New York Post reviewer, the audience “stood up and whooped loud applause for a good ten minutes . . . when the curtain fell on the opening of ‘Johnny Johnson’ . . . .”  Paul Green came out on stage to more applause, and Clifford Odets, Walter Huston, and Burgess Meredith were “overheard bellylaughing at the gags.” 

Of course, not everyone was this enthusiastic.  Some didn’t care for the comedy that ran through the play.  Some found the play touching; some laughed at the humor.  One reviewer said that “like a revue-goer, you enjoy some [scenes] and are bored stiff by others.”

The Performance

The diversity and strength of the reactions from both reviewers and theatergoers was due as much to the production’s uniqueness as to its quality.  Paul Green’s new form—the “symphonic drama”; Kurt Weill’s “non-musical” score; the ingenuousness of the performance, particularly the singing; and the three-styled expressionistic sets combined to make an event unprecedented on Broadway.  Like it or not, it was different.  In a promotional piece, Lee Strasberg wrote:

We meant to do an American folk legend, full of the humors of old vaudeville and the provincial family album, sharpened with poetic comments on the madness of contemporary life.  We felt that fantasy, extravagance, and dramatic music were intrinsic to such an exciting and ambitious experiment.

An advertising flyer for the show concluded that “the Group Theatre believes Johnny Johnson to be the most unusual and entertaining play it has presented thus far.”  There’s little doubt this was the case.

Paul Green’s attempt to combine various theatrical elements while juxtaposing dramatic genres didn’t always sit well with spectators.  The New York Post complained that “the play . . . leaps from straight drama to the maddest sort of farce and hence into pure fantasy with great abandon.” 

Others found the mélange pleasing: “The piece is built of dialogue, movement, scene, music, all together.  It is a promising—and needed—example of theatre that passes from one to the other of these with equal ease.” 

Despite the diversity of material and the number of scene-changes—which rose from 12 to 13 between opening and closing—an attempt was obviously made to keep the production in motion.    An unidentified reviewer in a weekly review of current plays called Margaret Wentworth's Sign Post remarked on the “quick-changing scenes” and Douglas Gilbert of the New York World said, “Lee Strasberg has staged the piece with a feverish continuity that matches the script.” 

The show’s pace seems due in part to a revolving set.  Though no reviewer mentioned this fact, the Alfredo Valente photographs of the set and Donald Oenslager’s floor-plans clearly show a turntable.  The sets shown in the drawings were specifically designed for a revolve with several back-to-back scenes indicated. 

Oenslager’s sketches suggest that sets were changed behind a blind—a painted backdrop, simple drape, or tall piece of constructed scenery—while a scene was in progress on the other side.  Sam Leve confirmed that this was the case.

What the audience saw was a central set piece—ranging from the complete, realistic front porch of the Tompkins home in Act I, scene 2, to a simple ramp with a painted backdrop for the camp drill-ground in Act I, scene 5—with the rest of the stage closed off by returns and two sets of wings.

In more complex sets, such as the porch, the recruiting office (Act I, scene 3), and the front-line trench (Act II, scene 1), small set pieces were run out from the wings.  It’s obvious from this set-up why spot-lighting was both necessary and desirable to close down the huge stage of the 44th Street Theatre.

The scenes changed so quickly that Russell Collins (1897-1965), who played Johnny, couldn’t completely change from his civilian costume in Act I, scene 3, to a full uniform in scene 4.  Photographs clearly show he was still wearing his civilian trousers under his military tunic until Act II.  It’s possible that some scenes might have revolved into view as the previous scene was ending.  Some photographs of Act I, scene 1, are taken with the scene 2 front porch in the background.

(This isn’t confirmed by any source.  Another explanation, perhaps more likely, is that some photographs of this scene weren’t taken in performance, and for one reason or another were shot before the scene 2 set.  Remember, though, that Lehman Engel recalled actors “making costume changes with no allowable time” in dress rehearsal.)

The acting, as has already been suggested, was primarily realistic.  Like Sam Leve, who witnessed several rehearsals, critics found this detracted from the performance when too much Realism “inhibited freedom of treatment”: “A certain heaviness was apparent in the production of Johnny Johnson, and despite the fine fantastication of Lee Strasberg’s production idea many performances seemed slack and pedestrian.”  The most blatant indictment of this problem came from John Mason Brown, who felt the Group Theatre’s actors

. . . set about the business of being funny with as much self-consciousness as if they were . . . a Greek chorus . . . . 

They reach for the ridiculous with a grim seriousness which does not add to the lightness of the lighter portions of “Johnny Johnson.”  They are all desperately in earnest.

The play opened on the dedication of Johnny’s monument to peace.  The script describes the scene: “The ground is covered with a carpet of green grass, and at the right a quaint young arbor-vitae tree is growing.”  Photographs of this scene show little of such realistic touches.  A certain backdrop bisected the turntable, and except for the Mayor’s bunting-draped “soap-box,” the stage was bare.  Several shots of this scene, including the Mayor speaking from his soap-box, and the confrontation of Johnny and Minny Belle with his rival Anguish Howington, were taken in front of the porch set for scene 2.  There was no documented explanation of this occurrence.

The porch setting was apparently substituted for the living room location described in the script.  The little evidence afforded by photographic records indicates the scene proceeded predictably in all other respects.  Both the setting and performances appeared essentially realistic in detail. 

The same was true of scene 3 in the recruiting office, except that the office was number 596673 in performance, instead of 18659 as indicated in the script.  (This change was apparently also made after the previews, as the 17 November program used the same number as the script; the opening-night program made the alteration.)  

Scene 4 seems to have been added in performance (or deleted from the published script).  It was set at an army training ground:

But the army takes [Johnny].  Then we see him being made into a soldier.  He can’t learn very well because the regulations sound silly to him, and besides he’s left-handed.  Everything is harder in the Army for a left-hander . . . .  He is finally taken off to war, against the better judgement of the whole army, because he seems to have won more favors from a favor-dispensing woman war worker than his sergeant and his captain.

The set for the scene was a virtually bare stage, with a raked platform across the center of the turntable, bisected by a drop painted with a row of military barracks.

The Statue of Liberty scene, originally scene 4, was cut after previews but reinstated sometime during the show’s run as Act I, scene 5.  In the scene, after Johnny sang a declaration of his peaceful intentions and his faithfulness to Minny Belle (“Johnny’s Speech”) to the Statue, the Statue sang a response of haunting sentiment (“Song of the Goddess”).  The song was omitted from the published version and there are no photographs of the scene.

In Act II, the first scene, set on “A road somewhere in France,” was apparently cut as a separate set, and the moment—virtually without dialogue, but with a column of wounded French soldiers returning from the front (“Song of the Wounded”)—was performed as part of the next scene, “The front line trench.”  In this new scene 1, an English Sergeant sang about “Tea.”  The program and published script list Jules (later John) Garfield (1913-52) as having played the part. 

As photographs clearly show, and Kraber clearly remembered, the role was played by Luther Adler (1903-84), and at least one reviewer recorded this reaction to the moment: “. . . and one perfectly atrocious [performance] by the Group’s best actor, Luther Adler.  He is for a few terrible moments a Cockney sergeant.”  The scene ended with Johnny in the trench with his company, who “. . . writhe their limbs in troubled sleep. [while] three great cannon bathed in green light rise over the parapet, and ghoulishly croak a lament . . . .”

In the hospital (Act II, scene 3, in production; scene 4 in the script), the set was minimal: a folding screen and a hospital bed set on the forward quarter of the turntable backed by the same drape used to divide the stage in Act I, scene 1.  The rest of the space appears ambiguous, though one photograph shows empty beds protruding from behind the drape divider.

The Château de Cent Fontaines (Act II, scene 4), set of the Allied Supreme Command, was the first brightly colored set in the show.  A very stylized drop of red and gold panels and a set piece resembling a large fan at the center rear formed the back “wall” of the set, bisecting the turntable.  The commanders all sat in plush-covered chairs of ornate design as they outbid each other for the number of casualties their forces would suffer.  There was an apparent attempt to make the actors in this scene look like their historical counterparts—although the characters are not named either in the script or in the program.

The scene designated in the scripts and the preview program as scene 7 didn’t exist as a separate scene by opening.  It may have been incorporated into the previous scene (“The edge of a great battlefield”).  This scene was a striking visual and musical moment that Charles Dexter of the Daily Worker described: “. . . in the climax, an English [sic – the script and program both say “American”] and a German minister [pray] as the bayonettes flash in the dark . . . .” 

In fact, the two priests chant and sing the same prayer in counterpoint, each in his own language.  (Only the English version of the prayer is in the published script, though the stage directions indicate that the German Priest utters the prayer in German.)  By opening night, this was the last scene in Act II.  The second New York Harbor scene was dropped and remained deleted throughout the run.

Act III opened in the State Hospital in the office of Dr. Mahodan: “. . . The examining psychiatrist was barricaded behind an enormous, crazily-aslant table and, as played by [Morris] Carnovsky [1897-1992] with deliberately jerky and angular gestures and body movements, seemed decidedly crazier than the patient . . . .”  This was the second scene with bright colors.  The raked red-and-white desk, placed in the set’s left front corner (on the turntable), sloped from five feet on the rear left down to three inches at center stage.  The lighting was very bright only on the desk; the rest of the set dimmed considerably.

The third colorful scene was Act III, scene 2, set in “the forensic arena in the house of balm.”  The set, with its sharply angled rear wall, was festooned with flags and brightly lit.  As the Adelphi Debating Society engaged in its discussion “Albert Van Deckers [sic - Dekkers] . . . as a mad gentleman . . . knits while the Senate is in session . . . .”

Finally released from the asylum, Johnny was reduced to selling toys “along a street symbolically leading nowhere.”  The stage was very dimly lit and nearly bare, with only a banistered flight of steps at the front right and an unlit lamppost at the front left.  The light seemed to have emanated from off stage in the rear right corner, leaving the playing area in deep shadows.

The floor plan of the scene shows the slanting rear wall was the same as the walls of Act III, scenes 1 and 2.  It bisected the turntable from eight o’clock to two o’clock in all three scenes, giving further evidence of the use of the revolving stage.

The play’s final moment is indicative of how blackouts were used between the many scenes:

The Paul Green-Kurt Weill musical Johnny Johnson borrows the [Charlie] Chaplin fade-out as its hero, momentarily defeated, goes off whistling, “a little more clearly now, a little more bravely” or (on the record) singing “We’ll never lose our faith and hope and trust in all mankind . . . .”

Conclusion

Visually, thematically, and musically unusual, Johnny Johnson was undoubtedly a controversial event, even among those who simply didn’t care for it.  It spawned discussion among leftists, pacifists, humanists, and adherents of many other causes and philosophies, each espousing Johnny Johnson’s point of view as their own.  Audiences were less confused by the play than critics: “Almost everyone who saw Johnny Johnson was charmed by it. . . .  [I]t had a subtlety and wit which were thoroughly engaging.”

Had the theater been smaller, the success of the production would probably have been assured, not only from a financial standpoint, but a critical one as well: “In a theatre suited to its scale, it would have come across with much greater bite; on that huge stage, it seemed weak.”  (Kraber estimated that the production came within $1,000 of its “nut” every week.  They just couldn’t fill the 1,463 seats of the 44th Street Theatre.

Johnny Johnson was an excellent example of Paul Green’s feeling that “The narrow confines of the usual Broadway play are not fitted to the dramatic needs of the American people.  They cannot contain the richness of our tradition, folkways, singing, dancing and poetry.”  It’s ironic that the thing most responsible for Johnny Johnson’s failure wasn’t a theater too small to contain it, but one too big for it to fill.

[The original production of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson included a number of company members who went on to become well known on stage and on film.  Among these, in addition to those named in the article above, were Phoebe Brand (1907-2004), Lee J. Cobb (1911-76), Elia Kazan (1909-2003), Will Lee (1908-82), and Sanford Meisner (1905-97).

[After the original 1936-37 production of Johnny Johnson by the Group Theatre, there were several revivals of the play.  From 21 October through 28 October 1956, there was an Off-Broadway production presented at the Little Carnegie Playhouse at Carnegie Hall directed by Stella Adler and starring, among others, James Broderick as Johnny Johnson and Gene Saks as the Mad Psychiatrist.  A Broadway revival directed by José Quintero opened, after 10 previews, on 11 April 1971 at the Edison Theatre, and closed after one performance.  The cast included Ralph Williams as Johnny and Alice Cannon as Minny Belle.

[Johnny Johnson was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company on 6-15 August 1986 at the Almeida Theatre, London, directed by Paul Marcus.  In 2009, a concert version was staged in London by the Discovering Lost Musicals Charitable Trust, with Max Gold in the title role.

[The ReGroup Theatre Company presented two staged readings of the play directed by Estelle Parsons at the 47th Street Theatre in New York on 12 December 2011.  In November 1956, the MGM recording I mentioned above (which was unrelated to the contemporaneous Off-Broadway staging) was released and in November 1996, Erato Records released another album of Weill’s score for Johnny Johnson.

[I’ve written a little about this research and the writing of the report twice before on ROT.  First, because it was my first published essay, I included it in my discussion “Writing,” posted on 9 April 2010; then I included it in a compilation I called “Short Takes: Research Coups” on 5 August 2011 because I made  a  discovery in my research—Oenslager’s use of a turntable in the set design.]