Sometimes an actor seemed to glow with a private, ineffable fire, only to lose the spark halfway through the play. Other performances should have been extraordinary but weren’t. He went to show after show on Broadway, where he saw extraordinary performances by some of the great actors of the day: Jeanne Eagels, Giovanni Grasso, Eleonora Duse. As a kid, Strasberg had performed in a few plays-his brother-in-law did the makeup for an amateur Yiddish theatre troupe-and by the time he graduated from high school he had fallen headlong in love with the theatre. He worked as a bookkeeper for a business that sold human hair. Strasberg, twenty-one years old, was born in a Polish shtetl and brought up on the Lower East Side. In January, 1923, Lee Strasberg went to Al Jolson’s 59th Street Theatre to see “Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich,” a nineteenth-century Russian play about sixteenth-century Russian politics, performed, in Russian, by a company called the Moscow Art Theatre.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |