Reviewed by Catherine Sheehy

There are certain names powerful enough to conjure with; they strike the hearer with awe or terror, admiration or disgust. They act as a call to arms or a cudgel. In 20th-century American theater, Stella Adler was such a name. More than 20 years after her death she remains one of the most famous acting teachers we have ever produced. At once guru and monstre sacré, Stella was a first-name force of nature. Now, in the new volume, Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights: Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, et al., edited by Barry Paris, a journalist and biographer who knew her, all of Stella’s talent and temperament, all her wisdom and vanity are on gaudy yet splendid display in a fortissimo lesson in American theatre.

When Adler died in 1992 at the age of 91, she and Paris had been in the planning stages for this book, which comprises three parts: Adler’s very grand and occasionally grandiose overviews of the authors listed in the truth-in-advertising exemplar of a title (“et al.” stands in for Thornton Wilder, William Saroyan and William Inge); Adler’s extraordinarily detailed scene work with various acting students on the specific plays included; and Paris’ plot synopses and curatorial efforts of choosing and editing the first two components from decades of taped and transcribed lectures and classes.

There is no questioning Adler’s place in the history of American theater; if she had done nothing more than train an intense young actor named Brando, she would have secured that. “Marlon acts twenty-four hours a day. He has always been anxious to link himself to me.” There is also undeniable worth in her personal working relationship with great writers like Wilder — “...the most important contributor to American drama, even more than O’Neill, up to that time. Envy me because I knew him.” — Miller “...a socialist-moralist playwright. His aim is to tell the truth…” — Odets “[He] is giving you the culture through a camera, not through psychological motivation” — and Williams “...there’s nobody that sells the poetry of life the way he does and yet lives the life of a Bowery bum.”

There is considerable entertainment in the energy of her assertions expressing what might be called big brushstroke ideas, which are often not so much wrong as charmingly off-topic, like the angry connection she forges between Glass Menagerie’s Gentleman Caller and the failure of Reds to defeat Chariots of Fire for Best Picture in 1981, or her admonition that “Happy children should not try to be artists.”

And then there is the staggering clarity, the piercing insight and the pure, undeniable genius of her dissection of the plays themselves. “Blanche puts two thousand years of culture into the performance she constantly lives.” Here is an idea that operates on both the emotions and the intellect: useful for the actor, playable, but also succinctly analytical. Refreshingly, Adler’s perceptivity extends to the political and social potential in our family-drama dominated canon. Her liberal zeal unapologetically inflects her readings, “If you see that capitalism provokes a respect for power but a disrespect for democracy — a great disrespect for financial failure — you will get a better sense of your own country.”

But ultimately, the volume’s success depends upon an alchemical partnership among Adler, the plays upon which she’s expatiating, and the reader. And the truth is that, for some readers, it will simply not come off.

This is partly to be laid at Paris’ door, as he disdains the most basic signposts, such as an index and where or more importantly when Adler’s pronouncements were handed down. Most seem to come from the 1980s. Why so narrow a date range? It looks a little like laziness given Paris’ note at the front about how much material there was from which to choose. It’s also here, in the space of a 2 1/2-page “Apologia,” that he arms himself against such criticism by flippantly telling anyone who wishes for better scholarship in the book they “can go directly to — other sources.” This is typical of a kind of romantic anti-intellectualism that Paris claims for Adler as well. “She was not college-taught but theater-taught — a tougher matriculation.” But Stella Adler herself speaks again and again (and again) in these lectures about the actor’s taking responsibility for knowing the world of the play and the playwright. What were the social, economic, political, aesthetic and, yes, personal circumstances that drove these artists to create these plays? She dins into her students the necessity for the rigorous investigation that Paris poo-poos. “I understand my tradition. It is very strong. You can’t beat it.”

Of course, the failure of the book to reach a broader base must also be partly chalked up to the ineluctable march of time. Paris asserts that he and Adler always envisioned that the book would “appeal to general readers, not solely (or even mainly) to theater people and scholars.” But I had an Ivy League-educated graduate student five years ago look at the DVD main menu photo of His Girl Friday and ask me which one was Cary Grant. Who is Stella Adler to a 21st-century readership?

A child of the century born in 1901, Stella was the youngest daughter of Yiddish theater star and impresario Jacob Adler. This made her, by her own account, something of a diva. “You couldn’t put me in an ensemble. I was a princess. My father was a king, my mother was a queen. You couldn’t do that to me. I hated it. I hated everybody.” But in 1931 that changed; Adler was invited to become a founding member of the groundbreaking collective, The Group Theatre, with Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford and her future husband Harold Clurman. There she created roles in premieres by Odets, John Howard Lawson, Dawn Powell and others in productions directed by the likes of Elia Kazan. Strasberg’s development of “the Method” based on his understanding of Konstantin Stanislavski’s acting technique piqued then provoked Adler to seek out the aging Russian master himself in Paris in 1934 for firsthand tutelage. She developed her own approach to teaching her art based on their five-day intensive interaction. This made her Stanislavski’s direct heir, and she made the most of the privilege. “I can’t tell you how much [Stanislavski] knew; I’m the only American who worked with him. God did it. Once in a while, God does something; he put Adler together with Stanislavski and a great deal came out of it — for me and for you.”

Braggadocio? Only partly. A great deal did come out of it for Stella, for her students and for those of us who recognize the names of all those ghosts she drops so naturally. If you want to understand our theatrical tradition, pick up a copy of Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights. But first rent a copy of Shadow of the Thin Man and see Stella in her youth, doing everything she can think of to breathe life into a stereotypical moll role in a fading series years past its sell-by date. Hold her performance in your mind’s eye as you read: “Don’t be little on the stage — it’s boring. Life is boring. We’re too little in life. That’s why we come to the theater — because it’s not boring here.” Here endeth the lesson.

Catherine Sheehy is Chair of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Literature at Yale School of Drama and Resident Dramaturg at Yale Rep. Formerly she was associate editor of American Theatre magazine and managing editor of Theater magazine.