The Books: Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, edited by Barry Paris

Daily Book Excerpt: Theatre

Next book on the acting/theatre shelf is Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, edited by Barry Paris

Must-read.
Must-read.
Must-read.

Stella Adler came from an illustrious hard-working theatrical family, active in the vibrant and important Yiddish Theatre at the beginning of the 20th century. She grew up surrounded by the great actors of the day. Her brother, Luther, was also an actor. She had a career, and in the 30s, she joined the Group Theatre, a brand new ensemble set up by Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman (her boyfriend and eventual husband), and Cheryl Crawford. The Group Theatre was committed to developing new work, work that had something to say about the current-day conditions in America (the Depression was raging), and an ensemble that would work very differently from the star system in American theatre. They would be an ensemble. Their names would be listed alphabetically. There would be no individual bows. The group would always bow together. The Group Theatre lasted 10 years, until financial realities finally forced them to shut down. But the legacy is forever. The people who came out of the Group went on to become the acting teachers whose names are in the history books forever. Sanford Meisner. Lee Strasberg. Bobby Lewis. And Stella Adler.

All of them had different interpretations of Stanislavski’s “System” and each taught what they thought was the most helpful effective “version” of it. They had fought these things out during the Group days, and Stella even went so far as to track Stanislavski down in Paris and grill him about what he actually meant. She spent days with him, working with him, and then came back to the Group to report what she had learned. Basically: “WE’RE ALL DOING IT WRONG.” (This is a huge oversimplification: Stella Adler’s meeting with Stanislavski could be the topic of an entire book.) Adler was not shy. She was not a shrinking violet. She also had some problems being part of an ensemble. She was, naturally, a star. And she did not like what Strasberg was doing with the training. She thought it was awful and damaging. So she came back to the Group and reported what Stanislavski had actually said. This caused huge ruptures in the Group, especially with Strasberg, and all of this may seem like a tempest in a teapot, but the result was fascinating.

Every actor has his own process. And every teacher teaches the process that worked for them personally. That is what is so interesting about all of the teachers who came out of the Group. It’s all the same thing, and everyone has the same goal in mind, everyone wants to acquire Truth onstage … but the way to get there is up to you. Of course everyone wants to claim that they have found “the way” (and those are usually the teachers you want to avoid).

I started out with the Meisner Technique in undergrad, and studied it for years. I took to it. I love it. It worked for me. It didn’t work for others. But it worked for me. The sense memory stuff, the Strasberg stuff, just wasn’t as effective for me, in terms of helping me when I was actually up there acting. But obviously many people love Strasberg. Fighting about this stuff and trying to convince someone that he is WRONG about the technique he loves is not only a waste of time, but stupid. You’re arguing about something totally subjective. It’s ridiculous.

But Stella Adler was at the forefront of that fight in the 30s.

She went on to be one of the most beloved acting teachers in the 20th century and the people she taught have won Oscars many times over. (The same is true, of course, for Strasberg, Meisner, and the others). Robert Deniro still speaks very highly of her, and loved in particular her script analysis class. Stella Adler was second to none in script analysis. There are other teachers who make you break things down into “beats” (Ted and I were just talking about this recently), into small easily digestible chunks, so that each scene has all these different “beats” and you can find out what the objective/obstacle/spine is in each beat. I don’t agree with that, although it is quite common. Ted and I were talking about it, basically that “beats” tend to break up the flow, and actors are suggestible creatures, so when there is a “beat-change” it can seem artificial, imposed. Often, in real life, we are not going from beat to beat. There is more of a flow. Funny things happen alongside sad things. We don’t operate in each moment thinking, “What is my objective and what is the obstacle?” These, of course, are good and important questions to ask when you are getting ready to play a scene, but the script analysis that depends on “beats” is detrimental to the playing of the thing.

Stella Adler’s script analysis is different. It is not technical, and yet it is the ultimate in specific. She herself was an actress who took everything personally. That was her great gift as an actress. You tell her, “It’s raining, you are sad” and she would burst into tears immediately. Not everyone has such a flexible instrument. She demanded that kind of belief and faith from her students. DeNiro said her greatest gift for him, a shy man, was to say, “Just get up and do it. Now.” Don’t sit in a chair worrying about whether you really feel the heat. Just get up and do it. (Again: this will only really work with very talented people. People who don’t already have a knack for this acting thing found themselves at sea with Stella. Stella’s class was for professionals, people who could already do it.) She was so big on script analysis that those classes were packed to the gills, people pouring into the room to hear her pontificate on great playwrights. She knew everything. Not just about the plays, but about the world from which each play came, the historical/political/social background, the geography (her lecture on Ibsen and the geography of Norway and how that plays into Doll’s House is a MASTERPIECE), the religion, the weather … and all of these things must somehow work on you, you must KNOW these things, they will HELP you to act the part.

Don’t be small, as an actor. Don’t only be interested in acting. Actors who are only interested in acting are boring creatures. You must be curious about the world, about the clothes, the weather, the religion, the way people traveled (coach? train? horse?), what they ate, how long the days were in that part of the world, the language and its development … everything. You must not only have books about acting on your shelves. You must have books about EVERYTHING.

This must-read book is a transcription of Adler’s lectures on three playwrights – Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov.

If you think you know these plays, think again. As an actor, if you think you understand what you need to do to play in these plays, think again. This goes back to my comment about Elvis and gesture: If acting is what you want to do, do you realize how deep you have to go? Are you aware of it? Some people aren’t, like that boy singing “If I Can Dream” with his hands in his pockets. If you want to be an actor, then it has got to COST you something. Otherwise, why do it.

Adler makes you realize the cost. But she also makes you realize what you (and an audience) will gain.

Do not stay on the surface. Don’t you DARE. Don’t you DARE think you have the permission to play Ibsen if you don’t know about Norway and the world from which those plays sprung. Don’t you DARE.

She was very fierce. You can hear her voice in these transcripts.

Just to give you an example of how her script analysis brain worked, here is an excerpt having to do with one scene – ONE SCENE – from The Seagull.

Excerpt from Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, edited by Barry Paris

Act II, Scene 2: Dorn and Polina and Arkadina

Let’s get to Dr. Dorn and his old love affairs. You have to build it up from the doctor’s past – twenty hours a day, no money, going to poor homes and birthing babies. It was only two or three of those houses where he’s really with them, drinks with them, where they love him and take him in. He grew up with Sorin’s family. His own life is worn out, but he saved one thing for himself: he really admires Arkadina. He admires her as an artist, the fact that she has this boldness, that she functions. He sees very few other people functioning.

Remember this is Chekhov, who said, “I never loved anything. I understood everything, but I think electricity did more for people than praying. I have a soul. But I respect my medical side more.” When the patient he operated on died right in front of him, how did Dorn feel? The scientist is hit by the downfall of society differently from the artist. He knows he isn’t a great lover. But Polina is. She is a beautiful, aristocratic woman. They had an affair. He says, “For God’s sake, don’t make so much of it.” This is very Chekhovian.

Polina is angry. She says, “You’re carried away by Arkadina. Don’t do that in front of me. It makes me sick. Be with me, you know I love you. You don’t even notice me.”

He says, “Darling, I’m fifty-five, I don’t have it anymore. I can’t give it to you.” He says, “I did a lot of good for women. They like me because I was a goddamned good doctor. And furthermore, I’ve always been an honest man.” But how does that reach her if he sits next to Arkadina instead of her? Polina is jealous and anguished and when her husband comes in she has to pretend not to be.

You see that they are all mismatched, misunderstood. Jesus, this is interesting! Do you see the difference between a man’s attitude toward being a lover and a woman’s? Polina is also Masha’s mother, so you see where Masha gets her obsession. Nina loves Trigorin but not “that” way. Trigorin loves Nina that way. Konstantin and Masha don’t love each other that way. He loves Nina. Masha loves Konstantin. It’s all mismanagement of the souls. In Chekhov, if you talk about your problem to someone who hasn’t experienced that problem, they don’t know what you are talking about. It is very important to see that not-meshing with the mind of the other person.

To Polina, the doctor meant more than a love affair; it meant her whole life. She had to marry into a lower class. She is dying because of the vulgarity of a husband who chomps into sandwiches when he talks. Stanislavky gives you his vulgarity. Polina says to Dorn, “If you don’t take me away, I will die.” To him, it was just an affair. “Don’t take it so seriously.” He doesn’t understand that she is dying of pain.

For that matter, he feels pretty much the same toward Arkadina, even though he is more enchanted by her. Once when Harold Clurman wanted to write about Ethel Barrymoire, he said, “I don’t know if she is a good actress or not.” He went to see her performance and said, “It was so full of the melody of her beauty and her voice – but I still don’t know.” So he went again and came back and said, “She’s so fascinating, so hypnotizing – but I still don’t know.”

That is Arkadina. Dorn is hypnotized by her.

She is a big star. She has slept with Dorn. Practically openly she says it. But she was strong and Polina is not. You get Dorn’s fascination with having two wonderful women always in love with him. But he was so busy all his life with everybody’s babies and sickness.

He has no money, no life, he’s old, he sings a lot. People who sing songs of the past are thinking about who they were at twenty-two. If you sang “Bicycle Built for Two” then, and you sing it now at fifty-five, something in this song betrays in you a lost romance.

If you understand that as a technique in Chekhov, you can use it in modern plays all the way up through Tennessee Williams, where it’s the same class only in the American South. I want you to see how a writer builds through memory.

All Tennessee is memory. A great deal of Death of a Salesman is memory, and such memory! Miller is a genius. But Miller goes with Ibsen, not with Chekhov. Tennessee goes with Chekhov because it is a class society, and Tennessee writes about Southern aristocracy. In Tennessee’s plays, there is always one character resembling the teacher who likes Blanche DuBois in Streetcar – the guy who has a fascination with her artistic temperament. The pedestrian soul is often drawn to the artistic – to the thing he doesn’t understand. In all these plays with characters who are dreamers, there is always some plain guy like Dr. Dorn who likes that.

Memory has a way of making the event beautiful. You don’t often remember and talk about ugly things. “At that parade, all of a sudden the horse let loose with …” You don’t say that. You say, “Did you see the comet?” “Did you see the sunset?” It lifts you. It is not just ordinary prose. It is the prose of memory.

Arkadina says, “You know, fifteen years ago we had music on the lake every night. There was lovemaking and laughter and noise. I remember, there was this doctor …” She lifts it. Then in the next moment she says, “I’ve hurt my son, I know.” Memory on a deeper level. “Where is he? …”

Understand where the mood affects you. All this is reminiscent of a life that you like to go it. It’s songs your grandmother sang. It’s a swing you had as a child. Somebody picks up a daisy and says, “She loves me, she loves me not.” Somebody’s looking for a four-leaf clover. Don’t promote the play. Choose what you want to do within the character, within the mood, within the action. For God’s sake, stop selling dialogue. After Chekhov, don’t sell anything.

If I were Arkadina, I would go over to the swing. “Oh, how nice …” Her brother joins her, singing. See the family. It’s slow. It’s the melody of the brother and sister. The singing connects them and they connect it. You can connect with anything that’s disconnected in Chekhov.

The harmony they can’t make in life, they make indirectly. Otherwise, it’s direct and very boring on the stage. Good writers create “mood actions”. Walk around in this mood. Have an action here where nobody does anything. Take five minutes before she says “Oh, how nice it is,” so you can show where the “nice” comes from – the swinging and all. That is acting. Everything else is baloney. Have one person not talk directly, and you’ll have the biggest success in the world. Do it on a symbolic rather than logical plane. Try it. Get five minutes of Chekhov, kids, you’re over the hurdle.

Throw all that sadness out. The Russian thing isn’t sad and isn’t phony. What life they have is in the past. That’s what people live by. We say, “Remember eight years ago when Marlon was in the class and there was some tootsie who … Remember that?” Everybody shares the past, that’s what unites them. Think of the inside action of a wonderful past. Be in that. Be with the crickets and birds and night noises. That makes Arkadina talk in a certain way. If you think of that night music, you will act and react differently.