Strut AND Fret : METHOD ACTORS Three Generations of an American Acting Style <i> By Steve Vineberg (Schirmer/Macmillan: $24.95; 349 pp.)</i>

One of the great fables of the American stage is the rise and fall of the Group Theatre, that reverberating ‘30s acting ensemble spearheaded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg; its Leitmotif is the discovery and dissemination of the Stanislavsky System, which under Strasberg’s alchemy became the American Method.

We all have heard and read how Stanislavsky’s disciple Richard Boleslavsky passed the torch to Strasberg in the late ‘20s, and how Strasberg proceeded to turn the Russian’s earliest theories into a magical formula for two generations of actors who included legends such as Lee J. Cobb, John Garfield, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Kim Stanley and Geraldine Page.

“Method Actors,” Steve Vineberg’s encomium to these and other disciples, makes us aware that we are now in the midst of a third generation, and that what in the ‘30s seemed a pretentious foreign import, and in the ‘50s a mystical form of self-therapy, now has become the acceptable stage-grammar of acting programs in colleges, universities and theater schools all over America. Originally a series of techniques and precepts devised by Stanislavsky to help coax the inspiration which, though the gift of great actors, came only infrequently to average actors, the System became, in Strasberg’s hands, mainly a “method” for engendering true feeling.

It was based largely on the use of emotional memory exercises and other self-inducing psychological stimuli. Today, of course, The Method is something of a generic title that doesn’t begin to describe the variations, extensions and even reversals of the original doctrines that, were Stanislavsky to return today, probably would make him disown those stalwarts who palpitate most fulsomely in his name.

Vineberg believes there was a natural affinity between the thrust of this acting theory and the American temperament, that its preoccupation with Freudian psychology and adolescent rebellion made it the perfect medium to express the duality of American life and the repressiveness of American youth.

John Garfield, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Vineberg argues, all are united by a certain renegade stance that a conformist society secretly admires. Playwrights such as Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller and even Tennessee Williams (all popularized by Method actors and directors) have perpetuated this strain of rebellion and the Method is the aesthetic by which it was effectively conveyed to the public.

So immersed is Vineberg in the minutiae of the Method that he finds parallels everywhere. John Garfield’s “sunken look” at the end of “Body and Soul” is seen as prefiguring “Brando’s in a similar moment at the end of ‘On the Waterfront.’ ” Sylvester Stallone’s performance in “Rocky” is a “composite” formed out of the work of Brando, Anthony Quinn and Ernest Borgnine. Even Tennessee Williams’ preoccupation with animal imagery in “A Streetcar Named Desire” is attributed to the animal exercises that Strasberg inherited from Maria Ouspenskaya in the ‘30s and incorporated into the work of the Actors’ Studio.

This is not persuasive cross-referencing; it is merely delusion, and stems from Vineberg’s larger delusion that every advance in contemporary acting owes something to the permutations of the Method as it evolved from the early Strasberg days to the present. It blithely bypasses the fact that creative new performers with distinctive personalities find original ways of expressing themselves whatever their orientation. It isn’t the Method that produces staggering “moments” on the screen and stage; it is the sensibility of forceful new actors who embellish whatever their basic training may have been, with nuances derived from their own unique character.

When an actor’s performance slips, as Paul Newman’s did in Tad Mosel’s television play “Guilty Is the Stranger,” Vineberg concludes that it is because the Method has failed him. In Newman’s case, he writes, “You can sense the Yale Drama School (which he attended before taking classes at the Studio) and Broadway (where he played the rich fraternity boy in ‘Picnic’ in 1953) lurking uncomfortably beneath every line.”

So staunch is Vineberg for his subject that even his put-downs have a way of doubling back on themselves. To write of Dustin Hoffman playing Shylock (“surrounded by classically trained English actors” in Sir Peter Hall’s Broadway production of “Merchant of Venice”) that “his limitations were infinitely more interesting than their range” is to turn special pleading into sophistry.

Occasionally and begrudgingly, Vineberg admits to certain limitations in the approach. “The real failure of (Kim) Stanley’s acting” in the ill-fated Actors’ Studio production of “The Three Sisters” is that “it doesn’t illuminate the character or explain the text. She’s too preoccupied with her own feelings to pay attention to the relationships between dialogue and action, action and motivation, character and context. . . .” Indeed, this has been one of the Method’s pitfalls since the late ‘40s--that actors mesmerized by its methodology were able to delude themselves that rigorously following its rules was tantamount to achieving artistic results.

Vineberg is a true zealot, and that zeal pulsates audibly beneath the text of “Method Actors,” but it also blinds the author to the fact that the cul-de-sac realism that he celebrates has produced more bathos and deadly treacle than the melodramatic fustian that it banished a century ago. While in Europe, the Orient and many parts of America artists are assiduously trying to escape the clutches of a cloying psychological realism, it is a little daunting to find an American critic launching a jamboree in its honor.

The Method’s blind spots are given short shrift. The fact that it is ludicrously inapplicable to the classics, for instance, is never seriously dealt with. The Actors’ Studio production of “The Three Sisters”--the most conspicuous failure, paradoxically, in a play where it should have yielded its most striking results--is never adequately explained. If the Method is a magic lozenge for psychological truth, what happened when the cream of the Studio under Strasberg’s own direction rallied their forces to convey the interior world of Anton Chekhov? If, as Vineberg admits, it was “one of the great theatrical follies of our time,” does it not say something devastating about the relation of theory to practice?

Despite the headiness (or perhaps because of it), Vineberg is excellent in analytical cameos on Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and in showing how the tentacles of the ‘30s spread into the succeeding five decades. His admiration for the actors and his descriptions of how certain off-the-wall choices finesse their performances generate some of his finest prose. He is right on the button describing how actors like John Garfield or Jack Nicholson achieve their effects and the way that audiences tune in their subtly coded messages. He loves and reveres the Method so much that he manages to find its vestiges even in self-proclaimed non-Method actors such as Jason Robards. (Robards’ “process,” writes Vineberg, wishfully thinking, “may be a subconscious-instinctive application of The Method.”)

I share his appreciation for the towering alumni of the Actors’ Studio but am not so myopic as to believe that every time one comes across a great actor (i.e. Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield, Charles Laughton, Ralph Richardson) one is automatically encountering Method technique unconsciously inculcated. The great paradox of the Method is how actors such as James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis exemplified it without knowing of its existence.