Method Acting is one of the most popular and controversial approaches to acting in the United States. It has not only shaped important schools of acting, but has been a fundamental constant of all American acting. This insightful volume explores Method Acting from a broad perspective, focusing on a point of equilibrium between the principles of the Method and its relationship to other theories of performance. David Krasner has gathered together some of the most well-known theater scholars and acting teachers to look at the Method. By concentrating on three areas of the Method - its theory, practice, and future application - the collection will serve to inform and teach us how to approach acting and acting theory in the 21st century.

Method Acting is one of the most popular and controversial approaches to acting in the United States. It has not only shaped important schools of acting, but has been a fundamental constant of all American acting. This insightful volume explores Method Acting from a broad perspective, focusing on a point of equilibrium between the principles of the Method and its relationship to other theories of performance. David Krasner has gathered together some of the most well-known theater scholars and acting teachers to look at the Method. By concentrating on three areas of the Method - its theory, practice, and future application - the collection will serve to inform and teach us how to approach acting and acting theory in the 21st century.

Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-Drama provides a new understanding of a crucial chapter in American theater history. Enelow’s consideration of the broader cultural climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s, specifically the debates within psychology and psychoanalysis, the period’s racial and sexual politics, and the rise of mass media, gives us a nuanced, complex picture of Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio and contemporaneous works of drama. Combining cultural analysis, dramaturgical criticism, and performance theory, Enelow shows how Method acting’s contradictions reveal powerful tensions inside mid-century notions of individual and collective identity.

Practiced by such actors of stature as Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Julie Harris, Dustin Hoffman, and Ellen Burstyn (not to mention the late James Dean) the Method offers a practical application of the renowned Stanislavsky technique. On Method Acting demystifies the "mysteries" of Method acting -- breaking down the various steps into clear and simple terms, including chapters on: Sense Memory -- the most vital component of Method acting Improvisation -- without it, the most integral part of the Method is lost Animal Exercises -- just one way to combat the mental blocks that prevent actors from grasping a character Creating The Outer Character -- so actors can give the freshness of originality to a role while at the same time living the life of the character On Method Acting is also an indispensable volume for directors, designers, lighting technicians, and anyone in the dramatic arts interested in creating a believable and realistic effect in their productions.

Women, Method Acting, and the Hollywood Film is the first study dedicated to understanding the work of female Method actors on film. While Method acting on film has typically been associated with the explosive machismo of actors like Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, this book explores an alternate tradition within the Method—the work that women from the Actors Studio did in Hollywood. Covering the period from the end of the Second World War until the 1970s, this study shows how the women associated with the Actors Studio increasingly used Method acting in ways that were compatible with their burgeoning feminist political commitments and developed a style of feminist Method acting. The book examines the complex intersection of Method acting, sexuality, and gender by analyzing performances such as Kim Hunter’s in A Streetcar Named Desire, Julie Harris’s in The Member of the Wedding, Shelley Winters’s in The Big Knife, Geraldine Page’s in Sweet Bird of Youth, and Jane Fonda’s in Coming Home. Challenging the longstanding assumption that Method acting’s approaches were harmful to women and incompatible with feminism, this book argues that some of Hollywood’s most interesting female actors, and leading feminists, emerged from the Actors Studio in the period between the 1950s and the 1970s. Written for students and scholars of Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Gender Studies, Women, Method Acting, and the Hollywood Film reshapes the way we think of a central strain in American screen acting, and in doing so, allows women a new stake in that tradition.

Insightful, focused case studies of screen performance from diverse directors with a range of contemporary styles and approaches.