“Today, purely in looks, you were more attractive. You looked sexier. In [Cat on a Hot Tin Roof], the girl, no matter what she is, has to be attractive, otherwise the play becomes unpalatable…. Frankly this quality is essential for your progress, acting-wise and career-wise.” — Lee Strasberg giving feedback to an actor, from Strasberg at the Actors Studio

Stanislavsky was without doubt a patriarchal figure, and from his own writing we learn that his classrooms were not free of gender stereotypes. The women, for example, did an awful lot of fainting. But he was horrified when he accidentally had a student do an improvisation that mirrored her personal experience of losing a child and she was, understandably, devastated. This is because the System asks actors to create emotional experiences by focusing on the problem the character is trying to solve (the task or objective) and the tactics they use to solve it (the actions), not reliving past emotional experiences—usually traumatic ones—as the Method asks. Because Method directors and teachers believe that creating emotional moments on stage requires delving into the actor’s subconscious mind, they tend to take on the role of guru, opening the door for far more manipulative behavior than Stanislavsky ever advocated.

In her 2012 book An Actress Prepares: Women and “the Method”, Rosemary Malague zeroes in on Strasberg and Meisner as the primary culprits of using the Method to affirm and reinscribe harmful gender stereotypes. Topping her list of feminist critiques is the idea that the goal of the Method is to produce “truthful” performances, and yet what is considered “truthful” is, in itself, a gendered concept. According to Malague’s extensive research, Strasberg’s responses to women’s acting in class often took the form of remarks upon their sexuality and desirability, as he encouraged them to play sex kittens and weeping women. In his classes, he gave different acting exercises to men and women. And when he rewarded actors for performances that he deemed truthful, he tended to reward women for being seductive and men for being fighters.

Is there a connection between use of the Method and the behavior called out by #MeToo?

Strasberg’s goal was to “break actors down,” which often meant manipulating, confusing, and shaming them, particularly the women, then encouraging them to re-suffer that shame every time they performed. In his own accounts of his practice, quoted below from An Actress Prepares, Strasberg admitted this could be unhealthy:

In fact I once had a Private Moment which was terrifying. An actress came in who I realized was very bound to convention and didn’t move from within … She had an emotional disturbance, and she should not have done Private Moments because they only lead to a re-affirmation of whatever bothers you … She did a Private Moment which was one of the greatest I’ve ever seen. I sat in amazement. I wouldn’t have believed that this girl had it in her. But she couldn’t recover from it, it was so strong.

As Malague put it, “The most intriguing statement in Strasberg’s account … is his declaration that this woman’s private moment was ‘the greatest’ he had ever seen. Watching a woman in total breakdown fulfills Strasberg’s (aesthetic?) goals.”

Meisner’s particular subgenre of the Method, called the Meisner technique, trains actors to act on instinct. The psychology underpinning it comes from Freudian theory, which, as we know, is already an extremely binary, gendered approach to the human mind, making even the simplest Meisner exercise a minefield of gendered assumptions. Malague points out that the repetition exercise, which encourages actors to make uncensored observations about one another’s physical appearance—“You are wearing a blue shirt. I am wearing a blue shirt”—could go very badly for actors whose gender identities are non-binary, or for those with nonconforming bodies or who are a minority presence in the room.

Meisner’s exercises, like Strasberg’s, tended to be different for women than for men. In his book, Sanford Meisner on Acting, he recounts a class in which he demonstrated a version of the repetition exercise twice, once with a man and once with a woman. In the first instance, he begins with “Can you lend me twenty dollars?” and, when the student eventually says no, he calls him a “big shit.” When working with the woman student, Meisner begins with “Will you come to my house tonight?” and, when she says no, he ends by calling her “a professional virgin.”

Meisner was not alone in this tendency towards encouraging aggression from men and victimization, usually sexual, from women. Apparently, Kazan used to stand next to actors as they rehearsed and poke them with a rapier; he deemed most of the women in Tennessee Williams’ plays to be motivated by a desire for sex or protection, in contrast to those of the men, who were encouraged by conflict. In fact, for Kazan, the tendency towards violence is an inherently biologically male phenomenon. In his notes on A Streetcar Named Desire, published posthumously in Kazan on Directing, he says Stanley is “desperately trying to squeeze out happiness by living ball and jowl, and it really doesn’t work because it simply stores up violence until every bar in the nation is full of Stanleys ready to explode.” Under the heading “Mitch,” he wrote, “Violence – he’s full of sperm, energy, strength.” And he characterized Blanche as a kind of succubus: “Blanche’s spine: to find protection, to find something to hold onto, some strength in whose protection she can live, like a sucker shark or a parasite. The tradition of woman (or all women) can only live through the strength of someone else.”