Stella Adler’s route to Stanislavsky was a direct one. She met him in Paris. Before their meeting she was introduced to his “system” by Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya at the American Laboratory Theatre. She joined their theatre in 1925 and studied there for two years (Adler, Technique 118). She also came into contact with Stanislavsky’s concepts at the Group Theatre of which she was a founding member (Meisner 9). Adler sorted through all the representations of Stanislavsky’s “system” she had experienced. When she did meet him in Paris, she gave her verdict to him directly, “Mr. Stanislavski, I loved the theatre until you came along, and now I hate it” (Adler, Technique 120)! Stanislavsky responded, “[If] the System does not help you, forget it. But perhaps you do not use it properly” (Garfield 33).
Adler had travelled to Paris, because she liked to visit Europe when she was able to (Adler, Technique 118). She was there with Harold Clurman whom she later married. The year was 1934 (Garfield 33). Clurman informed her, “[You] know, Stella, Stanislavski is here” (Adler, Technique 119). They arranged to spend some time with him. After the initially awkward meeting and her emphatic statement about hating the theatre, Stanislavsky agreed to actually work with her. It was on the play, The Gentle Women by Don Powell (120). The two spent a period of five weeks examining the script and various aspects of his ‘system’ (Garfield 33).
Adler characterized their working relationship; “Stanislavski and I were in the greatest closeness of director and actress, and very soon it was just actor and actress” (Adler, Technique 120)! During their training sessions, Stanislavsky emphasized the use of the actor’s Imagination. Adler explained, “Particularly, he made very clear to me that an actor must have an enormous imagination that is free and not inhibited by self consciousness. I understood that he was very much an actor who was fed by the imagination” (120).
He then explained to Adler “how important it was to use the circumstances” (120). As she represents the conversation, he referenced the Six Fundamental Questions, “He said that where you are is what you are, and how you are, and what you can be. You are in a place that will feed you, that will give you strength, that will give you the ability to do whatever you want” (120).
He also engaged her in an exercise that related to his Method of Physical Action technique, where an actor would string together Actions that a play suggested. He told her to “just do a few things and put a plot around it” (121). Adler strung together a few Actions like, moving to a window and seeing something “in which I was emotionally, immediately involved” (121). She moved to a desk and, “signed her name at the bottom of the letter. Again, I was dramatically, deeply involved with the plot […]” (121).
Stanislavsky confided in her about his performance as Stockmann in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, a performance I referenced in his section of this paper. As Stockmann, he had achieved a great artistic triumph only to end up lost in the role, mechanically moving without meaning. Adler said he told her “ it took him ten years to find the part. While he was gathering the Elements for a technique that would make acting easier, he found the answer to the problem that he had essentially experienced as an actor throughout his life […]” (121).
She summed up their time together, “[We] worked intimately on scenes and on improvisations, and I was able to be completely at ease, completely at home. I felt as if I had worked with him for a lifetime. He was gentle and ‘absolutely theatre’: nothing but theatre came through. Kindness and interest – a master with a student” (121). Stanislavsky also summed up the core of what he taught her: “I search in the given circumstances never the feelings. If I try and do the psychological, I force the action. We must attack the psychological from the point of view of the physical life so as not to disturb the feeling.[…] In each psychological action there is some physical element. Search for the line, in terms of the action, not feeling” (Garfield 33).
Adler returned to the Group with her findings concerning Stanislavsky’s emphasis on Given Circumstances, Imagination, and Action and that the actor should “search in the given circumstances [sic] never the feelings” (33). Stanislavsky had outlined the Method of Physical Action for her (Benedetti, Introduction 99). Although Garfield notes, “Stanislavski […] explained to her the centrality of ‘actions and tasks’ […]. However, the precise nature of the changes he was broaching was yet to be clarified, and there were to be four more years during which he would solidify that approach that would formally be tagged ‘the Method of Physical Actions’” (176).
Her explanation of Stanislavsky’s new emphasis on Action over Emotional Memory was “one of the most controversial episodes in the history of the Group […]” (Garfield 33). She brought a chart that outlined all that Stanislavsky had taught her and asserted that “the company [the Group] had been misusing the ‘affective memory’ exercise, which Stanislavski now recommended only as a last resort and that the given circumstances and action, according to the Russian theorist, should be given primary attention” (33).
Strasberg reacted to her news and was “angered by her report and her charge of misuse of the work, and concluded that either she had misunderstood what Stanislavski had told her or that the Russian Master ‘had gone back on himself’” (33). Adler’s confrontation with Strasberg decreased his influence on the Group and led to his eventual withdrawal from its ranks in 1935 (Meisner 10).
For Adler, direct knowledge from the source, Stanislavsky, was power, the power of independence from the grip of Lee Strasberg who was the primary interpreter of Stanislavsky’s “system” for the Group Theatre (Garfield 25). However, Sanford Meisner claimed that Adler considered Strasberg to be an enemy even before the Group began (Meisner 182). For Adler, ideas were paramount, “Nothing is stronger than The Idea — not Stella, not anybody, not even God” (Adler, Art 26).
Howard Kissel, the editor of Adler’s book The Art of Acting, felt her true design for theatre and the actor was nothing short of Biblical. He captured her divergence from Strasberg’s inward looking emotional memory emphasis to an outward looking emphasis on action in this way:
- The emphasis on doing rather than feeling makes the Adler approach more practical. It is reasonable, she – and Stanislavsky – asserted, to expect the actor to be able to perform actions; it is not reasonable to expect him to conjure up emotions. The emphasis on doing also has a very Old Testament quality. What has been seen as the legalistic tone of the Pentateuch stems from its insistence that the deity is not an abstraction. He is a living force who makes specific demands – Thou shalt do this, thou shalt not do that. One affirms one’s faith not merely in prayer or meditation but in very specific actions, like leaving part of one’s field unharvested so the poor can gather it.[…] The notion that actions have profound undercurrents and that the nature of an action is worth quibbling over both underlie Adler’s approach to acting. In this sense her teaching was a secular version of the interpretive battles in which Jews have been engaged for millennia. So were her disputes with the other Group alumni who became teachers. (Adler Art, Epilogue)
According to Kissel, Adler’s fight against Strasberg’s inward looking version of Stanislavsky’s system was a fight for the nature of the actor, his command (which Adler called “size”), which made him a figure worthy to comment on the world. She saw theater not just as a distraction but a grand social compact that could ennoble a fallen world, i.e., a mandate for the theatre and the actor that she could not leave in the hands of her intellectual enemy, Strasberg. (Adler Art, Epilogue). She made that clear:
- I myself was part of the Group Theatre, where the technique was supposedly being used. But as an actress who had a great deal of experience elsewhere, I resented acting with some of the principles that were used at the Group Theatre. Because of this, I became a stranger, I excluded myself from the way in which they rehearsed and the way the plays were directed.[…] They knew that I was against what was happening at the Group Theatre (Adler, Technique 119).
To solidify her own version of the “system”, Adler sorted through all the representations of it that she had experienced and then forged her own path. Despite the praise she heaped on Stanislavsky, she declared her independence from him, too. In fact she told her students:
- Don’t read his book, because it absolutely makes no sense. He came from a culture entirely alien to yours, and you wont understand it.[…] The Method is something you’ll find through me. I am one of the two million people who have been inspired by it. But my particular contribution will be to make you independent of The Method. You will have the strength to reformulate it and go your own way. (13 – 14)
It is relevant to note that Adler used “Method” to mean Stanislavsky’s “system” and her own version of that “system”.
Essence of Adler’s Technique
Both Stanislavsky’s “system” and Strasberg’s Method inspired Stella Adler. Yet, Ironically, the man whom she denounced – Stanislavsky – dominated her future work. Tom Oppenheim, in his section of Training of the American Actor explains: “Stanislavski […] released her from the obligation to work on feeling in favor of choosing and playing actions and living imaginatively in the given circumstances of the play.[…] Truth was to be found not exclusively in one’s personal past but through one’s imagination and in the given circumstances […]” (Bartow 45).
She moved away Emotion Memory by choosing to focus on an actor’s Actions in the play. To choose Action, she first encouraged her students to answer questions about an Action. The questions were basically the Six Fundamental Questions from Stanislavsky’s “system”. Adler taught that the actor must know specifics about his Given Circumstances in order to commit to an Action. (Adler, Technique 36). Adler stated, “[You] have come to learn how to act, and I keep telling you I want to teach you how not to act – except in a very precise sense of performing actions” (Adler, Art 115).
Her exploration of Actions was a kind of word study exercise. The Action, “to take care of” could become a lesson on nature to her students with the class on stage trying to save an imaginary fledgling bird that had fallen from its nest (115). She instructed, “[There] are many actions worth studying – to take care of, to learn, to teach, to study, to reveal, to confess, to arouse […]” (115). The actor was to explore and strengthen the Action through a firm grasp of the Given Circumstances through his own Imagination. Adler explains; “[…] the deep understanding of the circumstances, creates the indispensable need for him [the actor] to use his imagination. The nature of his imagination is to try to visualize, as completely as possible, the characters and circumstances of he play” (Adler, Technique 116). Her technique moved fluidly between understanding the fullness of the Given Circumstances through one’s Imagination in order to conceive of Action.
Adler clarified her views on the actor’s Imagination: “Ninety-nine percent of what you see and use on the stage comes from imagination.[…] Every circumstance you find yourself in will be an imaginary one.[…] Every action must originate in the actor’s imagination. Unless a fact passes through you […], it is a lie.[…] The most important exercises are those that have to do with the use of imagination” (16). For Adler, Imagination was a necessary entryway to the life of, say, an English Nobleman, a French Aristocrat, or a nun. Imagination and research into the Given Circumstances of the play, not Emotion Memory, allowed the actor to portray roles beyond his experience (Adler, Art 81)
Adler emphasizes her opposition to an exclusive focus on Emotion Memory in The Art of Acting. To make her point she discusses the character of Hamlet.
- I have the feeling that none of you has become convinced that your father was murdered by your uncle.[…] These are very specific circumstances. It is the actor’s job to delve into them, to imagine them, not just find circumstances in his own life that correspond to them. There are none. You felt miserable when your beloved grandmother died. You were inconsolable when the dog you had all through your childhood was run over by a car. The memory of these things can give you clues about his father’s death, but only clues. Whatever you reconstruct from your emotional memory is no substitute for putting your imagination to work. (81)
Interestingly, she did not dismiss Emotion Memory entirely but she made it less important than Imagination. From the quotation above, she admitted that “the memory of these things”, such as a dead pet or grandparent, “can give you clues about his [Hamlet’s] father’s death, but only clues”. She accepted the clues that Emotion Memory could provide. Emotion Memory had another application in Adler’s Technique. She called it the “‘golden box, that contained the actor’s personal source for the feelings needed in a scene” (Bartow 45).
Adler also had great respect for historical civilization and its form. She lectured her students about Greek architecture and its magnificent columns. That led her to the costumes and integrity of priests and nuns. She posited, “[When] we looked at the Greek columns we saw a strong solid base. We felt the root strength. We should feel the same in those who wear the costumes of a religious order. The members of an order are like columns. They dress exactly alike.[…] There was a moment in history when mankind found a form – through the church […]” (Adler, Art 199). Through her imagination, she explored the realities of the civilized world past and present to encourage her students to take on roles of “size”.
Throughout her book, Adler wanted “size” from her students. She said, “[Yet] the place of the actor in his own profession is clear and unchallengeable. On him rests the high responsibility of […] playing characters of size as Oedipus, Hamlet, Hedda Gabler, Joan of Arc, and Willy Loman” (Adler, Technique 5). She said, “Write this down: you have to develop size. That is what we are here to work on” (22). And also, “I will help you develop the habits that will give you size” (22). She wanted her actors to have the “size” to play the large roles. She went on: “[We] have to restore theatre to its historical purpose, lift it to the level where it existed all over the world for thousands of years. To the point where we understand that what the playwright was saying was, these are rules, these are the cosmic rules” (33).
In her books The Art of Acting and The Technique of Acting, Adler used the term size in ambiguous ways. One way to clarify this term in her vernacular is to apply it to some of the basic building blocks of her technique: Given Circumstances, Justification and Action. Before going on, I should clarify that Justification in Adler’s technique was simply the Justification for an action or the reason that an action would be undertaken by the actor in his role (Adler, Art 125). Adler stated, “Your talent consists in how well you ‘shop’ for justification. Your justification is what gives size to your actions. You must make every action you perform epic” (125). Adler also believed with Stanislavsky that “The truth in art is the truth of your circumstances” (Adler, Technique 31). Identifying your Given Circumstances as an actor is the entire context of that actor’s size, as she defined it.
While Strasberg, Stanislavsky and Meisner called an organic, emotionally true performance inspired, Adler’s idea of an actor in peak performance was an actor with size. Her desire for that size also led her to Stanislavsky’s “system” just as the desire for inspired acting led Strasberg and Meisner. The commonality between these two difficult terms, “size” and “inspiration”, is found in their so-called “eternal” qualities.
An inspired performance, where an actor seems to live organically on stage, is a performance that dissects the reality of all men. When an actor performs the great roles that require Adler’s size, that actor is also a stand-in for all men. An inspired performance possessed of size speaks to man as he always has been and as he will be, beset by suffering and fighting to overcome it. This is the “eternal man” or man as archetype. Meisner, Strasberg and Stanislavsky, in witnessing that, saw an emotionally full, organic, life like performance. Adler did, too, but referred to it as “size”. All involved spoke to the “eternal” quality that good art possesses.
Adler came closest to ironing out her use of the term size when she wrote the introduction to her husband, Harold Clurman’s, The Fervent Years. It is important to note, Jacob P. Adler was Stella Adler’s father. He is referred to in this statement:
- Harold too dreamed of a greater and more compelling American theatre, as he explains in his own foreword to The Fervent Years. He saw that super-size was necessary and found it in the person of Jacob P. Adler, who could hypnotize an audience with his colossal quality. This was the essence of theatre Harold sought: monumental stature and universality.[…] Another way of stating my point is to describe it as a search for universal size, larger than life, a size possessed by a Lear or a Shylock. (Clurman, Fervent vi – vii)
Adler used the terms epic, cosmic order, monumental stature, universality, in all the previous quotes I’ve related. They reflect her way of communicating what size involves. Terms like these further align her with Stanislavsky’s, Strasberg’s and Meisner’s thoughts about inspiration. Her use of pseudo religious terms is reminiscent of Stanislavsky’s way of referring to inspiration which an actor could not chase on his own, but had to rely on, “that miraculous fairy nature” (Stanislavsky, Handbook 85), to call inspiration forth into the actor’s performance.
As I have shown, Stella Adler had a unique interpretation of Stanislavsky’s “system” which included her rejection of Strasberg’s interpretation of it. She also had a profound effect on Sanford Meisner who, in his early career, was dependent on Strasberg to define Stanislavsky’s work. After Adler returned from Paris with information from Stanislavsky himself, Strasberg’s intellectual influence over Meisner was lessened. Meisner sided with Adler when she “rejected Strasberg’s emphasis on affective memory in favor of use of the imagination” (Malague 117).
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