‘Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights,’ Lectures - NYTimes.com
8/31/12 9:14 PM
August 30, 2012
... And in Eternal Stagecraft
By BEN BRANTLEY
STELLA ADLER
On America’s Master
Playwrights
Edited and with
commentary by Barry
Paris
Illustrated. 385 pages.
Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.
Size mattered — really mattered — to Stella Adler.
“Make it big,” she would say again and again to her
students in the dramatic arts, whom she spent four
decades training to be giants. “Be as large as the stage
is,” she said. “Don’t be afraid of the size. You need it as
actors — we need it in America.”
Adler — who was a star of the Yiddish theater, the
Group Theater, Broadway and, fleetingly, a player of
several stripes in Hollywood, before devoting herself to teaching — was a tall
woman to begin with. But more important, she might say, she had size, in the
way that counted.
For confirmation, just dip into “Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights,”
a compilation of lectures she gave in the 1980s, edited from transcribed
recordings by the biographer Barry Paris. Your ears will start to ring after
reading only a few sentences. Even on the page, Adler (1901-1992) projects to
the back of the house. It is indeed the voice of a giant.
Adler is probably best known today as the muse and mentor of Marlon Brando,
whose name she invokes freely in these sessions. And Brando is remembered
as the most visible exponent of the Method approach to acting, rooted in the
teachings of the Russian theorist and director Constantin Stanislavsky, with
whom Adler studied in Paris in the 1930s.
“Once in a while, God does something,” she says. “He put Adler together with
Stanislavsky, and a great deal came out of it — for me and for you.”
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‘Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights,’ Lectures - NYTimes.com
8/31/12 9:14 PM
But please don’t confuse Adler’s take on the Method with that of her onetime
colleague and enduring rival Lee Strasberg, the gurulike leader of the Actors
Studio in Manhattan. The words of Stanislavsky, it appears, are as open to
varied and conflicting interpretation as those of the Bible.
While Strasberg was famous for asking his students to dig deep into their own
psyches, Adler demanded of hers that they understand the times, the history
and the author of any work they appeared in. “The truth of the art is not your
truth,” she says. “It is the truth of the play’s circumstances.”
This approach means that, to the lay reader at least, Adler’s directives to her
students are likely to be more informative and entertaining than Strasberg’s
would be. She discusses eight playwrights in this book: Eugene O’Neill,
Thornton Wilder, Clifford Odets, William Saroyan, Tennessee Williams,
William Inge, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee.
In each case she paints a vivid, if partisan, picture of the social conditions from
which their plays emerged. (This is perhaps the place to observe that I wish
that Mr. Paris, who edited an earlier volume of Adler’s reflections on Ibsen,
Strindberg and Chekhov, had provided a bit more context for these lectures,
specifically setting the times and places in which they occurred.)
Though no academic, Adler was particularly well qualified to create that big
picture. She was roughly as old as the 20th century itself. The New York-born
daughter of Jacob Adler, the great Yiddish actor-manager, Stella (and her
brother Luther) went on to become members of the epochal, socially conscious
Group Theater. She later married and divorced the influential director Harold
Clurman, one of its founders.
Adler thus had a ringside seat for the American theater’s most transformative,
tumultuous and fertile period, not to mention personal acquaintance with most
of the writers she discusses here. And she gives as vibrant an impression as I’ve
come across of the social and artistic chaos in which American playwrights of
the early 20th century found themselves.
The key to these plays, she says, during a lecture on O’Neill, is that “nothing is
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‘Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights,’ Lectures - NYTimes.com
8/31/12 9:14 PM
fixed.” She continues, with her signature cadenced, evangelical repetition: “No
religion is fixed, no family is fixed, no property is fixed — nothing gets rooted
long enough for it to hold on.”
She is at her best in applying this anomic perspective to O’Neill, a writer who
created characters in the titanic mold that Adler cherished. I’ve never read a
gutsier or more persuasive analysis of “Mourning Becomes Electra,” O’Neill’s
reimagining of Sophocles in the post-Civil War era.
“He keeps you local and puts your ideas in common speech — but he gives you
a mask,” she says of the “Electra” cycle, “which makes you even more
responsible for revealing what’s beneath it.” The trilogy also inspires what may
be my favorite Adler dictum: “If you do a Greek play, play marble, not cement!”
She provides invaluable insights on the forms of escapism in “Long Day’s
Journey Into Night,” O’Neill’s autobiographical masterwork. And she is
startlingly perceptive in a surgical analysis of the romantic leads in Odets’s
“Golden Boy” (being revived on Broadway this season), of which she says: “This
is not a love story. It’s a hate story.” (Surprisingly, Adler does not deal with
Odets’s “Awake and Sing!,” in which she created the role of the matriarch,
Bessie Berger.)
Were I an actor, I’m not sure how helpful I’d find Adler on the other
playwrights under discussion here, though there are some lovely and precise
instructions to students attempting particular roles. (Of the fluttery Alma in
Williams’s “Summer and Smoke”: “This speech cannot be spoken, it has to be
danced.”And of Maggie, the Marilyn Monroe-inspired character in Miller’s
“After the Fall”: “She only exists, or thinks she only exists, to fill other people’s
needs, when in fact she is the neediest person in the world.”)
Often, though, you get the feeling that she’s vamping, especially when she’s
talking about Wilder, Williams and Mr. Albee, spinning into the ether with
pronouncements about life’s absurdity. Many words are devoted to the idea of
Blanche and Stanley, in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” as embodiments of old
and new orders of civilizations.
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‘Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights,’ Lectures - NYTimes.com
8/31/12 9:14 PM
As a reader, though, I loved listening to Adler vamp as she erupts into
sustained verbal fireworks as you’ve never heard elsewhere. The only person I
ever met in real life who talked with such mythologizing grandeur and
dictatorial verve was the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, to whom fashion was as
much a religion as theater was to Adler.
And make no mistake. Theater was, for Adler, what was left in the world once
you took away God and the great traditions of European civilization. “The artist
— when I say ‘the artist,’ I mean the actor — escapes,” she says. “But he doesn’t
go to religion. He goes to the play to understand life. The play gives him
enough.”
Speaking of the heroine of “Golden Boy,” she notes contemptuously, “Lorna is
like we are — brainwashed to think of success in terms of popularity. In our
world, we don’t really know or care about quality; it’s all about money and
publicity. It’s a sickness.” So I suppose it’s fortunate that Adler was spared the
first decades of the 21st century, when that “sickness” has become ever more
epidemic.
On the other hand, the theater could sure use a few giants like her to help it
sustain its proper sense of scale. As she puts it: “Life is boring. We’re too little
in life. That’s why we come to the theater — because it’s not boring here.”
Some of the wide-ranging pronouncements in “Stella Adler on America’s
Master Playwrights”:
On Laurence Olivier:
“His craft is bigger than his talent.”
On the artistic temperament:
“Happy children should not try to be artists. You have to be born with a broken
heart and a sense of loneliness inside. I never had a happy moment as a child
myself.”
On her canine co-star in “Shadow of the Thin Man”:
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‘Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights,’ Lectures - NYTimes.com
8/31/12 9:14 PM
“I played with Asta — and he was the best actor in the company.”
On 20th-century writers:
“Something in the way of American life defeats them. They are after the next
best seller, and if they fail, they give up.”
“We have very few good playwrights now, because society’s attitude is passive.”
“No modern play ends on an up note about marriage.”
On specific 20th-century writers:
“The melody of Saroyan’s language is so fantastic, because it comes out of no
education at all. No schooling, no training, just drinking.”
“There’s a certain author who doesn’t like the women in her plays, only the
men — and in life, too. That’s Lillian Hellman.”
On Hollywood:
“Certain types of artists can’t handle it. In some ways, it killed Odets. It
certainly killed Franchot Tone. He couldn’t live with that divided spirit. He
couldn’t live with that — or Joan Crawford.”
“All of Hollywood is dead.”
On everything else:
“You don’t have to be intelligent in Shakespeare. He’s a giant, so he carries you
— if you speak ever so precisely and have lots of good teeth.”
“The only excuse for not coming to a class or a performance is death.”
“I’d rather act than go to the bank — wouldn’t you?”
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‘Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights,’ Lectures - NYTimes.com
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