Dont use your conscious past. Use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character. I dont want you to be stuck with your own life. Its too little.

You must get beneath the words before you can say them. The text must be in you. It is your job to fill, not to empty the words. They can only be used if they come out of what you need to say. Stella Adler

From one the most celebrated and influential acting teachers of her time, of all time, whose generations of students include Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn, Eva Marie Saint, Diana Ross, Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, Annette Benning, Peter Bogdanovich, Mark Ruffalothe long-awaited companion volume to her book on the master European playwrights Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov (Evidence, wrote John Guare, that Stella Adler is hands down the greatest acting teacher America has produced . . . Nobody with a serious interest in the theater can afford to be without this book).

She was a force of nature, an unforgettable personality. Once, when she walked into a crowded room and her presence caused a hush to fall over it, a little girl asked, Mommy, is that God?

Adler saw script interpretation as the actors profession (The most important thing you can teach actors is to understand plays). Her classes of script analysis became legendary; brilliant revelations of the playwrights, the characters, the social class and the time of the play as opposed to ones own. Adler explored how to find the ideas and experience them; how to search for the soul, for what is unsaid; all of this as a way of building craft as distinct from talent.

Her new book, brilliantly edited by Barry Paris, brings together her most important lectures on Americas plays and playwrights, the giants of the twentieth century, men she knew, loved, and worked with. Adler considers, among them, Eugene ONeill, ; his first play, ; and his last, (ONeill is a mystical playwright . . . his speech is vernacular, down-to-earth . . . it conveys the idea that there is nothing real outside, but thats where I want to besomewhere out in the fog. The answers are hard to get in a fog) . . .

She writes about Tennessee Williams and , , and (Williams captivates us because of the romantic way in which he escapes the filth and frustration . . . The greatness in Williams is that [the characters] have a to run away. What do they run away from? From the monster of commercialism and competition, from things that kill the melody and beauty of life) . . . about Clifford Odets (Clifford, if you dont become a genius, Adler once said to him, Ill never forgive you); and about his plays and (on Lorna Moon and Joe Bonaparte: You cant put a whore together with a Napoleonic man and think theyre going to make it. They might make it under certain conditionsbut not from the point of view of love. This is not a love story. Its a hate story) . . . about William Inge and and; about Arthur Miller, ([The salesmans sons] are Biff and Happy . . . Theyre not George and Jacob. Their names are shortcuts. Its the American Waya way of saying, Well leave out tradition . . . That tells you something youll see throughout the entire play: they are cut off from custom) about Millers; and Edward Albees and.

Illuminating, revelatory, inspiring: Stella Adler at her electrifying best.

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