The Truth Of Method Acting

By Roy Eisenstein

Many actors pretend the emotions that their characters are feeling while others bring the real thing to their performance.

Actors who feign their emotions during a performance are called being presentational. When this approach to acting is used the audience will know that the actor is not being genuine and will respond accordingly. The entire performance will be judged to be unbelievable by the audience and it will affect the performances of all the other actors in the company.

Method acting is an approach that can bring some of the realism back to a performance. Many acting coaches will agree that method acting is a way for an actor to bring the truth to the performance or to even use in their auditions.

In 1931, the Group Theater was created by Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford and Harold Clurman. The Group Theater was designed to present a unified approach to performing the plays of that time. There was to be no star in the company and all of the actors were part of a movement that would achieve success for every member of the company.

Some of the members who were a part of the Group Theater were Kurt Weill, Lee J. Cobb, Paul Strand, Paul Green, Clifford Odets, Michael Gordon, John Randolph, Joseph Bromberg, Franchot Tone, Will Geer, Howard Da Silva, Luther Adler, Stella Adler, John Garfield, and Elia Kazan.

The theater is the place where Lee Strasberg first developed the acting style called the Method. Konstantin Stanislavsky is the inspiration for this method of acting. During rehearsals the actor is trained and encouraged to use real emotional experiences in his performance. The experiences are reached through improvisation techniques.

Through the years, the Method has gone through many incarnations as it has been passed through the hands of different acting coaches. Acting coaches add their own personalization to the method to get the best performances out of their students.

Many actors who were previously guarded and giving stiff performances have been able to open up and use the emotions that are in their own experience. This method is a powerful tool for bringing those emotions out of the actor and into their performance.

The exercises that the Method uses will help the actor to draw upon their own life experiences for the emotions that their characters are feeling in the scene they are performing. It is about moving from a state of being into a state of emotion and then using that state to perform the scene. When an audience watches an actor who is using this technique the performances can be powerful and raw. There is genuine emotion behind the acting.

The Method approach to acting is a lifelong commitment to the process. The actor will always be learning about their own emotions and their response to the events of their life. They will always have a well of emotional experiences to draw upon whenever their performance demands it.

This method changes the performance from an acting performance into an art form. The artist is always able to put his or her own passion and emotion into the performance while the actor simply pretends.

About the Author:

Eisenstein is a successful actor who has made a career of developing and pioneering comedy vehicles that shape the genre. An acting coach and mentor, and has taught in Hollywood and abroad at the IAFT, a film school in Cebu, Philippines.