Stella Adler Sums Up a Life in the Theater

“The need for help grows stronger in the theater as producers and directors have less and less to do with the career of the actor. Actors have been stranded. They get very little help. The director is there for the ideas of the play, and the ensemble, and doesn’t always see that the actor is capable of growth and change. It happens now that the director will simply fire the actor he doesn’t like.”

Stella Adler was discussing why she’s decided to come out with a new book, “The Technique of Acting” (Bantam Books, $18.95).

At 82, Adler has grown up with the American century and has figured so prominently in its theater as actress, director and, especially as teacher, that ex-student Marlon Brando can write without exaggeration in her book’s preface, “Little did she know that through her teachings she would impact theatre culture worldwide. Almost all film makers everywhere in the world have felt the effects of American films, which have been in turn influenced by Stella Adler’s teachings. She is loved by many and we owe her much.”

The American theater has historically been a small world. The Provincetown Players, Mercury Theatre, Group Theatre, Actors Studio and Jose Quintero at the Circle in the Square remain seminal influences of 20th-Century American drama.

But always, it seems, there was Adler. She made her stage debut at the age of 4 in a play called “Broken Hearts” in her father’s Yiddish theater in New York. By 1931, when she joined the Group Theater, she already had an international career.

An extant photo of her role as Bessie in “Awake and Sing” demonstrates her skill--even in still life--of showing how a woman of 29 can look 59 when sufficiently burdened with anxiety over the future, and being perpetually broke.

For a while she was Lola, as in Lola Montes, the temptress. As in “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.” Photos of her young womanhood show a ripe honey-blond sensual beauty with the dead-level gaze of someone who knows all the sweets of love and the prices it can exact on the heart.

As she got older, she didn’t draw a circle of habit and reminiscence around herself and live complacently in its confines. She grew out. There was still too much to impart. After all, this was the woman whose mother was playing Tolstoy while everyone else in the neighborhood was peddling from pushcarts. This was the woman who made the pilgrimage to Stanislavsky in Paris because, after decades in the theater, she sensed that she--and her fellow actors--weren’t accurately translating the modern temper on stage.

The force she exerts is that of elevation. She reminds the actor that he’s not just doing a scene study, but that he (or she) embodies a specific person inhabiting a specific place and time; the actor owes something both to the practicality of his circumstance and the underlying universality of the playwright he represents.

“Truth is the essential word for the actor in modern theater,” she recently told her class, by way of introducing a scene from Jean Anouilh’s “Waltz of the Toreadors” (she travels to Los Angeles twice a year to oversee classes at her West Coast studio). It didn’t seem to bother her to have to introduce Anouilh as “a very famous French playwright” as she continued to describe the play. “The waltz is romantic. The toreador is very theatrical. He fights the bull. In this case we’re witnessing two forces, a man and his wife, a toreador and the bull, in a dance of death.”

The actors began the bedroom scene, where the wife, feigning illness, terrorizes her philandering husband with shouts of ferocious recrimination. Off to the side, Adler listened quietly. Soon she broke in.

“We’re not listening,” she said to the actress. “This man is a toreador. He steps around the force you represent in life. But you must be . . . a force! “ Adler’s head tilted up and her hands rose, Medea-like. “The self-indulgence of this woman is colossal. You’re playing it little. Can you kill him? Yes? Remember I’m here to help you.”

She turned to the house. “I want all the women here to lose this baby quality. Everyone has had children. Everyone has had sex. Is this what it means to be Californian? You’re all playing so young.” She turned back to the actress. “You’re static. Do something. Let’s have a fight, for Christ’s sake!”

The actors finished the scene. “Bravo!” she said. Whether encouraging or fault-finding, her tone remains the same, which means that the actor feels neither especially censured nor praised. He’s been given an understanding of the particulars of why he (or she) is there. There is, of course, encouragement. But beyond that there’s no more judgment in her comments than there is in a tennis coach’s reconstruction of a strategic stroke. If you do something appropriate, something even more appropriate will come of it. That’s how a part begins.

(That’s not only true of acting. Her friend, playwright Jerome Lawrence, said of her, “She can find things in plays that I don’t think the playwrights themselves knew were there. I’ve seen her make incredible discoveries with any variety of playwright, from Ibsen to Inge. She has a wonderful ability to bring historical background up front; at the same time, she’s wonderful at bringing forth the intimacy of character.”)

To one of two young men playing factory workers in a scene from Arthur Miller’s “A Memory of Two Mondays” she said, “Sweetheart, you’ve got to get rid of the habit of inflicting yourself on a partner while he’s doing something. . . . Speak out, for God’s sake! The theater is for pouring out your thoughts aloud. The theater is for singing out!”

She spoke of playing loneliness. “Loneliness is Chekhovian. It’s never expressed directly.” She spoke of what it was like during the Depression, where the play is situated. “Miller wants you to know how the daily working conditions of people kills them. Just kills them. Yet you were lucky if you had a job in a factory. People were dropping dead in the street.”

One of the actors had no conception of what she was talking about. He turned to her and said, “But Stella . . . “ He sounded like someone pleading with his mother. But she didn’t make a power play, as another teacher might, by savaging his ego. She patiently took him as far as he could go into understanding his role, and then coolly moved on.

This impersonal element was one of the things that made her criticism tolerable. Another was her frequent allusions to the sacred trust every actor and actress bears once he or she steps on stage. Hearing her leads you to conclude that the actor is not only an expressive repository for the great ideas and literature of our civilization, but the actor gives the audience a sense of itself as well in connection with these things. The actor, to paraphrase Anouilh, “makes us a little less lonely in the dark.”

A couple of days later Adler sat in her Beverly Hills living room off Coldwater Canyon. It was an oppressively muggy afternoon, but the house had a coolly austere brightness created by the abundance of its Scandinavian wood.

Adler sat near the entrance, as vivid as a figure in a Matisse. She has Champagne blond hair and gray-green eyes that combine in an ethereal water tone. Her smile was pleasant, neither winsome nor gaudy. Her face has, as you’d expect, seen a great deal. For some years it had a hard look at the edges. Now it seems to have resolved itself into an imperturbable calm.

“The drama needs new theater,” she said by way of comment on the state of the art. “We are in need of the best and deepest kind of play that helps the audience understand themselves and life. The money thing has taken over a great deal, and realism is ready to play itself out. That’s why it’s so difficult for the actor. The new styles haven’t developed. The actor has to know the Elizabethan style as well as Beckett and Pinter, but right now he’s caught in an improvisational state. We’re in a mechanical, technological age as well. The actor has to submit to the camera. To play Miller, an actor has to have the size of Jefferson, but the actor now has shrunk into the everyday. We once had our Barrymores, but no more.”

Asked why she left performing (she had a prodigious career that lasted 27 years and ended with a 1961 London production of “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad”), she replied, “I started directing. There was a period when plays were written for men. I couldn’t get enough starring roles. The period of Katherine Cornell had left. The American working class was put on stage, as it had been in Ireland, and then the English theater caught on. Musicals became big. I love musical theater, but I prefer ideas and language. I love to see the effect of ideas on an audience.”

Adler makes no pretenses about being self-created. She’s had the great and good fortune to absorb the influence of an amazing number of major 20th-Century theatrical figures.

“Let’s start with Sarah Adler (Stella’s mother), who had her own theater and opened with ‘The Kreutzer Sonata.’ Luther (her famous brother) and I played children in Tolstoy. That was the kind of upbringing we had. When I walked in the street with my father, he’d say, ‘Look at that man. Watch him. Study everything you can about him.’ At 6 or 7 years old, I’d be asleep at midnight and he’d wake me and say, ‘Tell me about four people you saw today.’ You have to be in a permanent state of watchfulness to work well as an actor.”

From the Group Theatre, she learned ensemble playing. From Stanislavsky, she learned “the importance for the actor to live in a specific space and play the truthfulness of that place, not as a platform, not even as a play, but as a real situation, whether it’s a jail, a park, or a phone booth.” She worked with Max Reinhardt, Tony Guthrie and, of course, Clurman. “I would include playing with Luther as one of my most important influences,” she added. “To be on stage with him was indescribable. Can you imagine playing love scenes with your brother?”

Asked if they all had a common link, she replied, “They loved beauty. Essentially they were aesthetes. Jacob Adler was extremely fastidious about the relationship between costume and behavior. So were Guthrie and Reinhardt. They were like ballet-masters. The eye was very important to all of them. As it is to all great artists. Ibsen said that he knew the color of the buttons on Nora’s coat.”

Adler refuses to discuss her star pupils, who are legion and include Brando and Robert De Niro.

“I have a religious attitude about that,” she said. “For every actor who has enjoyed success, there is one or more who is equally talented and gifted, but remains obscure. The element of chance favored some, and looked aside from others. In America, chance has more to do with recognition than talent. From an ethical standpoint, I can’t talk about my well-known students without injuring the ones less known. But I can tell you I’ve been personally wounded by some of the talent I’ve seen that didn’t get its chance.

“What do I look for in an actor? Size. Not only the high-visibility feature that draws your eye to an actor when he’s sharing a stage with 30 people. I mean the ability to lift the civilization up through the individual. Size is required in the great plays. I’m not necessarily speaking of grandeur either. Chekhov and Miller made the vernacular meaningful. But it’s something. Schopenhauer said, ‘You can tell a man by one gesture.’ ”

If she wouldn’t discuss specific actors she had known or coached, she didn’t mind rhapsodizing about one or two she didn’t personally know. Marcello Mastroianni, for one. “Mastroianni is for the ages,” she said, her hands raising like a dancer’s self-unfolding. “I’d go anywhere to see him. His performances are incredible, full of the humor and sweetness and sincerity of life.

“I love actors more than anything else in the world. They’re aristocrats because they dare to reveal themselves. They carry the seeds of all our knowledge.”