Michael Howard

Sep 20

Build the method that only you can work with.

Life and work

Michael Howard (1923–2019) taught actors in New York for more than sixty years. He entered the Neighborhood Playhouse on scholarship in 1942 and studied with Sanford Meisner, served as a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne, joined Equity in 1947, then studied with Lee Strasberg and became a member of the Actors Studio in 1950. He acted on Broadway in Clifford Odets’s The Country Girl and on film in The Men. He began teaching in 1952, at Sidney Lumet’s invitation, at the High School of Performing Arts, and the studio that carries his name began the year after that.

Approach and technique

Howard did not hand you a system. The studio he founded states the principle plainly: there are many pathways into the craft, and every actor has to develop a method of their own. He worked from what Meisner and Strasberg had given him, added what he found in teachers elsewhere, and treated all of it as material for the actor in front of him rather than doctrine to be applied to that actor.

In a 2013 interview he described acting as a confrontation between the actor and the character, a struggle whose result he called a new three-dimensional human being. Two live things are in the room under that description. One is your history, your temperament, your particular inner life. The other is a written person whose circumstances are not yours. The work happens between them. Neither is supposed to disappear.

He was equally plain about what cannot be taught. Talent, he said, has to do with temperament, genes and childhood, and with luck. A teacher can help you develop what you have. That limit is not modesty. It sets what a class is for. Not the manufacture of ability, but the building of a working process around the ability you walked in with.

A teacher formed in two houses

You can trace Howard’s teaching to two rooms usually described as rivals. He was nineteen when he entered Meisner’s classroom at the Neighborhood Playhouse in the fall of 1942. The war interrupted that. He came back, worked as an actor, studied with Strasberg, and entered the Actors Studio in 1950, where he was later a member of the directors unit. He learned contact and behavior in one house and the actor’s private material in the other, and he declined to treat either as the whole of the craft.

The teaching itself began by request. Sidney Lumet asked him to teach at the High School of Performing Arts in 1952. A group of friends who met regularly to keep working asked him to lead their sessions, and in 1953 that group became a studio. He went on to teach at the Yale School of Drama, the Juilliard School, American Conservatory Theater and Boston University while keeping his own rooms in New York open the entire time. Sixty years of that is not a career decision. It is a temperament.

Why a method of your own is not permission to improvise your training

Find your own method is easy to hear as permission to skip whatever is hard. Under Howard’s version it is the opposite. If no system is going to carry you, then you are the one responsible for knowing what actually works inside your instrument, which means testing things and keeping records rather than collecting vocabulary.

What does a personal method have to contain before it deserves the name? It has to be repeatable on a bad day. It has to survive a director who gives you nothing. It has to be sayable to a scene partner in one sentence so the two of you can work. A set of preferences is not a method. A sequence you can run while frightened is.

The confrontation he described gives you the test. When your own material floods the room and the written person vanishes, you are performing your life with a script as the excuse. When the written person is executed accurately and nothing of yours is at risk, you have made a competent imitation. The craft lives where both are true at once and neither is safe. That is hard to schedule, which is exactly why it needs a method and not a mood.

There is a cost in this position, and he took it on himself. A teacher who refuses one system cannot hide behind the system when a student is stuck. He has to diagnose. He has to know which of the available tools this particular actor needs this month, and be willing to be wrong about it in front of the room. If you are choosing a teacher, that willingness tells you more than the name of a technique on the door.

Applications for actors

Keep a working notebook of what has actually produced a change in you, with the date and the circumstance beside it. Over a year that notebook becomes your method, stated in your own words and tested on your own instrument. Take the questions it cannot answer to a teacher who will look at you rather than at the syllabus.

Rehearsal exercise

Take a scene you are working on and write two short lists. The first is what this character does that you would not do. The second is what this character wants that you recognize in yourself with no effort at all. Three items each, written as behavior rather than as adjectives.

Now rehearse the scene twice. On the first pass, grant the character the full reason for everything on the first list. You are not approving the choice, you are giving it a cause. On the second pass, let the wants from the second list run underneath the same words without changing any of your staging.

Afterwards, name which pass made the other person in the scene matter more to you, then name what you lost on each. If the first pass made the character correct and cold, your own material stayed out in the house. If the second was warm and vague, the character’s circumstances went missing. What you are after is the version where your reasons and theirs are both live in the same minute. Keep the notes. That record is the beginning of the method Howard said you have to build for yourself.

Books and further study

Read The Actor Uncovered: A Life in Acting, published by Allworth Press in 2016. It is a memoir and a teaching book at once, built in short chapters that move between his working life and the craft questions that life raised, and it covers auditions, memorizing, rehearsal, film against stage, and the history he sat inside. Howard is direct in it about what a class is and is not. He writes that he does not teach acting and that it is not a how-to class, which is a useful warning label for anyone hunting a formula. His 2013 interview is a compact account of the same position.