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‘Method’
guru celebrated in year of new plays
It
is not very often in hard-nosed Hollywood that you hear
directors talking gleefully about how much money they
are not going to make. Yet that is just what is energising
the family of the late Lee Strasberg, as they launch
a year of celebrations, marking the birth centennial
of the legendary teacher of ‘The Method’,
the man behind some leading American stage and screen
actors.
Strasberg, co-founder of the Group Theatre, and artistic
director of the Actor’s Studio, was born in November
1901 and died in 1982, after nurturing the careers of,
among others, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, James Dean,
Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Anne Bancroft, Robert De
Niro and Paul Newman.
His legacy is being marked, not by a series of star-studded
benefits and glittering parties, but by a season of
new plays by young and emerging artists staged in a
simple brick-walled 96-seat theatre. “Nothing was
chosen for the reason that it would be a sure-fire commercial
hit. The plays were chosen for their powers of exploration:
young playwrights finding their words,” said Strasberg’s
widow, Anna, the artistic director of the Los Angeles-based
Lee Strasberg Creative Center. “I’d rather
have a noble failure, than a commercial success,”
she added, “I’d rather someone say the play
had courage. You hope it will find its voice and its
audience.”
The three new plays and three workshops will be performed
by a new in-house production company called The Group
at Strasberg, which is dedicated to discovering and
promoting new contemporary voices.
In more than a nod to the illustrious Strasberg past,
the plays will be staged in the newly renovated Marilyn
Monroe Theatre in West Hollywood, named after Strasberg’s
most enigmatic pupil.
Although he started his career in the theatre, it was
the movies that made Strasberg with his emotion-oriented,
natural acting technique, the most sought-after teacher
in Hollywood. “Lee was the daddy of film acting.
He loved movies. He thought it was the greatest invention
of the 20th century,” Anna Strasberg said, “Lee
started training actors for their film tests, and teaching
them to be less mannered and more human, to be real,
to speak in a normal tone of voice.”
The list of actors who passed through Strasberg’s
acting classes reads like a Who’s Who of the 20th
century filmmaking. But it all started in the theatre,
with exercises developed by Strasberg and now perpetuated
in his books and videos, to be discovered anew by the
budding stars of tomorrow.
Al Pacino still returns to the modest building that
houses the Creative Centre to lecture to acting students.
Angelina Jolie, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar
this year for Girl, Interrupted, studied there before
breaking into movies.
The legacy is continued by Anna Strasberg and her son
David Lee Strasberg, 27, who, after starting his career
in business and politics, came full circle last year
to become chief executive officer of the Lee Strasberg
Acting Studio. David Strasberg spent his youth hanging
lights, building sets and listening to directors, actors
and writers discussing their passion for the theatre,
before realising it was a passion he shared. “This
is where I grew up,” he said, “and to be able
to come back to it and continue what my father did in
a way that is fulfilling to me — you don’t
get any better than that.”
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