{"product_id":"stella-adler-on-americas-master-playwrights-isbn-9780679746997","title":"Stella Adler on America's Master Playwrights","description":"\u003cp\u003eStella Adler was one of the most influential acting teachers of all time, a legendary force of nature whose generations of students include Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Anthony Quinn, Diana Ross, Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, Annette Benning, and Mark Ruffalo.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis long-awaited companion to her book on the master European playwrights brings to life America’s most revered playwrights, whom she knew, loved, and worked with. Brilliantly edited by Barry Paris, Adler’s lectures on the giants of twentieth-century theater feature her indispensable insights into such classic plays as “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” “The Skin of Our Teeth,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Come Back, Little Sheba,” “The Glass Menagerie,”  and “Death of a Salesman,” while shedding new light on such lesser known gems as Tennessee Williams’s “The Lady of Larkspur Lotion” and Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall.” Illuminating, revelatory, inspiring—this is Stella Adler at her electrifying best.\u003c\/p\u003e“An essential text . . . Adler worked to bring a greater understanding of the human condition to the American stage.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Intoxicating . . . Paris has done a magnificent job. . . Every sentence is a treasure. . . . For actors and actresses this rich material is essential. For those interested in the American theater, it is a must. For cultured people everywhere, this book belongs in their personal canon. . . . It is about so much more than simply bringing to life the work of major artists; it is really the expression of a way of life, and of looking at art as something larger than life.\"  —Peter Bogdanovich, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Adler’s voice pops into life on the pages . . . Fascinating . . . often hilarious. . . . Adler knows these plays the way a master violist knows her instrument.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Adler projects to the back of the house. It is indeed the voice of a giant . . . Provides invaluable insights . . . and erupts into sustained verbal fireworks as you’ve never heard elsewhere.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Passionate, opinionated, and consummately dramatic, Stella Adler’s voice and personality come through in every word . . . dense and detailed . . . filled with insight, wit, and fervor . . . a lively and fascinating look into the beliefs and methods of the late teacher, who, twenty years after her death, is still regarded as one of the greatest in the history of American theater.” —\u003ci\u003eSTAGE Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“[The book is] about so much more than simply bringing to life the work of major artists; it is really the expression of a way of life, and of looking at art as something larger than life. . . . Stella had a marvelous way of mixing erudition with down-to-earth realities, show business know-how with a few Yiddishisms, all combined with a vivid sense of what she called a theater of ‘heightened reality’. . . . This book brings her voice back quite viscerally. It’s Stella talking, taking you on her particular roller-coaster ride through the playwrights and their characters.” —Peter Bogdanovich, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“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\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Stella was a first-name force of nature . . . There is considerable entertainment in the energy of her assertions . . . And then there is the staggering clarity, the piercing insight and the pure, undeniable genius of her dissection of the plays themselves.” —\u003ci\u003eWashington Independent Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Paris has performed a great service by presenting Adler’s astute perspectives about these writers, whom she knew and admired. Her views are valuable not only for actors, but for anyone interested in the American theatre and its extraordinary achievements.” —\u003ci\u003eBay Area Reporter\u003c\/i\u003eSTELLA ADLER 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBARRY PARIS is the author of biographies of Louise Brooks, Greta Garbo, and Audrey Hepburn, and the editor of \u003ci\u003eStella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekov\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eStella Adler on America's Master Playwrights.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003eExcerpted from the Hardcover Edition\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eOne\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eActor vs. Interpreter\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere ­aren’t two actors in the  entire Western world who can ­really play King Lear. I’ll tell you  something, there weren’t two actors in America they could find to play  Willy in Death of a Salesman, because of the size of the character.  There ­aren’t many who can play these parts. It’s a big stretch for an  actor to live up to the playwright. But you can’t do less.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf you  say “I’m an actor,” people think you’re an idiot. You come from an  American tradition where the actor is buried by the government—or worse,  where he is invited to partake in the government. The term “script  interpretation” is a profession; it’s your profession. From now on,  instead of saying “I’m an actor,” it would be a better idea for you to  say “My profession is to interpret a script.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLet’s start with  this: I don’t care what you think about ­me—­good, bad,  ­indifferent—­and I don’t care what I think about you. It’s a fair  exchange. You have a lot to learn, starting with an understanding that  your concept of the theater is the least responsible of any country in  the world. I want to make you responsible for being an actor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou  have to come from a tradition where the actor has a better reputation  and rightly deserves it. We don’t, because our theater has changed so  that it’s not ­really much of a theater anymore. We’re a  ­film-­and-­television leftover. ­That’s going to be pretty permanent,  but it ­doesn’t have to be fatal. After all, the Greek theater is still  around; it’s pretty old. The word theater itself comes from the  Greeks—it means “the seeing place.” It’s the place where people come to  see a spiritual and social X‑ray of their time. The theater was created  to tell people the truth about life and the social situation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYour  job is not to “act.” Your job is to interpret. You can’t go on the  stage as you are. There are no criteria now, good or bad. Everything is  in transition. That is not unusual in history. The French Revolution was  a transition. The Great Depression was a transition. During that  collapse of our economy, we changed from being a ­middle-­class audience  into a ­lower-­middle-­class audience with money. We are in transition  again now, and if you understand that, you will start to understand  something about American theater, which is also in transition.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn  the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American theater was just  fooling around. I don’t know what we were doing. Nobody does. But I  know there were authors called Tolstoy, Chekhov, Andreyev, and Evreinov  in Russia; in Germany there was Goethe; in Czechoslovakia there was  Cˇapek; in France, Claudel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom Goethe on, all these very, very  good plays existed in Europe. We ­didn’t have that. But we played their  plays. We saw them and acted in them. I acted in one called Bloody  Laughter and ­didn’t understand one word of it. I acted in a lot of  plays that were so ­grown-­up, while I was an ­un-­grown‑up American who  ­didn’t know it was my responsibility to understand what I was doing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOnce  the playwright has written the play and the play is here, he’s done his  job. It’s closed. It lies there. Then it hangs around for people to see  or read or study or act in. It is an extremely difficult literary form,  that little ­play—­so few pages. ­That’s a difficult form and one  ­that’s not understood. He has done his job; then you come along. You  say, ­“What’s my job?” You don’t know your job. You don’t even know the  name of your job. All you know is, “There’s a ­play—­I’ll act!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA  play has two aspects\/essences: it is divided into the literary side  (the playwright’s) and the histrionic side (the actor’s). The histrionic  side belongs to the actor and to what he puts into it, how he thinks,  what he says and understands through it in his mind, his soul, his  background, his culture, his personality, his whole being.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat  histrionic side of the actor is what he is and what he adds to the play.  The play is dead. It lies there. The other side is the side that people  fool around with. ­That’s what makes a man say “I want to be an actor.”  He’s no shmegegge; he wants to play King Lear. He wants to play Hamlet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI  remember a man coming to my father once and saying, “I’ve been working  on Hamlet for five years.” His name was Jack Barrymore. He was working  on The Living Corpse and he played it well. He worked hard at it and  then he worked himself into becoming a drunk, a bum, because the  transition happened: the transition from a place called the theater (and  Broadway was part of that) into a place called the movies. He was  called out to do the movies, and he was not a man who understood the  movies, even though he beautifully understood words.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo when the playwright’s job is done, you come along and say, “I’ll take it from here and just say his words.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut  you can’t just take his words, because the words, by themselves, won’t  help you. You have to take his soul. You have to take his life, his  experience of life, his ethic, what he has said to the world. I’m  talking about real playwrights. I’m talking about plays that have in  them enough to change the thinking of the world. The thinking of the  whole world was changed by Ibsen. Nothing was ever the same after Ibsen,  because he was a man who, through his craft, through his talent, was  able to say the truth. He was able to say it to a certain kind of  audience.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis audience was not the king—not royalty or  aristocracy. It was you. You were a new audience, something that was  happening, and he was telling you the truth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAre you mature  enough to take on the Greek classics? I don’t know. You would have to  study Greek art and architecture and movement. You would have to learn  that the temples of religion were connected with the gods, the temple of  art had to do with the mind, and the temple of the body had to do with  what it was to be a man in Greece. You’d have to understand how the  discus thrower and the masks were part of that. To be a Greek actor,  you’d have to do a lot. First of all, you’d have to look at the statues  and architecture. ­That’s the least you’d have to ­do—­something to  understand Greek philosophy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou are involved with a movement  ­that’s two thousand years old, the first movement of a theater that had  a text and a value that are still handed down to us. A major part of  Greek culture is in our culture, although we don’t use it; it’s still  there. If you go back and study it, you would have a much more serious  attitude ­toward your background. You don’t have enough of a serious  attitude ­toward your theatrical background. It’s not ­really your  ­fault—­it isn’t offered to you.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUnderstand your profession:  “Interpretation” means that I’m going to find the play and the  playwright in me. I’m not going to do Ibsen if it’s Chekhov. I’m not  going to do Chekhov if it’s Strindberg. I’m not going to do Strindberg  if it’s Shaw. These are different playwrights with different minds, and  they say different things. The things they say will stay in literature  forever. They want something. They have the mind to say something. They  find the form to say it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn actor has to be big, enormous—a giant. His mind, his feeling, his ability to interpret must be that of a giant.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou  have to find the character and the place that he is working in. You  have to be able to wear the costume. You have to use the words. You have  to have the ideas. You have to have the back of the ideas. You have to  experience the ideas. You have to have the soul of the ideas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShaw  ­didn’t act. Chekhov ­didn’t act. Strindberg acted. It led him to the  insane asylum. He was there for a long time . . . These men were  connected with different kinds of theaters. They were the great  Europeans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe’re going to do Odets, Miller, Wilder, O’Neill,  Tennessee Williams. They are the great Americans. The American problem  of interpretation is very different from the European. I told you that  Mr. Barrymore said, “I worked five years on a play.” He certainly  ­didn’t work on the words, did he? Everybody knows the words: “To be or  not to be, that is the question.” It’s not the words. It’s a specific  author in a specific moment in history and a specific style that he  worked on.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI’ll say it again: every playwright writes in a  specific moment in history. He does not write your history. He’s not  writing about Reagan. ­That’s not his president. It may be Wilson or  Roosevelt or Jefferson. There’s a difference between Reagan and  Jefferson that comes out of the time. You can’t put Jefferson in  Reagan’s time or Reagan in Jefferson’s. Every play comes out of the  author in a special moment in history, and there’s a special style that  goes with that moment. Mr. Jefferson was very close to the French  government. He understood and was educated, had a great deal to do with  foreign countries. I don’t think Mr. Reagan went abroad unless he was  paid for it. Every writer writes in his style. The style comes out of  his moment in history.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Greeks wrote in their moment of  history. Shakespeare wrote in his. Chekhov wrote in his moment. Odets  wrote in his. If you agree that the moment in history determines a great  deal of what the playwright wants to say, then you will not say “I  think I’ll play in Shaw” without knowing the moment in history that  created Shaw. Shaw influenced the whole British government! He was  influential enough to make a big impression on ­En­glish society through  his dynamic work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen you do an author, you must know him. If  you don’t know the author, you’re crazy. You must understand him and his  time, not your time. Your time is quite easily understood. You live in a  very industrial moment. There are cars. There’s electricity. There’s  manufacturing. There is science. It’s your time. It’s not Shakespeare’s  time. There’s no electricity in Shakespeare’s time. The time element is  the most important thing: the moment in which your playwright is  writing; the ethic of that ­time—­the fact that women are sitting here  in ­pants—­is very different from the ethic at the moment when Mr. Shaw  wrote his plays. There were no [women in] pants. The fact that you wear  pants means that a lot has changed. The fact that your hair is cut long  or short represents a tremendous change in world circumstances. Walking  around in the streets with long hair down to your waist was a sign of  insanity not too long ago.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf you went out on the stage in Samson  and Delilah, you would be considered insane just because you had long  hair. It belonged in the bedroom or in the hospital. It did not belong  in the drawing room.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYour profession is to interpret, and you  have to interpret your time. Your time is different than any other. It  is an industrial and scientific time. If you understand that, you will  understand also that with it goes a certain kind of ethic. In a previous  time, most people went to church. Then Mr. Darwin came along and said,  “Never mind the church. You came from a monkey, so shut up about  ­it—­you don’t need a God.” But a lot of people said, “I don’t care if I  came from a ­monkey—­I still feel like I came from God.” Then Freud  came along and said that people’s confusion came from their  psychological inability to solve what was going on in their inner self.  He saved a great many people from the insane asylum. Then another kind  of a man came along, Mr. Einstein, who changed the world by making the  physics of the universe clearer. His scientific mind changed the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  world gets changed by certain people. They can be scientists or  writers. Listen to them. You don’t listen well enough. I want you to  gain an understanding of how to listen. All your life you have thought  you listen, but you have heard only about one hundredth of what was said  to you because you don’t understand that true listening is something  that comes from your soul, your blood, your concentration, your mind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eListening is a very difficult thing. You must acquire the asset of listening with all of your instinctive abilities.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf  you speak about the ­En­glish actors, you would say that Olivier has a  lot of craft, which means he has the essential beginnings with which to  interpret. If you have the craft of the piano, you have the beginning of  being able to play the piano with talent. There is no profession  without craft, except yours.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDo you understand the difference  between craft and the result of craft, which is talent? Nobody says “I  want to play the piano at Carnegie Hall” before they take some lessons.  You can imagine what it would sound like.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs an actor you need  craft. Mr. Olivier can hold the curtain up. He knows how the play is  built. He’s thought about it. You could say he knows how to act. He  knows how to handle the part. If you talk about Ralph Richardson, you’d  say he knows how to handle the part and you don’t have to worry about  him. Sometimes you have to worry about Mr. Olivier, because his craft is  bigger than his talent, greater. But once in a while he will give a  great performance.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCraft is the basic thing in the beginning of  this work for you to understand: it is your handle. It is not your  talent. But you must have it. The pianist has it. The flutist has it.  The painter has it. Everybody has it except the modern actor. We don’t  have it, and therefore we have very few actors. We have nobody that we  can send to Europe. Well, we can send a type to Europe. De Niro would be  a very good type to send to Europe.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut everybody is suited for  more than what they look like. For instance, you know what I look like.  You’ll tell me the truth, and I don’t want to hear it: I look a little  like an ­ex-­Hollywood star. I’m rather pretty and graceful. I have a  lot of assets, but I’m ­really a character actress. I played servants,  peasants, secretaries, queens. I played every goddamned thing they could  think of when they ­couldn’t give it to anyone else.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300483092709,"sku":"NP9780679746997","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780679746997.jpg?v=1767737297","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/stella-adler-on-americas-master-playwrights-isbn-9780679746997","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}