Clap Hands, Here Comes Strasberg

The comely blonde walked confidently onto the bare stage of Paris' Salle Gemier and smiled at her audience of fellow actors and actresses. Whatever the scene required, she obviously felt up to it.

"You are on vacation," droned a Bronx-plated voice from the darkened auditorium. "You are in your hotel room, reading. Then, when I clap my hands, you will see lights on the beach. When I clap a second time, you will hear noises. And when I clap a third time, you will hear screams. O.K., you're on your own. Have a good time."

More of the Shame. The voice belonged not to a hypnotist but to Lee Strasberg, 65, director of the Actors Studio, teaching method acting for the first time in Europe. "You seemed even to have run through a wall," he scolded after the actress' first effort to follow his commands. "When you smoked a cigarette, you held your fingers together as though you were sucking them. The cigarette had no taste, no reality. Now let's try again."

In a few embarrassed moments, the early confidence had gone. The actress responded like a Miss Universe candidate who had just popped a shoulder strap. Nevertheless, she returned the next day for more of the shame. Though Strasberg's famous pop-psych approach to acting has lately been criticized as much as it has been acclaimed in the U.S., the French have welcomed him as though he were Stanislavsky reincarnate. "The event of the theatrical season," trumpeted Le Monde, and 443 theater folk from 26 countries plunked down $60 each to get the Strasberg pitch. Among the students who enrolled in the four-week course were a Moulin Rouge chorus girl and a psychotherapist, as well as some of the best actors and directors in France, notably Jeanne Moreau, Alain Resnais, Annie Girardot, Delphine Seyrig, Louis Malle, Madeleine Robinson and Jean-Louis Barrault.

Let's Pretend. And why are seasoned pros interested in playing Strasberg's little game of let's pretend? "For a cow to give milk," explains Actor-Director Barrault, "she must go back out into the fields from time to time." Adds Director Malle: "We needed Strasberg. I know that some French actors will say his method leads to overly introspective, overly personalized performances. But that's just our trouble. The French actor suffers from under-introspection."

Not for long, if Strasberg has his way. During one class, after chiding a group of actors for eating their make-believe breakfast too rapidly, he lectured: "You are unconsciously following only chronological sequences, imitating an act rather than re-creating it. Through mastery of emotional memory after mastery of sensory memory, we create something new." "Absolutely fascinating," says Jeanne Moreau. "In principle, I am against all systems for training actors, but now 1 know that this is not what Strasberg means or does. He is a great teacher, the kind who doesn't mold an actor but makes him discover simple things he has never really considered or important things he has forgotten." Jean-Paul Belmondo prefers to forget Strasberg. He attended one class, stayed ten minutes, and then stalked out, sniffing: "I'm not for that gimmick. For some, it may be useful, but I don't need it."

Nevertheless, most of the French actors obviously dig la methode and its group-therapy techniques. Says Strasberg: "One can sense their budding understanding." And also their growing dependence on the master. "What," wailed one French actress last week, "will we do after Lee has gone?" Maybe just pretend that he hasn't.

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