Professor Enelow: Once a Kid who Adored Acting, Now an Award-Winning Performance Theorist
Today, Shonni Enelow is an Associate Professor of English at Fordham University, a frequent contributor to the publications Film Comment, Reverse Shot, and Criterion, and the author of two books, one of which, Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-Drama, won the 2015-2016 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, whose previous recipients include Pulitzer Prize finalist Michael Feingold and The New Yorker’s Hilton Als.
But before all that, Enelow was just another kid obsessed with acting. She remembers as a child putting on little plays for her parents and their friends. Though much of her published writing has focused on film acting, Enelow was first drawn to theater, not paying attention to cinema until later in her life. “I grew up in Berkeley, California in a very no-TV, no-white bread kind of household,” she remembers. “The first movies that I really remember watching were musicals from the 1940s. And so I have vivid memories of watching the musical 42nd Streetwith Ruby Keeler, which is all about, y’know, ‘Ingenue makes good in New York.’ ” When Enelow herself reached ingenue age, she set off for New York to study theater at NYU.
Enelow remembers her college days fondly, remarking that through acting she was able to gain a sense of independence and autonomy. She even recalls her opening lines of one production that she is still particularly proud of. With a cool demeanor, she recites: “ ‘My name is Marcia Gates. I lost my voice on the’ some date ‘As a result of an act of the Unseen. If you think you cannot be so stricken, dream on.’ ”
While still in college, though, Enelow’s specific interests began shifting. “I was more and more interested in the idea of acting and thinking about acting from a philosophical and an aesthetic perspective and cultural perspective.” She wrote her dissertation, which evolved into her award-winning book, on method acting—its history and various cultural implications. Method acting, as described by Enelow, is “an idea about performance that also has a set of exercises and techniques associated with it, but also has an aesthetic associated with it. It's a style. It's a narrative genre.” Although initially conceived in Russia, this approach toward acting in the United States is most commonly associated with the performance teachers Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner, each of whom mentored various high caliber Hollywood stars throughout the twentieth-century, such as Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, and Robert Duvall, respectively.
Enelow focuses on the contemporary shift away from the expressiveness of method acting towards a more restrained and contained model she labels “recessive acting.” In the twenty-first century, says Enelow, we have become suspicious of that type of emotional communication. “I think it relates to a period of endless wars, the collapse of the global economy in 2008, ecological collapse and just an increasing sense that people have that things are really on shaky ground in so many ways.”
After her book, Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-Drama, was published in 2015, Enelow began getting asked to write about film, something that she never considered as a part of her career path. With the way in which Enelow rattles off arthouse filmmakers from across the globe, though, you would be surprised that film studies was not a part of her plan from the outset. She casually cites Olivier Assayas, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Leos Carax, and Maren Ade as contemporary directors she has been interested in, and she was invited to speak on a panel at 2016’s New York Film Festival.
Most recently, Enelow has been concerned with what she calls “performance across media,” the way that digital media interacts with all forms of performance, including traditionally “live” modes, such as theater. Ideas about the virtues of “authenticity” result as a consequence of this new reality. “That idea is a 20th century idea that really emerges out of the dominance of film. Back in Shakespeare's time, they weren’t talking about ‘The authenticity that live performance affords.’ That was not a thing. So even that effort to push against the dominance of screens, that has to be seen as a response to screens.”
This concentration on performance theory can be seen even in Enelow’s staged work. She served as playwright for the second and third installments of director Katherine Brook’s The Power of Emotion, a reflexive project concerned with “how we watch, hear, and perform emotion,” according to the production’s website.
Whether it’s theater or film, Enelow cares about performance and its connection to the broader culture. Beside her atop the desk lies a daunting tome on Tenessee Williams, whom she is focusing her current research on. “He is always thinking about the complicated situation that female performers are in,” Enelow says. “She's being asked to do these contradictory and paradoxical things like performing gender while performing truth...she is supposed to look like she's working, but the constraints of sexism and gender valuation require that she looks like she's not exerting herself.”
For Enelow, the contemporary artistic moment is marked by its constant shifting. The move away from method acting, the changing media landscape, the rise of prestige television, and the inability of Hollywood to produce interesting films — though, Enelow doesn’t pay much attention to Hollywood’s biggest product of the past decade: superhero flicks. “I couldn't name people in those movies. I mean, I guess every once in a while a Robert Downey Jr. is in one of them, but most of them are people that I don't know. There’s all the Chris's, right?” she says, almost certainly referring to actors Evans, Hemsworth and Pratt.
In addition to focusing on the work of Tennessee Williams in her research, Enelow is currently teaching two courses on dramaturgy and one on the thematic role fashion has played throughout nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature.
Written for English Connect by Michael Byrne, FCLC ‘20