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• Teatro | Teoría

PAÍS DE ORIGEN
Nueva York, Estados Unidos

A Dream of Passion is the long-awaited definitive work on acting and the training of actors by one of the greatest figures in twentieth-century theatre, the late Lee Strasberg. Known as the father of the Method -the famous system by which the vast majority of actors in this country both learn and practice their art- and as the artistic heir to the great Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavsky, Strasberg taught generations of America’s finest actors and actresses, including John Garfield, Marlon Brando, Geraldine Page, Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Fonda, Steve McQueen, James Dean, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Al Pacino, Dennis Hopper, and countless others. Many have tried to explain Strasberg’s work and the Method in numerous books and articles, but here for the first time in his own book, Strasberg speaks for himself.

A Dream of Passion is Strasberg’s journey of discovery that led to the Method. It begins with an account of his own experiences as a young actor in New York watching performances by such artists as Eleanora Duse, Jacob Ben-Ami, Giovanni Grasso, and Pauline Lord, and recognizing the central problem all actors, even great ones such as these, have always confronted: achieving consistency of inspiration. He describes his excitement at attending performances by the Moscow Art Theatre under Stanislaysky’s direction and analyzes with brilliance and clarity how Stanislaysky began to solve the age-old problem. Strasberg traces his own training with Stanislaysky’s pupil Richard Boleslavsky, and he shows how Stanislavsky’s system was applied and adapted through work with the legendary Group Theatre (which Strasberg co-founded) and later at the Actors Studio (of which Strasberg was Artistic Director) and at his own Theatre Institutes.

The result of this evolving process of thought, research, experiment, and discovery by Strasberg and others was the Method, and Strasberg takes great pains to explain just what this often misunderstood term means, and dosn’t mean. Using insightful analyses of performances by major actors of our time as well as students just starting out, concrete examples of various training exercises, and vivid analogies to dramatic situations in literature and everyday life, Strasberg paints a clear and engrossing portrait of the Method in action. He demonstrates how the Method can train the actor to achieve regularly the results he wants on stage and help anyone who feels hampered by the inablity to express what he or she feels.

A Dream of Passion is a work of historic importance which no actor, would-be actor, nor anyone, involved with theatre can afford not to read. In addition, it is a book that all who are interested in creativity and its expression will find a revelation.

Lee Strasberg was born in Poland in 1901 and grew up on the Lower East Side of New York. He began his training as an actor at the American Laboratory Theatre in 1923, and in 1931, with Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, he founded the Group Theatre. He directed some of the Group’s most famous productions and was in charge of actor training. Strasberg became Artistic Director of the Actors Studio in 1951 and continued to direct on and off Broadway. He also conducted private acting classes at Carnegie Hall and at his own schools, the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institutes. Strasberg resumed his acting career with the role of Hyman Roth in the film The Godfather, Part II in 1974. He died in 1982.