Get Real

In his tribute to Elia Kazan at the 70th annual Academy Awards, Martin Scorsese remarked that Kazan introduced a new style of acting into American movies. Clips from “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “East of Eden,” “On the Waterfront,” “Wild River” and “Splendor in the Grass” showed this style in action, and it doesn’t lessen Kazan’s brilliance as a director to point out that the style couldn’t have existed without Stella Adler.

Marlon Brando, in fact, acknowledged her “astounding legacy” as an acting teacher in his 1994 autobiography. “Virtually all acting in motion pictures stems from her,” he wrote, “and she had an extraordinary effect on the culture of her time. Because of Adler, acting changed completely during the ‘50s and ‘60s.” If you doubt this, compare Brando’s performance in “Streetcar,” Montgomery Clift’s in “A Place in the Sun” and Robert De Niro’s in “Taxi Driver” with Paul Muni as Zola or Louis Pasteur and Fredric March in “The Best Years of Our Lives.” Trained in an earlier theatrical tradition, notably accomplished and honored with Oscars in their day, the latter two seem exterior and closed in contrast to the actors who followed the Adler line: “It is good for you to be able to give away the inside, to be able to say, ‘Look at me, I’m naked.’ ”

“Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov” is edited with great skill by Barry Paris, who extracted the essence of Adler from 3,000 pages of transcripts of her lectures to young actors at the drama school she founded in 1949. The book is not for actors only but for anyone interested in theater. No critic has written or talked about theater, as well as these playwrights, with more insight and passion.

Adler’s talent was partly inherited and partly inherent. Born in 1901 to Jacob and Sara Adler, leading lights of the Yiddish Theater, she first appeared onstage at the age of 4. As well as playing major roles in her father’s company until the mid-1920s, she performed minor ones in English on Broadway, where opportunities for a Jewish actress were limited.

“Unless you give the audience something that makes them bigger--and better--do not act,” Jacob Adler once told Adler; after he died in 1926, the search for something bigger and better led her to the off-Broadway American Laboratory Theater. Founded by two defectors from the Moscow Art Theater Richard Boleslawski and Maria Ouspenskaya, the Laboratory was the first company to apply Konstantin Stanislavsky’s acting techniques in America. The Stanislavsky System made a profound impression on Adler as well as on another member of the company, future director and critic Harold Clurman. They also made a profound impression on each other. A tumultuous off-again, on-again affair lasted until 1941, when it became a tumultuous off-again, on-again marriage, ending in divorce 20 years later.

In retrospect, Adler described Clurman as the man who “opened up my mind,” and Clurman described Adler as “spiritually vibrant” and “eager to add knowledge to instinct.” When he co-founded the Group Theatre with Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg, she joined the company and gave some highly admired performances. In Clifford Odets’ “Awake and Sing,” directed by Clurman, she aged 20 years to play John Garfield’s mother. In John Howard Lawson’s “Success Story,” her acting in the final scene was so powerful that several actors, among them John Barrymore and Noel Coward, came back to watch it more than once.

The group, like the Moscow Art Theater, combined an acting company with a drama school, and Adler also attended Strasberg’s classes. As her mind opened up and knowledge added to instinct, she began to suspect he was distorting the Stanislavsky technique by his excessive reliance on “affective memory” exercises, the use of a personal emotion from the past as the key to playing a scene. Strasberg was directing her in a play at the time, and after she discovered that she wasn’t the only actor to be blocked instead of unlocked by the exercises, she went to visit Stanislavsky in Paris, as soon as the play closed.

At their first talk, Stanislavsky confirmed her suspicions. “Affective memory,” he told Adler, was only one element among many in his system, and if it didn’t work for her, she shouldn’t use it. Then, over the next four weeks, he explained all the other elements in detail. On her return to America, Adler delivered a report to the group that infuriated Strasberg; but as in her own case, it proved a revelation for many of his actors. And later, as a teacher, she passed it on to her students: “Don’t go to you instead of going to the playwright.”

Adler concentrated on teaching soon after the group disbanded in 1941, partly because (like two other company members, Robert Lewis and Sanford Meisner) she found the New York theater scene dispiriting. But her most important reason was the experience with Stanislavsky in Paris. She had told herself, after they said goodbye, that the best way to thank him would be “to give other people what you have given me.”

The Stella Adler Acting Conservatory opened in New York, and before it eventually transferred to Los Angeles, several of her students had moved there, including Brando, De Niro, Warren Beatty and Harvey Keitel. But Adler did far more than recycle Stanislavsky’s teaching. “This is not a course in drama,” she explained in the earliest lecture collected here. “It is a course in opening up the vastness in you as a human being, in all your aspects, to understand your place more than you do--not to be led by the Bible or anything else but the truth of modern life as given to you by certain genius-authors in the theater.”

The lectures were also a course in “two aspects of the theater, one belongs to the author and the other to the actor.” You can’t play Ibsen as if he were Chekhov, Adler insisted, or Strindberg as if he were Shaw, and you can’t act any of them without “a complete understanding of what your character is experiencing.” A self-described “scholar as well as an actress,” Adler was profoundly knowledgeable but never academic. Earthy and sophisticated, imperious and droll, she had the gift of making plays written 100 years earlier seem excitingly modern.

An actor’s success, Adler believed, depended a great deal “on how deeply he can penetrate into the culture that he is going to act.” To perform Ibsen, he must learn about Norway in the 1880s, where the rigidly conservative Lutheran church dominated middle-class life, the “ideal” woman was an obedient wife and an unenlightened society, as Adler ironically observed, enjoyed only a few hours of light each day for most of the year. Ibsen’s response was to demolish conformist notions of “right” and “wrong” and “truth” as absolutes, make audiences reconsider every aspect of their lives, “sex, church, morality, money” and create characters who were neither heroes nor villains but “in flux between good and bad. That is something new.”

The lectures on Strindberg reveal something else new. They describe the wretched childhood that created a fatally disturbed and introspective adult who created characters in his own image, trapped by themselves instead of by society: “Here starts the modern drama, the self-trap from which you cannot emerge.” The same shadow falls across O’Neill and Williams, and “Streetcar” echoes “Miss Julie” in another way: “Blanche and Southern society are going down, just as Miss Julie and her class are dragged down.”

Exploring Chekhov, Adler suggested that he felt no obligation to “explain” life but to observe it precisely and sympathetically. And his observation focused on people living at a time of great doubt and insecurity. “They didn’t believe in their government, and neither do you. They couldn’t throw out the tsar and we can’t throw out dirty politics.” The businessman who buys Ranevskaya’s orchard, then cuts it down to “develop” it, is an archetype of the new materialistic Russian middle class “that wants things. They have absolutely no use for orchard blossoms. That’s us too. That is what happened in America.”

The bottom line in Chekhov, Adler concluded, is “transition. Transition is pain. But in ‘The Cherry Orchard’ they laugh on top of pain.” How this affects performance leads to brilliant observations, with an instinct for subtext equaled only by an instinct for acting it.

Did America lose an exceptional actress, in the tradition of Uta Hagen and Zoe Caldwell, when Adler concentrated on teaching? The only direct evidence comes from the very few movies she made, and it’s inconclusive. Her most substantial role was in “Shadow of the Thin Man” (1941), in which she played a character who is a distant cousin of Mary Astor’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy character in “The Maltese Falcon.” But although the part was still too minor to allow her to do more than create a strong and intriguing presence, Adler carried on the family tradition in her own way. By continuing to teach until a year before she died in 1991, at age 90, she gave the audience (her students) something that made them bigger--and better.