Marlon Brando was an actor for his time, not ours. Ours is one
filled with Facebook and quantum physics. There’s no way Stanley
Kowalski—Brando’s character in A Streetcar Named Desire—could
understand what it means to be human now. Likewise the type of
acting used by Brando, now commonly known as the Method, cannot
get to the heart of who we are today, or so argues Sheila Heti
in Maisonneuve. The Method—the form of acting started by
Constanin Stanislavski in Moscow and popularized in the U.S. by
Stella Adler and Lee Strasbourg through their Actors Studio—Heti
explains, follows closely the development of Sigmund Freud’s
psychoanalysis, pleading the actor to look inside himself to
find similar emotions from real human experience to project onto
characters, who will then appear to us, the watcher, to have a
past context that has brought them to this moment. Actors who
studied at the Actors Studio—like Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman
and Dennis Hopper—present us with a version of the human as a
deeply individual, emo