“Mediating the Method: Lee Strasberg, Marlon Brando, and the Sound of Authenticity”

Method acting, the mid-twentieth-century performance style developed at the Actors Studio in New York City, was both renowned and reviled for its monomaniacal pursuit of emotional authenticity in performance, sacrificing textual integrity, and sometimes even intelligibility, to feeling; Marlon Brando’s infamous mumbling is a case in point. But our obsession with the Method’s psychological contortions can cause us to overlook its creative dialogue with new technologies. In this seminar, Gallagher-Ross considers the media behind the Method. Recording undergirded the exercises and thought of Lee Strasberg, the Method’s Svengali. And Brando’s mumbling, upon closer scrutiny, reveals itself as a canny sound experiment.