In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights: Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee ed. by Barry Paris
  • Sheila Hickey Garvey (bio)
Barry Paris, Ed.
Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights: Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee
New York: Knopf, 2012. 386 pp.
ISBN: 978-0-679-42443-7

Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights, edited and with commentary by Barry Paris, will likely be seen as an essential reference for those who were unable to study with the celebrated Stanislavski-based acting teacher. Readers of the O’Neill Review who also teach acting should find Adler’s book valuable. She is adamant when insisting that the canon of Nobel and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Eugene O’Neill is the primary or key source to which actors should refer when attempting to understand and interpret all other twentieth-century American playwriting.

After beginning her career as a descendant of the Adler family acting dynasty, Adler acted and directed during the first half of the twentieth century. She was a member of the legendary American Yiddish Theatre and went on to become an original member of the Group Theatre where she met her second of three husbands, Harold Clurman. In 1961 Clurman authored The Fervent Years, the book theater devotees revere as being the Group’s definitive history. Adler wrote a foreword to The Fervent Years, one included in all editions published after Clurman’s death in 1980.

Adler became one of a handful of women who profoundly transformed American theater during the twentieth century. Her most significant contribution was that she documented and taught to generations of theater professionals a systematized version of techniques based on her personal studies with Konstantin Stanislavski. Not all of the most famous mid- twentieth-century realistic American acting teachers could claim a direct lineage to the great Russian master craftsman of realism. [End Page 258]

In 1949, Adler founded the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting in New York City and eventually opened a branch in California. Although she died in 1992, her studios continue to teach the techniques she developed. Many nascent theater professionals who later became famous studied with Adler and credit her influence on their stage, film, and television performances, among them Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Robert De Niro, Benicio Del Toro, Salma Hayek, Annette Bening, and Warren Beatty. In 1988 Adler documented her approach in her book The Technique of Acting and coauthored Creating a Character: A Physical Approach to Acting (with Moni Yakim and Muriel Broadman), which was completed and published a year after her death. In addition, Stella Adler: The Art of Acting, published in 2000, is a series of twenty-two of her sessions, compiled by Howard Kissel and drawn from a collection of tapes, videos, and manuscripts, with a foreword by Marlon Brando.

Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights is a companion volume to Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, also edited by Barry Paris. The former volume was in the planning stages prior to Adler’s death but not completed by Paris until 2012. This newest contribution focuses solely on major male American playwrights, many of whom she knew personally, and, like the companion volume, includes samples of class lectures Adler gave during her years leading acting workshops. In this volume she portrays herself as being at all times a dignified lady as well as a formidable intellect and interpreter of the playwrights she chooses to examine. Editor Paris broadens Adler’s notions of her persona in his “Apologia and Acknowledgments,” commenting that she was known within the theater community for “ unpredictable bursts of trenchant, dagger-sharp Yiddish-based humor” that “reached withering heights when directed at students.” He adds that Adler “was like her voice itself: grand, commanding, intimidating, pontifical, and majestic— in service to the redemptive glory of theater” (xi). What is universally agreed is that she was a force to be reckoned with, a woman who survived and contributed immeasurably to the development of the American acting tradition during a potent creative era dominated by formidable male artists.

Although realism became the mainstream international acting...

pdf