Book review: Stella! Mother of Modern Acting, by Sheana Ochoa

by Sheana Ochoa
Applause Theater & Cinema Books
2.5 stars
Charles McNulty

The exclamatory title of Sheana Ochoa's biography of legendary acting teacher Stella Adler invokes Marlon Brando's tormented cry in A Streetcar Named Desire.

It's a fitting allusion: Brando was Adler's most famous pupil, and his endorsement of her teaching over Lee Strasberg's Method was a crucial victory in the war between these two American interpreters of Constantin Stanislavski's revolutionary system of acting training.

Adler and Strasberg's bickering began at the Group Theatre, the groundbreaking depression-era collective that Strasberg formed with Adler's future husband, director Harold Clurman, and producer Cheryl Crawford, aimed at endowing American theatre with a political conscience and promulgating a startling new brand of realism. The daughter of Yiddish theatre star Jacob Adler, she was far too imperious to defer to Strasberg, who was working out his theory of affective memory, the mining of an actor's private experience for the attainment of a more acute realism.

What could Strasberg teach Adler that she hadn't already learned as a girl acting with her nearest and dearest on stage? She was born, as she said, "into a kingdom", a princess of the Yiddish theatre. To her, Strasberg was an interloper preaching a psychological technique that wasn't only impractical but injurious to the longevity of an actor.

After studying with Stanislavsky in Paris, Adler contended that Strasberg had badly misinterpreted the Russian master. She returned to the Group Theatre with an urgent corrective: the actor must imaginatively enter the circumstance of the play, concentrating on the actions of the character, not his or her own childhood hurts and resentments.