No question that Lee Strasberg was an exceptional director, actor, and teacher, but he was also highly manipulative and a self-promoter.
Case in point is perhaps —
In 1924 Strasberg was in the ensemble of Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted, produced by the Theatre Guild, which transposes Cyrano de Bergerac to the vineyards of Napa Valley. For the rest of his life Strasberg would compliment Pauline Lord, who starred in the play opposite Richard Bennett and Glenn Anders, for her incandescent performances.
He would do more than that: he would point to her as an example of Method acting before the fact, as if she were one of the very few actors working before he began teaching who could measure up to the standard of acting he endorsed.
But in reality, many of the techniques promoted by Strasberg had long been used by actors; the Method represents one particular codification of them.
And Strasberg’s endorsement of Lord does have the taint of self-congratulation, as if Lord was great because she was one of the few among the then-benighted acting sorority who had the vision to see the forthcoming light.
Rather teleological, I would say.
When I interviewed Anders in 1981, he agreed that Lord was as great as Strasberg or anyone else had said, but in his recollections she certainly did not try to immerse herself in the actual emotion of heroine Amy when she was onstage.
I don’t want to simplify, but didn’t Strasberg and the Method school advocate just that?
Anders recalled his first long scene with Lord in act one.
He’s young and handsome, while vineyard owner Bennett, wooing San Francisco waitress Lord via correspondence, is not. Bennett sends her farm hand Anders’s photo, not his own. She shows up at the ranch for her nuptials. In his nervousness, Bennett has crashed his car. Anders is to greet her. Lord tries to establish rapport with the man she thinks she is going to marry. She tells him her sad story of growing up.
“I would be working with Pauline, sitting up on those boxes, looking down on her, and reading the lines, and in my heart I was saying, ‘My God. . . she’s breaking my heart. . . Gee, something awful has happened.” In other words, something to Lord herself, so authentic did her emotion seem.
However, “The curtain would come down and she’d say, ‘Well, hello Glennie, how are ya? Did you have fun today?'” He was flabbergasted and told her what he’d been imagining.
“Oh, balls!” was her response.
Lord was using her technique to project an emotional reality beyond and apart from a consideration of immediate identification.
“You know, Polly, you’re a genius,” Anders told her.