Acting with Adler (review)

Acting with Adler. By Joanna Rotté. New York: Limelight Editions, 2000; pp. 191. $14.95.

Joanna Rotté studied with Stella Adler during the 1970s. It was the period when Adler may well have been at the height of her powers as a teacher and as an icon. She was legendary for having been the only member of the Group Theatre to have actually studied with Konstantin Stanislavski, and for announcing on her return that they had gotten it all wrong. Harold Clurman called her the greatest acting teacher in America. The craftsmanship of her most famous students, like Marlon Brando and Robert de Niro, had helped to establish her mystique. Stories ran rampant in the theatre community about the miracles of student acting she wrought daily--and of her emotional abuse of some.

Acting With Adler is Joanna Rotté's chronicle of her two years of training at the Stella Adler Conservatory. It also includes some description of the experience of having Adler direct an ensemble of Conservatory graduates in Thornton Wilder's The Happy Journey from Trenton to Camden.

Rotté's account creates a vivid portrait of Adler as a consummate teacher and a complex woman: as a teacher she is demanding; as a woman she is needy. The central theme of a course of study under Adler was that acting is an art that bears a responsibility to the continuing history of theatre, human civilization, and truth. It is, according to Adler, a sacred responsibility. There is a lot of confusion these days about whether conservatories are nourishing artists for a theatre or training commodities for the entertainment industry. It is refreshing to read how Adler could unashamedly instill in her students a sense of artistic dedication and significance. It would be easy to turn cynical and interpret some of Adler's most outrageous flights of eloquence on this theme as posturing, but Rotté manages to put them in a context that renders them convincing, even inspirational. There is, indeed, a quality of romanticism and nostalgia in Acting With Adler that some may find naïve. I do not. There is a lot to be said for belief in a passionate, informed commitment to life as an artist. The straightforward clarity of Rotté's account of her training under Adler forces us to recognize that.

The structure of Acting With Adler is reminiscent of the structure of An Actor Prepares. The voice is that of a student. She takes the reader through all the stages of instruction from overview, through the building blocks of concentration, observation and relaxation, to the more complex problems of action and characterization. The strategy is one of narrative rather than a series of explicated exercises. The difference between the two books is the permeating presence of Stella Adler.

Adler emerges here as a central member of a generation of early twentieth-century artists--actors, directors, musicians, painters--who were also humanists. Like her former husband, Harold Clurman, and their close friend Aaron Copeland, Adler's mission was to wrest a uniquely American aesthetic from everything she found rich and honorable in the European tradition--including the Yiddish theatre in which she grew up.

Rotté captures Adler's often combative tone that springs from her recognition of the difference between the European respect for art and the American commodification of it. Her frequent exhortations to her students to maintain their principles, their dedication and their standards are tinged with impatience and frustration at the commercial system of American theatre. It is worthwhile to remember that in the years in which Adler was a working actress regional theatres were almost non-existent. The American theatre was defined by its for-profit Broadway producers.

Acting With Adler is primarily a memoir. It is as much permeated by the sensibility of the author as by Adler. This is a strategy Rotté uses in all her work. Her previous book, Scene Change (1994), a personal memoir of a theatre tour of Prague, Moscow, and Leningrad in 1991, hinges on...