Butler writes with such awe, compassion, and conviction about [Kim] Stanley that despite having only seen a few of her performances, I felt deeply connected to her artistry, cheering her triumphs, empathizing with her struggles, wincing at her failures. That he achieves this effect not only in his portrayal of her but also with the cavalcade of characters both famous and forgotten in The Method is nothing short of extraordinary. Every vignette springs from the page ... As an author, Butler accomplishes what the Method’s devotees sought to do in their performances, bringing color and dimension to figures who might have been boxed into archetypal roles (omniscient godhead or exploitative charlatan) and presenting them to us in all their brilliant, infuriating complexity. The scope of the book is sweeping, the figures entering and exiting the narrative often larger-than-life, but each quote and anecdote Butler chooses to include draws them close enough to touch.
Thoroughly engrossing ... [Butler] handles his material deftly, like a biographer ... Butler makes an airtight case for the Method as an artistic revolution on par with other mid-century advances, from improvisation in jazz and stream-of-consciousness in fiction to the flourishes of abstract expressionism in painting ... Butler’s book revives the memory of plenty of the Method’s most estimable proponents.
The Method proved fascinating. The story of the philosophy’s growth and evolution plays out in the same manner as any good biography, with each high point explored with scholarship and thoughtfulness. A book like this could have easily read as dry and/or academic, but instead, Butler has woven his thorough research into a compelling narrative, one with heroes and villains and misunderstood figures from the nebulous middle space. All this while also producing a work of theatre history ... The Method will be of great interest to fans of history and the theatre, of course, but the truth is that anyone can read this book and engage with it. Butler has crafted an impressive and engaging work of nonfiction, a book that will prove fascinating to anyone who picks it up.
Engaging and meticulously researched ... Like a good 19th century omniscient novelist, Butler hops seamlessly among his characters’ points of view while recounting their lives and times ... Gracefully balancing on the right side of that fine line between contextualizing and condescending to the reader ... Butler’s main title, The Method, set against the book’s cover photograph of Strasberg giving notes to actor Morris Carnovsky, [is] problematic. It casts Strasberg as progenitor of modern acting craft and narrates the story of modern-day acting through the lens of the Method. Butler even refers to Awake and Sing! — with which Strasberg was not involved — as 'the first full-length Method play' ... To his credit, Butler dedicates a generous amount of his narrative to the Group’s schism, calling it an 'unresolvable dispute.' And yet he capitalizes on the way 'the Method' caught the popular imagination as the revolutionary style — and therefore became the term that comes most readily to the lay reader’s mind. In doing so, he conflates the Method with Stanislavski’s System, which is akin to writing a history of rock ’n’ roll featuring Elvis Presley on the cover, crediting him as creator of the genre, and referring to rock interchangeably with its progenitors, gospel and blues ... Structuring his book like a biography, Butler traces a straight line from the birth of the Method — which was actually the birth of the System — to its demise in the 1980s ... Despite his conflation of terms, Butler’s history is an indispensable account of a revolution in acting that ramified beyond the theater ... Tools equip the actor to transmit the human condition, which can only be done by telling the truth. Butler’s book delivers on this honest gospel.
It’s a remarkable tale, and Butler, a writer and podcaster for Slate who also teaches theatre history, is well cast as narrator ... It is quite possible to read all three hundred and sixty-three pages of Butler’s book and still be unable to define exactly what the Method is. That’s not a dig. Just when you think you have the thing pinned down, it changes. A technique becomes an attitude; the attitude becomes an aura—or an affect.
Butler’s lively, well-researched and marvelously readable book isn’t just for actors, but also for anyone who loves watching them. Most in need of it is anyone who has ever announced authoritatively, at a cocktail party or anywhere else—and, sadly, my personal experience tells me these people are plentiful—that 'Method acting is when you actually become the character' ... Butler weav[es] a story that keeps us asking, And then what happened? That’s no small feat in a book whose goal is to trace the history of an often controversial and sometimes rather opaque set of performance principles ... Butler pulls it off, by painting vivid portraits of the people who breathed life into those precepts.
Butler takes a meticulous, immersive approach, offering a blow-by-blow narrative of the trials, tribulations, victories, affairs, and dissolutions of a busy cast of characters and theatrical institutions. Yet the avalanche of detail can be pedantic, and the promise that he will explore the Method’s deep social ramifications mostly disappears as he traces the turmoil in and around the Moscow Art Theatre, and the enthusiastic ferment that pervaded the Group Theatre in New York ... One of the major takeaways of The Method is how ill-defined and bitterly contested the Method was even among its most famous practitioners ... Butler argues that the Method era began to fade in the ’70s, a waning that he blames unconvincingly in his final chapter on a variety of factors ... Butler spends almost no time on the Method’s more expansive legacy—the fascinating question of how it filtered into American culture and where it continues to live with us.
Stanislavski’s story is expertly and exactingly told ... The Group Theatre succumbed to schisms by decade’s end, and Butler clearly parses the murky divisions that continue to define the Method, then and today ... This book will deepen your understanding of how and why we watch cinema.
The theater has its allure, but one often thinks that Irving Berlin’s 'There’s No Business Like Show Business' could profit from the bracing corrective of Noël Coward’s 'Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage.' Isaac Butler’s intense, deeply researched, historically alert, well-written, eminently readable (and gossipy) The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act explores the art of acting with sufficient depth and clarity to support both positions ... [a] capacious book, which includes cogent close readings of individual scenes from films as well as stage performances ... Mr. Butler reminds us, in the age of blockbuster movies with knock-’em-dead special effects, one big problem is holding the attention of an audience. Too much mystery, or 'subtext,' or inwardness, or dialogue, may bore them.
Isaac Butler has packed The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, his essential history of America's hallmark acting style, with tales of political intrigue, stories of stratospheric triumphs and epic failures, and scenes of backstabbing and petulance played out by—and this should go without saying-—a first-rate cast ... [Butler] doesn't skimp on the backstage dramas of the technique's best-known practitioners ... [Butler's] book amounts to a print-form master class in the Method ... This comprehensive history of the great American acting style is the present and likely future standard-bearer for books on the subject.
An excellent, thorough history ... This work is all the more welcome given that consolidating the multiple—and often contradictory—definitions as to what exactly constitutes 'the Method' is itself a Herculean achievement ... Butler has produced an essential study of this hugely influential theory and practice of American acting. This work should be in every collection of books on theater and film.
In this history of that movement, he traces its journey across stages and continents and introduces us to a colorful cast of actors, directors, and teachers ... The story of their rivalries and feuds makes for a very compelling script ... This perceptive and well-executed book will engage readers on both sides of the footlights.
