Book Review: THE METHOD - HOW THE TWENTIETH CENTURY LEARNED TO ACT by Isaac Butler

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"To theorize about acting is to theorize about what a human being is and how a human being works. It is to theorize about what good art is and how good art is made."

I did not expect that this 2022 book on the history of Method Acting would end up becoming one of my favorite reads this 2023, or for that matter, for all time.

If this was a play, then its spine (or supertask, to use the book's jargon) is simple enough. It tells the history of hallowed names in theater - those of Stanislavski, Strasberg, Adler, and Meisner - and how a cultural shift that began in Russia spread to America, and continues to impact how we view all acting in theater and film today.

To this reader, who experienced studying under different "theories" for different fields (in music, Kodaly and a smattering of Dalcroze ... in education, Montessori versus the traditional one... and in theater, the more traditional and strict style taught in universities versus the more easy-going, interior style in other workshops), the book was an utter revelation not merely of how impossible it is to safeguard a method against all other influences, but to what it says about human nature when people are passionately for or against one style of teaching as opposed to others.

Butler writes as a former actor does, infusing theory with practical examples that are nuggets of gold to any theater aficionado. He infuses cultural history writing with a dramatist's flair for conflict, making the historical figures come to life in a nonfiction book that was so exciting to read! It's quite possibly the best written nonfiction book I have ever read, never sacrificing academic rigor (the bibliography and notes alone took nearly half the volume) for artistry.

I put the book down with gratitude that it exists. It's a must-read for anyone teaching or involved in drama, for anyone who wants to give an intelligent response to the question "What IS good acting?"

But acting was never merely a form of entertainment.

Butler showed how actors, playwrights, in plays and films, crystallized and voiced the agonies of their current generation. Art as a mirror of its time. And thus, this fine book is more than the story of a pedagogical system. It is the story of humanity itself, and its struggle to overcome each decade's troubles.

And what about us humans, the audience of today? Butler writes:

"We live now in a Time of Performance. In this era, due in no small part to social media, we are more conscious than ever that we are performing for an audience of other people. We are also aware that we are the audience for everyone else’s performances, and we rate them, not with applause, but with hearts and thumbs-up, with emojis and retweets... it is unsettling to always be at least slightly aware that nothing is real, least of all ourselves... Today, the major challenge to an actor is not being heard, or seen, but seizing and holding an audience’s attention... 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... This leads to the postmodern actor’s paradox: At a time when everything feels a little bit inauthentic, we crave simplified, clear acting that presents characters as coherent and easily knowable. We crave, in other words, a comforting lie about who we are."


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