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Home > Directing > Theatre > Stella Adler on America's Master Playwrights: O'Neill, Wilder, Odets, Saroyan, Williams, Inge, Miller, Albee
Stella Adler on America's Master Playwrights: O'Neill, Wilder, Odets, Saroyan, Williams, Inge, Miller, Albee
Stella Adler on America's Master Playwrights: O'Neill, Wilder, Odets, Saroyan, Williams, Inge, Miller, Albee
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Author: Stella Adler Edited by: Barry Paris Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Format: Hardcover # of Pages: 400 Pub. Date: 2012 ISBN-10: 0679424431 ISBN-13: 9780679424437
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About
the Book:
This is a script analysis
"master class" in a book from Stella Adler,
who strongly believed that all of the clues necessary to perform a
role could be found in the script. Robert De Niro says he owes
everything to her unparalleled script‐interpretation class where
she taught that it is the actor's responsibility to analyze why
characters behave the way they do and to become immersed in the world
of the play. In this collection of her lectures she gives you her
extraordinary script analysis of America's plays and playwrights –
the giants of the 20th century, men she knew, loved, and worked with.
An original member of the famed Group
Theater, Stella Adler was one of few Americans to have
studied the "Method" with its originator, Constantin
Stanislavsky, and the founder of her own highly esteemed acting
conservatory, she was an experienced film and theatre actress before
she started training her students – among them Marlon Brando,
Al Pacino, and Robert DeNiro – in the art of script
interpretation.
Stella Adler saw script interpretation as the actor's
profession ("The most important thing you can teach actors is to
understand plays"). Her classes on script analysis became
legendary. She discussed plays as scripts for actors, exploring the
texts for performance clues; brilliant revelations of the
playwrights, the characters, the social class and the time of the
play as opposed to one's own. She pressed her students to create
characters by closely studying the text of the play and its
historical context; how to search for the soul, for what is unsaid;
all of this as a way of building craft as distinct from talent.
"Don't
use your conscious past. Use your creative imagination to create a
past that belongs to your character. I don't want you to be stuck
with your own life. It's too little. You must get beneath the words
before you can say them. The text must be in you. It is your job to
fill, not to empty the words. They can only be used if they come out
of what you need to say."
— Stella Adler
The book Stella Adler on America's Master Playwrights,
brilliantly edited by Barry Paris, brings together her most important
lectures on script interpretation of America's plays and playwrights.
Adler considers, among them, Eugene O'Neill, Mourning Becomes
Electra; his first play, Beyond the Horizon; and his last, Long Day's
Journey into Night ("O'Neill is a mystical playwright ... his
speech is vernacular, down-to-earth ... it conveys the idea that
there is nothing real outside, but that's where I want to be –
somewhere out in the fog. The answers are hard to get in a fog").
She writes about Tennessee Williams and The Glass
Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, and The Lady
of Larkspur Lotion ("Williams captivates us because of the
romantic way in which he escapes the filth and frustration ... The
greatness in Williams is that [the characters] have a right to run
away. What do they run away from? From the monster of commercialism
and competition, from things that kill the melody and beauty of
life") ... about Clifford Odets ("Clifford, if you
don't become a genius," Adler once said to him, "I'll never
forgive you"); and about his plays Waiting for Lefty and Golden
Boy (on Lorna Moon and Joe Bonaparte: "You can't put a whore
together with a Napoleonic man and think they're going to make it.
They might make it under certain conditions – but not from the
point of view of love. This is not a love story. It's a hate story")
... about William Inge and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
and Come Back, Little Sheba; about Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
("[The salesman's sons] are Biff and Happy ... They're not
George and Jacob. Their names are shortcuts. It's the American Way –
a way of saying, 'We'll leave out tradition' ... That tells you
something you'll see throughout the entire play: they are cut off
from custom") about Miller's After the Fall; and Edward
Albee's The Zoo Story and The Death of Bessie Smith.
The long-awaited companion volume to her book on the master
European playwrights Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, Stella
Adler on America's Master Playwrights is illuminating,
revelatory, inspiring: Stella Adler at her
electrifying best.
What people say:
"Stella Adler
had a very good script-breakdown-and-analysis class that nobody else
was teaching. It was just a way of making people aware
of character, style, period, and so on." —
Robert De Niro
"We usually go to scholars,
dramaturgs, and critics for detailed analyses of the modern American
theatre. Well, forget that! Here in this amazing book is Stella Adler
in full and insightful bloom, preaching, exhorting, insulting,
provoking, and always helping her many acting students. Through
character study and scene breakdown within a specific play, she
manages to give us a personal tour of the times and lives of the 20th
Century's most illustrious playwrights. She knew them, she knew the
world they lived in, and she remembers EVERYTHING! A brilliant book."
— Andre
Bishop,
Lincoln Center Theater
"Even on the page, Stella
Adler projects to the back of the house. It is indeed the voice of a
giant ... vivid ... as vibrant an impression as I've come across of
the social and artistic chaos in which American playwrights of the
early 20th century found themselves ... [Adler's book] provides
invaluable insights ... and erupts into sustained verbal fireworks as
you've never heard elsewhere." — The New York Times
About the Author:
Stella Adler (1901-1992) was an American actress and an
acclaimed acting teacher. She began her life on the stage at the age
of five in a production that starred her father, the legendary actor
of the Yiddish Theatre, Jacob Adler. Stella Adler was one of the
co-founders of the revolutionary Group Theatre. In 1934, she met and
studied with Konstantin Stanislavski and began to give acting classes
for other members of the Group, including Sanford Meisner and Elia
Kazan. Adler established the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting in
1949 and taught at Yale University.
Barry Paris is an author and journalist based in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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Joanna Rotté, foreword by Ellen Adler
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Stella Adler & Barry Paris
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