"The American public often appreciates the theatre and applauds wildly, but it doesn't really understand acting," Lee Strasberg told a capacity crowd at New Lecture Hall last Thursday. Speaking on "The Actor in the Theatre," the renowned artistic director of the Actors' Studio gave the first of three lectures on facets of the theatre sponsored by the Summer School.

"We are on the verge of creating a new, great theatre. We have today a larger number of good, if not great, playwrights than at any other time, with the possible exception of the Elizabethan era. It all depends on understanding the actor, on training our audiences to know what acting really is," Strasberg stated.

What are the chief requisites for a great actor or actress? "Most people will list a great voice and a good-looking body," he said. "But the greater performers have lacked one or both of these--David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Eleanora Duse, Pauline Lord and Helen Hayes, for example." In the movies, even such "good but not great actors" as Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and John Garfield were not able to get anything but villain roles for a long, long time.

"The conventional criteria just don't hold up," Strasberg said. "But something does happen when these people come on the stage. The basic requirement is this: the capacity to be excited by imaginary stimuli. The actor must be able to reproduce a reaction to a situation at will.

"Actors use their own personality more than any other craftsmen," he added, "but the truly great actors are those who can go beyond their own personalities, who can transmute and transform them."

But what about non-realistic acting? "No matter what the style is," Strasberg said, "the same capacity of imagination is demanded--even in the most formal theatre, like the Noh drama of Japan. The result must be convincing and believable in any kind of theatre. The two greatest feminine performances I ever saw were given by Duse and Mei Lan-Fang; and the latter was the more notable achievement, for it had to overcome the greater handicaps." (Mei Lan-Fang was the foremost Chinese actor, and head of the Ching-Chung Monastery, who specialized in female impersonations). "In all kinds of theatre, the basic emotions are always the same; only the techniques of handling them differ."

Shakespeare

"I believe Shakespeare was Shakespeare," Strasberg continued, "and that he was an actor." He said the best clue to Shakespeare's ideas on acting is not to be found in Hamlet's oft-cited directions to the Players (Act iii, 2), but rather in Hamlet's 'O what a rogue and peasant slave' soliloquy (Act ii, 2), especially the lines, "Is it not monstrous that this player here,/ But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,/ Could force so his soul to his own conceit/ That from her working all his visage wann'd,/ Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect,/ A broken voice, and his whole function suiting/ With forms to his conceit?"

He also talked about Moliere as another actor-playwright who combatted the conventional acting of his day.

What Does an Actor Create?

Since an actor has his lines furnished to him, just what does he create? Strasberg answered, "An actor creates character; he creates a new human being." From the 18th century he cited the example of David Garrick's interpretation of King Lear, in which Garrick "showed for the first time the whole process though which a person actually goes insane." And from the 19th century he mentioned Edmund Kean's conception of Shylock as an Italian Jew only 38 years old, and said he wished somebody else would dare to try this approach sometime.

Another creation of the actor, Strasberg felt, is the feeling of humanity. "All the other arts can only come close to capturing a sense of humanity; acting alone can really do it."

He outlined the "strange sequence" of 19th-century British acting, from which American acting derived much. "American acting has not yet solved all its problems. But it began to come into its own only after World War I." Still, he felt that already the U.S. has seen some modern performances that compare with the supremely brilliant ones in the past abroad, and cited Jeanne Eagels in John Colton's Rain (1922), Pauline Lord in Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted (1924), Alfred Lunt in Ferenc Molnar's The Guardsman (1924), and Laurette Taylor in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (1945).

Walter Huston's 'Othello'

Strasberg said he wanted to conclude with "a most moving experience." Where-upon he read the short article, 'The Sucess and Failure of a Role,' which the late Walter Huston contributed to the fascinating anthology Actors on Acting.