I am more ok with Adler than Strasberg, though on the whole I don’t think either one of their systems works well long term without some other serious physical work that neither really addresses.
Adler I find to be a more healthy and sustainable acting technique. It doesn’t focus on single use tricks that force the actor to constantly relive trauma in order to create false emotional allegories. I think that the method, at it’s best, only works at all with people who are naturally gifted actors, and creates an acting style that prevents those with natural talent from ever growing or changing. It’s fundamental principle is to turn yourself into the character, which long term is impossible, so typically the character turns into the actor which undermines the writing. In short, in people who are not already grounded in solid technique, and even then if they aren’t already fairly good actors, you generally get inconsistent and self indulgent acting that serves the actor more than the story, and everything in acting should be in service to the story.
Moreover, while it is a technique that may work on film where performances only need to be given a single time, it is downright dangerous if used over the long haul of a stage performance. Even Stanislavsky abandoned the techniques that Strasberg built the majority of the Method on because they only work for a limited number of performances and after that the performance quality deteriorates. I also find the Method to be irresponsible and potentially psychologically dangerous because of it’s intense focus on emotional memory.
Adler started from the same place as Strasberg (Stanislavsky), but focused on the storytelling aspects of Stanislavsky’s teachings, and rather than picking at the actors psyche worked with an actors physicality to create emotion. These are the techniques that Stanislavsky himself, along with Michael Chekhov, expanded on in his own career after he dropped most of the emotional memory stuff. Her technique, because it is focused on repeatable actions and textual analysis rather than emotional recall provides much more consistency and generally (I think) better serves the written material.
That is all in theory. In practice, as a director I generally dislike working with both Method actors and Adler actors, though Adler’s disciples are generally possible to work with, while method players are almost impossible. If I know someone is a hardcore method person when I am casting I will generally not cast them. Fortunately this is actually a rather rare thing these days, there aren’t many people who are method only left, but the damage has been done. Method allows for lazy acting and actors who don’t want to rehearse because they want the performance to “stay fresh”.:rolleyes: The reality is that that “fresh” performance is just the first blush of where you are capable of taking it, and the valley that inevitable comes after the performance gets stale and the fight to get back out of that valley, is where the magic of great acting occurs. It’s only after you have gone through that low ebb that you can give a genuinely solid and consistent performance because it is in that ebb that you find the weakness and excess in your original “fresh” performance. The staleness is caused by the weaknesses, and the process of fixing them is the actual work of acting.
Anyway, it’s hard to find many actors who weren’t specifically being trained for the stage, who will agree with that these days. Heck it’s hard to find actors who have actually had much training at all these days. And yeah, I sort of blame Strasberg for that one too. Though not as much.
