Interiority-bound acting styles devalue plot, ideas, and rhetorical form.

Evidence

A recent critic of modern styles of acting (identified as Strasbergian rather than Stanislavskian) makes the interesting claim that its strongly individualist bias leads to a devaluation of plot: “seeing a play as a collection of individualized character portraits,” he maintains, “means that plot, themes, images, rhetorical figures, metrical forms, poetic motifs, and intellectual content of any kind become unimportant; they are … externals. As dozens of actors and directors have earnestly told me over the past three decades, ‘You can’t play an idea.’ You can only play real, live, independent persons, so the theory goes, not literary constructs.” — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 369

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the vaulted reading purpose: Christianity’s interior-self paradigm demotes outward form, and here acting shows the same move — ‘you can’t play an idea.’
• SEED: The notion that form/ritual/idea become ‘externals’ once the true self is interior is exactly the Christianized-modernity claim asserted in an unexpected domain (theater), useful as a vivid example in an essay.