A Discourse on Method is a paranoid theory and a counterfactual history of American method acting, conducted in two parts. The first is Shonni Enelow’s account of a journey into the churning guts of the Method archives; the second is David Levine’s monologue Edition of Eight, delivered by an artificial human. Illustrated throughout with spiritual, conspiratorial, and documentary images.
Available now from 53rd State Press.
For The Criterion Channel:
Interview with Michael Koresky for Queersighted (2022)
In Modern Drama:
“Sweating Tennessee Williams: Working Actors in A Streetcar Named Desire and Portrait of a Madonna” (Summer 2019). Winner of the 2019 Modern Drama Prize and Honorable Mention for the ATHE Outstanding Article Award, 2020.
For Reverse Shot:
“All My Souvenirs” (December 2022)
“Signs of Life” (July 2022)
“Shared Space” (November 2020)
“Stuck in the Middle” (July 2019)
“Best of Enemies” (August 2018)
“Make it Real, Make it Alive” (May 2016)
“Caught in the Act” (October 2015)
For Film Comment:
“Toil and Trouble” (May 2021)
“Feel the Love” (July 2019)
“The Big Screen: Peterloo” (March 2019)
“Stronger Together” (September 2017)
“The Great Recession” (September 2016)
For Criterion:
“When Actors Do Double Duty” (August 2018)
“Fallen Child: Amy Wright in Wise Blood” (July 2017)
“Driven: Lindsay Crouse in House of Games” (January 2017)
Method Acting and Its Discontents (Northwestern University Press, 2015).
Winner of the 2016 George Jean Nathan Award
Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-Drama provides a new understanding of a crucial chapter in American theater history. Enelow’s consideration of the broader cultural climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s, specifically the debates within psychology and psychoanalysis, the period’s racial and sexual politics, and the rise of mass media, gives us a nuanced, complex picture of Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio and contemporaneous works of drama. Combining cultural analysis, dramaturgical criticism, and performance theory, Enelow shows how Method acting’s contradictions reveal powerful tensions inside mid-century notions of individual and collective identity.
“Like a good acting class with a gifted teacher, Method Acting and Its Discontents is filled with mental and emotional surprises. Widely referenced in American popular culture, the Method is rarely cited evenhandedly. But like that acting teacher we were lucky to get or wish we had, Shonni Enelow confronts us with the unexplored subtexts. She gets at them by casting odd-couple partners in unexpected scenes: Tennessee Williams and Jean Genet, Jean-Martin Charcot and Marilyn Monroe, Lee Strasberg and almost everyone else, but especially James Baldwin. Like the best scene work, the results disclose much that we didn’t previously know, not only about the scripts, but also about ourselves.” —Joseph Roach, Yale University
“A fascinating account of the psychological and psychoanalytical ideologies which were manifested in Strasberg’s Method acting approach in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Shonni Enelow’s painstaking cultural study positions the contradictions of Strasberg’s method within a set of fraught cultural anxieties that permeate post–Second World War multicultural America and the ways in which Method acting was in conflict with new feminist and postcolonial discourses. Method Acting and Its Discontents provides the broader historical contextualizations and complexities at play in Strasberg’s creation of a highly marketable but problematic set of ideas and asks all the nagging questions at which others have balked. This is essential reading for all theater scholars.” —Mary Luckhurst, University of Melbourne
"Enelow offers a forceful and timely rethinking of the American theater’s dominant acting theory. In chapters ranging across Broadway and Off Broadway plays, Hollywood and experimental films, and classroom sessions at the Actors Studio, she probes the Method’s assumptions, identifies its blindspots, and tests it against the tumultuous politics of the 1950s and 1960s.” —The George Jean Nathan Award Committee
Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project, co-authored and co-edited with Prof. Una Chaudhuri (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Encompassing academic research, theatre work-shopping, playwriting, dramaturgy, and theoretical writing, this book offers a practical, theoretical, and critical engagement with the urgent issue of making art in the age of climate change.
