Stella! Mother Of Modern Acting
Thank the lords of acting and writing that Sheana Ochoa has written this biography of one of the greatest broads of the boards of Broadway. (Yes, I hang my head in shame for political incorrectness.) Professionally, her life is a record of several great eras of the American theatre. Her father, Jacob Adler was likely the predominant figure of the Yiddish/Hebrew Theatre that played to houses of 2,000 a night during that genre's heyday in the late 1800s. It was also very much the family business. Stella made her stage debut at the age of three and, along with her brothers and sisters, born of several wives one might add, maintained a significant acting presence all their lives.When the acting style began to change from, shall we say Sarah Bernhardt-like histrionics to a more natural mode of presentation, was with the founding of the Stanislvski-acolyte Group in 1930. Both Stella and her brother Luther were present at the creation, with Stella's presence a direct result of her long-running and completely unfaithful relationship with the Group s co-founder Harold Clurman.My other suspicion after finishing and thoroughly enjoying Stella! is that she became a great acting teacher not just to make ends meet in her Park Avenue world, but in order to play before her classes the parts that she felt she should have played as a stage or movie actress. For this is the irony of her career, and also those of Strasberg and Meisner. If all we had to go by in assessing their impact was the list of their performances, attention would not be paid. Stella had good to excellent notices in several plays, most notably John Howard Lawson's Success Story, yet that all faded out by the end of the 1930s. As for Hollywood, she made a few movies under the rather clunky name of Stella Ardler, with Shadow of the Thin Man being the only one you are likely to run across on TCM some late night. Actually, that tells you all you need to know. If Stella had arrived in Hollywood with a star name, Hollywood never would have asked her to change it. And yet, her name still lives and it is deserved that life for her greatness as a teacher. Marlon Brando often played fast and loose with the story of his own life, but he did say that if there were not a Stella there might not have been a him to be heard of. Robert DeNiro took her classes for decades, even though he was never one of her teacher s pets; and the names of Martin Sheen, Sidney Lumet, and Peter Bogdnaovich attest to her mastery. Script first; the play's the thing. And from the quotes Ochoa uses where Stella analyzes a play, a scene, a character, she deserves all the encore curtain calls she can possibly get. This is a must-read biography for lovers of acting and theatre in general. --San Francisco Book ReviewThe exclamatory title of Sheana Ochoa's biography of legendary acting teacher Stella Adler invokes Marlon Brando's tormented cry in ''A Streetcar Named Desire.'' It's a fitting allusion: Brando was Adler's most famous pupil, and his endorsement of her teaching over Lee Strasberg's Method was a crucial victory in the rancorous war between these two American interpreters of Stanislavsky's revolutionary system of acting training. What could Strasberg teach Adler that she hadn't already learned as a girl acting with her nearest and dearest on stage? She was born, as she said, ''into a kingdom,'' a princess of the Yiddish theater. To her temperamental mind, Strasberg was an interloper preaching a psychological technique that wasn't only impractical but injurious to the longevity of a performer.After studying firsthand with Stanislavsky in Paris, Adler contended that Strasberg had badly misinterpreted the Russian master. She returned to the Group Theatre with an urgent corrective: The actor must imaginatively enter the circumstance of the play, concentrating on the actions of the character, not his or her own childhood hurts and resentments. ''To go back to a feeling or emotion of one's own experience I believe to be unhealthy,'' Adler explained in 1966 after she had established herself as one of the foremost acting teachers in the country. "It tends to separate you from the play, from the action of the play, from the circumstances of the play, and from the author's intention.'' Ochoa valuably reviews this still-simmering debate and offers a vivid sketch of the burgeoning, early 20th century Yiddish theater of New York's Lower East Side that gave rise to the socially conscious realism ushered in by the Group Theatre an assimilated generation later.Adler is portrayed as a complicatedly charismatic force of nature, a prickly beauty who worshipped her father to the detriment of her relationships with men. Although she had success on stage (winning acclaim for her performance in the Broadway premiere of Clifford Odets' ''Awake and Sing!'' and inspiring the young Arthur Miller), Adler found true stardom in the studio in the role of the flamboyantly irascible acting guru, insistently defending an elusive ideal.The theater schools in New York and Los Angeles bearing her name have trained numerous luminaries, including Mark Ruffalo, who in his brief foreword identifies what may be the most important lesson this demanding diva instilled in her charges: ''For her, the theater was where we really learned about mankind and how we were supposed to be in the world.'' It's a fitting tribute to a teacher who, however much she fell short in her own life, held fast to the view that ''growth as an actor and growth as a human being are synonymous.'' --Los Angeles Times