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'Stella Adler On Ibsen, Strindberg And Chekhov' Edited by Barry Paris

Stella Adler’s lectures illuminate European playwrights

Sunday, July 18, 1999

By Mary Rawson

	Stella Adler On Ibsen, Strindberg And Chekhov By Edited by Barry Paris Alfred A. Knopf $27.50

Stella Adler was a legendary actress from a grand theater family whose tagline was: “No curtain in New York goes up without an Adler behind it.”

She started on the stage at 5, studied with former members of the Moscow Art Theater and was a founding member of the Group Theater. But ultimately she found her calling as a teacher. She believed passionately that play interpretation is the actor’s profession.

A high priestess in the theater, she taught for half a century, training thousands of actors, including Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro. Her lectures are the basis of this fascinating book.

In 1934, when she was having trouble with a part in a play directed by Lee Strasberg, she tracked down Stanislavsky in Paris to get it straight from the master why his “method” wasn’t working for her.

She decided that Strasberg was the one who was getting it wrong. The director and best-known teacher of the “method’’ school believed the personal, internal life of the actor was to “find the truth behind the words.”

Adler was sure that Strasberg tripped on his own ego, but she herself had enough ego to be confident that she had the conch. She describes a telling moment in Hollywood when she sat erect in a recliner while Hollywood stars slumped around her -- with no craft or will to find “the chair” in their recliners and, in her opinion, likewise no craft or will to search for meaning.

“Every character has a unique way of thinking and feeling about life. Without that, you don’t have a character, you have you.”

Adler introduces things by stating that hers is not a course in “drama … but the truth of modern life as given to you by certain genius-authors who can make you into something tremendous.” Henrik Ibsen has no heroes or villains, only people struggling to figure things out. This realism in the theater means that the words are not enough. Shakespeare’s poetry tells it all, but modern plays search for truth, and this search requires “the new actor -- a different species of performer with enormous sensibility and the ability to interpret the subtext in performance.”

The project of publishing her famous lectures was to have been collaborative, but Adler and editor Barry Paris were able to meet only once before her death in 1992, when she was 91. Discovering shared roots in Odessa, they clicked and decided to get started with the Europeans: Ibsen, August Strindberg and Anton Chekhov, with Stanislavsky completing the foursome: “Stanislavsky put the concept of the writer into acting terms.”

The Americans, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, could be left for volume two.

Paris, a Post-Gazette film critic, left that meeting with a vivid sense of Adler and 3,000 pages of lecture transcript. A more academic editor might have tried (and failed) to shape Adler’s lectures into essays, but Paris respects her passionate language and keeps Adler’s tone, which is most often insistent and loud. If some passages feel repetitious, it’s the repetition one hears from a devoted parent: “This is an important message, kid, perhaps you didn’t get it, let me put it THIS WAY!”

Just as Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov are rooted in their time, these lectures come from the ’70s and early ’80s, but the references to former President Ronald Reagan in the White House are always sharp and to the point. The anecdotes about her own life in the theater are just as crisp. She thinks as hard about what it means to be an actor in America as what it meant for Chekhov to be a doctor in Russia.

This is not a book about technique. It assumes that you’ve already mastered your piccolo. Now to the music! The actor’s responsibility is to communicate ideas and emotions, and without comprehension, there can be no communication. Through her detailed scene analysis, Adler illuminates much of what must be understood about Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov, but she challenges the actor to get your own flashlight, pronto, because it’s a big tapestry you must explore.

This is a book for actors, directors, anyone who loves the theater. As an actor, be prepared to read with a pencil.

“As an actor, you have to” and “As an actor, you must” are standard starts to sentences, but all her rules make sense to me as an actor. Referring to Chekhov: “You have to do something when you talk. It’s about what happens, not what is said.” “Do the words instead of saying them.” “Don’t bring in anything to the theater which doesn’t make the play clearer.” “Read the play; deepen yourself.”

The book concludes with a section of precise acting exercises. And, if you are an actor, you will come away with a great sense of privilege in your profession.

“It is through Chekhov and Strindberg and O’Neill and Tennessee Williams that you can understand the world,” Adler said. “The problems they put in the plays make you think as a person. You can take those thoughts and words in the character and think them through for yourself, and that is how you begin to become.”

Mary Rawson is an actress and teaches acting and directing at Pittsburgh Filmmakers.