Join us January 25, 2024 at 101 Archer at 7pm!
OCH will welcome Isaac Butler to 101 Archer to celebrate his new book, The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act. Butler will be in conversation with TU’s Justin Rawlins to explore the history of method acting and its impact on the twentieth-century stage and screen.
Butler received the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and is the co-author of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America which NPR named one of the best books of 2018. His writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Slate, The Guardian, American Theatre, and other publications. He is the co-host of Slate’s “Working” podcast and previously hosted “Lend Me Your Ears:” a podcast about Shakespeare and politics.
Butler’s newest work chronicles the history of the Method in a narrative that transports readers from Moscow to New York to Los Angeles, from The Seagull to A Streetcar Named Desire to Raging Bull. He traces how a cohort of American mavericks–including Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and the storied Group Theatre–refashioned Stanislavski’s ideas for a Depression-plagued nation that had yet to find its place as an artistic powerhouse. The Group’s feuds and rivalries would, in turn, shape generations of actors who enabled Hollywood to become the global dream-factory it is today. Some of these performers the Method would uplift; others, it would destroy. Long after its midcentury heyday, the Method lives on as one of the most influential–and misunderstood–ideas in American culture.
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