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Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov
Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov
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Author: Stella Adler & Barry Paris Publisher: Vintage Format: Softcover # of Pages: 352 Pub. Date: 2000 ISBN-10: 0679746986 ISBN-13: 9780679746980
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About the Book:
"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
An original member of the famed Group
Theater, Stella Adler was one of the most influential
artists to come out of the American theater. She was a force of
nature, an unforgettable personality. Once, when she walked into a
crowded room and her presence caused a hush to fall over it, a little
girl asked, "Mommy, is that God?" As a Stanislavsky
disciple and founder of her own highly esteemed acting conservatory,
the extravagant actress was also an eminent acting teacher, 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 of script analysis became legendary; brilliant
revelations of the playwrights, the characters, the social class and
the time of the play as opposed to one's own. Adler explored how to
find the ideas and experience them; how to search for the soul, for
what is unsaid; all of this as a way of building craft as distinct
from talent.
The classic lectures collected here, delivered over a period of
forty years, bring to life the plays of the three fathers of modern
drama: Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Anton
Chekhov. With passionate conviction and shrewd insight, Adler
explains how their plays forever changed the world of dramaturgy
while offering enduring insights on society, class, culture, and the
role of the actor. She explores the struggles of Ibsen's characters
to free themselves from societal convention, the mortal conflicts
that trap Strindberg's men and women, and the pain of loss and
transition lyrically evoked by Chekhov.
A majestic volume, Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and
Chekhov allows you to experience the work of these masters "…as
if to see, hear and feel their genius for the first time" —
William H. Gass
What people say:
"Superb. Stella's words burn
off the page like her beauty, her scornful glance, her authority, and
the fire in her truth." — Irene Worth
"One
regrets never having seen [Adler] perform, but reading her on these
writers, especially Chekhov, is the next best thing."
— The New York Times
"A
beautiful treasure for actors and directors. Brilliant and
passionate." — Kim
Stanley
"No critic has ever talked
about theater… with more insight and passion. Earthy and
sophisticated, imperious and droll, [Adler] had the gift of making
plays written over 100 years earlier seem excitingly modern."
— The Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Plunges you into the world of
theater… [and] reveals Stella
Adler as a literary and social analyst, Stella
Adler as an acting teacher, and Stella Adler
as a great personality." — The New Republic
"These inspired lectures are
evidence that Stella Adler is hands down the
greatest acting teacher America has produced…. Nobody with a
serious interest in the theater can afford to be without this book."
— John Guare
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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Stella Adler, edited by Barry Paris
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Joanna Rotté, foreword by Ellen Adler
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