Stella Adler as mob moll Claire Porter in W. S. Van Dyke’s Shadow of the Thin Man (1941). Her hat rivaled Myrna Loy and her perfume ruffled William Powell. (Illustration Credit 1.1)
THERE AREN’T two actors in the entire Western world who can really play King Lear. I’ll tell you something, there weren’t two actors in America they could find to play Willy in Death of a Salesman, because of the size of the character. There aren’t many who can play these parts. It’s a big stretch for an actor to live up to the playwright. But you can’t do less.
If you say “I’m an actor,” people think you’re an idiot. You come from an American tradition where the actor is buried by the government—or worse, where he is invited to partake in the government.1 The term “script interpretation” is a profession; it’s your profession. From now on, instead of saying “I’m an actor,” it would be a better idea for you to say “My profession is to interpret a script.”
Let’s start with this: I don’t care what you think about me—good, bad, indifferent—and I don’t care what I think about you. It’s a fair exchange. You have a lot to learn, starting with an understanding that your concept of the theater is the least responsible of any country in the world. I want to make you responsible for being an actor.
You have to come from a tradition where the actor has a better reputation and rightly deserves it. We don’t, because our theater has changed so that it’s not really much of a theater anymore. We’re a film-and-television leftover. That’s going to be pretty permanent, but it doesn’t have to be fatal. After all, the Greek theater is still around; it’s pretty old. The word theater itself comes from the Greeks—it means “the seeing place.” It’s the place where people come to see a spiritual and social X-ray of their time. The theater was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation.
Your job is not to “act.” Your job is to interpret. You can’t go on the stage as you are. There are no criteria now, good or bad. Everything is in transition. That is not unusual in history. The French Revolution was a transition. The Great Depression was a transition. During that collapse of our economy, we changed from being a middle-class audience into a lower-middle-class audience with money. We are in transition again now, and if you understand that, you will start to understand something about American theater, which is also in transition.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American theater was just fooling around. I don’t know what we were doing. Nobody does. But I know there were authors called Tolstoy, Chekhov, Andreyev, and Evreinov in Russia; in Germany there was Goethe; in Czechoslovakia there was Čapek; in France, Claudel.2
From Goethe on, all these very, very good plays existed in Europe. We didn’t have that. But we played their plays. We saw them and acted in them. I acted in one called Bloody Laughter3 and didn’t understand one word of it. I acted in a lot of plays that were so grown-up, while I was an un-grown-up American who didn’t know it was my responsibility to understand what I was doing.
Once the playwright has written the play and the play is here, he’s done his job. It’s closed. It lies there. Then it hangs around for people to see or read or study or act in. It is an extremely difficult literary form, that little play—so few pages. That’s a difficult form and one that’s not understood. He has done his job; then you come along. You say, “What’s my job?” You don’t know your job. You don’t even know the name of your job. All you know is, “There’s a play—I’ll act!”
A play has two aspects/essences: it is divided into the literary side (the playwright’s) and the histrionic side (the actor’s). The histrionic side belongs to the actor and to what he puts into it, how he thinks, what he says and understands through it in his mind, his soul, his background, his culture, his personality, his whole being.
That histrionic side of the actor is what he is and what he adds to the play. The play is dead. It lies there. The other side is the side that people fool around with. That’s what makes a man say “I want to be an actor.” He’s no shmegegge;4 he wants to play King Lear. He wants to play Hamlet.
I remember a man coming to my father once and saying, “I’ve been working on Hamlet for five years.” His name was Jack Barrymore. He was working on The Living Corpse5 and he played it well. He worked hard at it and then he worked himself into becoming a drunk, a bum, because the transition happened: the transition from a place called the theater (and Broadway was part of that) into a place called the movies. He was called out to do the movies, and he was not a man who understood the movies, even though he beautifully understood words.
So when the playwright’s job is done, you come along and say, “I’ll take it from here and just say his words.”
But you can’t just take his words, because the words, by themselves, won’t help you. You have to take his soul. You have to take his life, his experience of life, his ethic, what he has said to the world. I’m talking about real playwrights. I’m talking about plays that have in them enough to change the thinking of the world. The thinking of the whole world was changed by Ibsen. Nothing was ever the same after Ibsen, because he was a man who, through his craft, through his talent, was able to say the truth. He was able to say it to a certain kind of audience.
His audience was not the king—not royalty or aristocracy. It was you. You were a new audience, something that was happening, and he was telling you the truth.
Are you mature enough to take on the Greek classics? I don’t know. You would have to study Greek art and architecture and movement. You would have to learn that the temples of religion were connected with the gods, the temple of art had to do with the mind, and the temple of the body had to do with what it was to be a man in Greece. You’d have to understand how the discus thrower and the masks were part of that. To be a Greek actor, you’d have to do a lot. First of all, you’d have to look at the statues and architecture. That’s the least you’d have to do—something to understand Greek philosophy.
You are involved with a movement that’s two thousand years old, the first movement of a theater that had a text and a value that are still handed down to us. A major part of Greek culture is in our culture, although we don’t use it; it’s still there. If you go back and study it, you would have a much more serious attitude toward your background. You don’t have enough of a serious attitude toward your theatrical background. It’s not really your fault—it isn’t offered to you.
Understand your profession: “Interpretation” means that I’m going to find the play and the playwright in me. I’m not going to do Ibsen if it’s Chekhov. I’m not going to do Chekhov if it’s Strindberg. I’m not going to do Strindberg if it’s Shaw. These are different playwrights with different minds, and they say different things. The things they say will stay in literature forever. They want something. They have the mind to say something. They find the form to say it.
An actor has to be big, enormous—a giant. His mind, his feeling, his ability to interpret must be that of a giant.
You have to find the character and the place that he is working in. You have to be able to wear the costume. You have to use the words. You have to have the ideas. You have to have the back of the ideas. You have to experience the ideas. You have to have the soul of the ideas.
Shaw didn’t act. Chekhov didn’t act. Strindberg acted. It led him to the insane asylum. He was there for a long time … These men were connected with different kinds of theaters. They were the great Europeans.
We’re going to do Odets, Miller, Wilder, O’Neill, Tennessee Williams. They are the great Americans. The American problem of interpretation is very different from the European. I told you that Mr. Barrymore said, “I worked five years on a play.” He certainly didn’t work on the words, did he? Everybody knows the words: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” It’s not the words. It’s a specific author in a specific moment in history and a specific style that he worked on.
I’ll say it again: every playwright writes in a specific moment in history. He does not write your history. He’s not writing about Reagan. That’s not his president. It may be Wilson or Roosevelt or Jefferson. There’s a difference between Reagan and Jefferson that comes out of the time. You can’t put Jefferson in Reagan’s time or Reagan in Jefferson’s. Every play comes out of the author in a special moment in history, and there’s a special style that goes with that moment. Mr. Jefferson was very close to the French government. He understood and was educated, had a great deal to do with foreign countries. I don’t think Mr. Reagan went abroad unless he was paid for it. Every writer writes in his style. The style comes out of his moment in history.
The Greeks wrote in their moment of history. Shakespeare wrote in his. Chekhov wrote in his moment. Odets wrote in his. If you agree that the moment in history determines a great deal of what the playwright wants to say, then you will not say “I think I’ll play in Shaw” without knowing the moment in history that created Shaw. Shaw influenced the whole British government! He was influential enough to make a big impression on English society through his dynamic work.
When you do an author, you must know him. If you don’t know the author, you’re crazy. You must understand him and his time, not your time. Your time is quite easily understood. You live in a very industrial moment. There are cars. There’s electricity. There’s manufacturing. There is science. It’s your time. It’s not Shakespeare’s time. There’s no electricity in Shakespeare’s time. The time element is the most important thing: the moment in which your playwright is writing; the ethic of that time—the fact that women are sitting here in pants—is very different from the ethic at the moment when Mr. Shaw wrote his plays. There were no [women in] pants. The fact that you wear pants means that a lot has changed. The fact that your hair is cut long or short represents a tremendous change in world circumstances. Walking around in the streets with long hair down to your waist was a sign of insanity not too long ago.
If you went out on the stage in Samson and Delilah, you would be considered insane just because you had long hair. It belonged in the bedroom or in the hospital. It did not belong in the drawing room.
Your profession is to interpret, and you have to interpret your time. Your time is different than any other. It is an industrial and scientific time. If you understand that, you will understand also that with it goes a certain kind of ethic. In a previous time, most people went to church. Then Mr. Darwin came along and said, “Never mind the church. You came from a monkey, so shut up about it—you don’t need a God.” But a lot of people said, “I don’t care if I came from a monkey—I still feel like I came from God.” Then Freud came along and said that people’s confusion came from their psychological inability to solve what was going on in their inner self. He saved a great many people from the insane asylum. Then another kind of a man came along, Mr. Einstein, who changed the world by making the physics of the universe clearer. His scientific mind changed the world.
The world gets changed by certain people. They can be scientists or writers. Listen to them. You don’t listen well enough. I want you to gain an understanding of how to listen. All your life you have thought you listen, but you have heard only about one hundredth of what was said to you because you don’t understand that true listening is something that comes from your soul, your blood, your concentration, your mind.
Listening is a very difficult thing. You must acquire the asset of listening with all of your instinctive abilities.
If you speak about the English actors, you would say that Olivier has a lot of craft, which means he has the essential beginnings with which to interpret. If you have the craft of the piano, you have the beginning of being able to play the piano with talent. There is no profession without craft, except yours.
Do you understand the difference between craft and the result of craft, which is talent? Nobody says “I want to play the piano at Carnegie Hall” before they take some lessons. You can imagine what it would sound like.
As an actor you need craft. Mr. Olivier can hold the curtain up. He knows how the play is built. He’s thought about it. You could say he knows how to act. He knows how to handle the part. If you talk about Ralph Richardson, you’d say he knows how to handle the part and you don’t have to worry about him. Sometimes you have to worry about Mr. Olivier, because his craft is bigger than his talent, greater. But once in a while he will give a great performance.
Craft is the basic thing in the beginning of this work for you to understand: it is your handle. It is not your talent. But you must have it. The pianist has it. The flutist has it. The painter has it. Everybody has it except the modern actor. We don’t have it, and therefore we have very few actors. We have nobody that we can send to Europe. Well, we can send a type to Europe. De Niro would be a very good type to send to Europe.
But everybody is suited for more than what they look like. For instance, you know what I look like. You’ll tell me the truth, and I don’t want to hear it: I look a little like an ex-Hollywood star. I’m rather pretty and graceful. I have a lot of assets, but I’m really a character actress. I played servants, peasants, secretaries, queens. I played every goddamned thing they could think of when they couldn’t give it to anyone else.
It was terrible. If they couldn’t get a character actress the right age, they gave it to me. When I was ten, I played my father’s mother. I was in London, I had to do it. It was all right. It’s all right to have scale. Your scale has to be large enough. But I’m afraid your scale is “I am me and I like me and I’m going to show me!”—hoping that they’ll buy you, the way they buy the cloud or the rain or the river they need for the shot. “That’s a good rain, let’s photograph it! It’s a wonderful river—the best river we ever found—we’ll photograph that! That’s a good actress—she’s short and fat”—or “tall and thin”—“exactly what we want!” She is what they want. So’s the dog they choose. I played with Asta—and he was the best actor in the company.6 I told him to sit up—he did it. He did everything right. That’s very good, but it’s not acting. So we can’t just say about you, or anybody, “He’s got a lot of craft. He studied with Stella Adler”—or Uta Hagen or Lee Strasberg. “Give him a try at King Lear.”
Once there were auditions in California for King Lear and a thousand people came to read, and one man with a Yiddish accent said he wanted to play Lear. They said, “You can’t. We won’t give you an audition.” He said, “You give me an audition—you’ll see.” The director said, “But you speak with an accent.” He said, “Never mind about the accent.” So they let him audition, and he got up and said [with perfect accent], “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!” The director said, “You speak perfect English!” He said, “That’s acting.”
He was right. The accent must be perfect. It must not be “worked on.” It’s got to be perfect. Your job is mid-Atlantic English. [Speaking affectedly:] This is not American English. This is a British affectation which is peculiar to their culture. They do very well with it. They conquered the world with it.
It’s a façade and they can’t get rid of that façade. That’s why they can’t play modern plays: that façade keeps away the truth, which is a very bad thing to keep away in our modern time because that’s what we’re after.
We have other faults. [She mumbles:] Nobody knows what we’re saying. We’re sloppy and vulgar and miserable. I was starring in London once, and I went into an expensive store— Black, Starr & Frost—and asked for something and they said, “Yes, Miss Adler, where should we send it to you in England?” I said, “I’m awfully sorry, I don’t live in England. I live in America.” They said, “Oh, we thought you were English.” I said, “No, just affected.”
The affectation may or may not work in life. On the stage here, it’s mid-Atlantic English. I can work in all the other plays because I can play the accents. That’s craft.
But it’s not talent.
We really don’t trust the talent because of the lack of craft. We trust the craft more than we do the talent: “Maybe he won’t be great, but at least he won’t let us down.” It’s very important to keep the curtain up.
We’re going to the American playwrights. How many people here are just interested in literature? A bunch. You don’t want to act; you want other things. I’m glad. I wish there were more. To take the course because it’s about literature is fine. If you’re here because you’re interested in being a stage designer, that’s fine, too. I’m not speaking only to people who want to act. To interpret means to interpret stage design, lighting, scenery. All this is part of acting. The actor has to train himself as soon as possible, as soon as he’s smart enough, to understand directing; to understand the other characters; to understand sets, lighting, costumes. Don’t come to just show yourself on the stage ’cause you’re special. You’re not. You’re a dime a dozen.
What I’d like you to get is a kind of size where you know your profession in the way that Stanislavsky did. I can’t tell you how much he knew. I’m the only American who worked with him. God did it. Once in a while, God does something; he put Adler together with Stanislavsky and a great deal came out of it—for me and for you.
The audience is interested not just in acting but in the literary side of the playwright; that has to come through. There are statements in every play. Get to know how they work. Every play is external. It isn’t internal. It isn’t in you, and it’s not going to be—not if I’m around!—until you pay a real price for it. A lifetime’s price, like every poet or writer pay.
“Lovely play,” you say. “Brilliant!” But what are you going to get out of its words? Nothing. So we start with the outside. It starts outside, on the page. You begin with those externals. There’s no other way to do it. The externals come partly in sentences, sometimes in monologues, but finally through the two things YOU have to bring to it: study and instinct!
I went up to Harvard to study psychology once. A very interesting course was being given there. I did my homework a little. My blood told me it was necessary, and I believe in blood. I believe in that thing in us that is eternal and true.
My husband, Mitchell Wilson, was a physical scientist, an assistant to Fermi, the great physicist at Columbia, and he told me a wonderful story. Once there was an equation up on the blackboard, and Fermi and three of his Nobel Prize colleagues were standing there, looking at that equation. The three said, “It’s right.” Fermi said, “No, it’s wrong.” They said, “How do you know?” He said, “I feel it.”
I feel it. I sense it. I know when something’s true. I know when it’s a lie. I told you that story because we think of science as being cold. It isn’t at all. By the way, Einstein didn’t have his physics books or formulas handy when the fourth dimension came to him. He was sort of having coffee when it suddenly came to him. “My God, that’s it!” Then he fainted. It put him to bed for weeks.
Thousands and millions of years are in us. I’m going to treat you as if you were millions of years old, not just pishers on the street. I want you to know that the most important thing in opening the play is to know the circumstances.
Where does it take place? Is he writing in Venice? Is he writing about the Venetian war with the Greeks? Are you in a garden in 1870 or 1970? Is there a thunderstorm? In 1970, you have something that diverts lightning from striking your house. In 1870, you could not divert it. It struck your house, and your house burned down.
Time and place give you a great deal—the social circumstances. An actor who doesn’t know where he is is crazy. You must know on the stage that you’re in the garden, in prison, in an insane asylum, in a house, if it’s 1870 or 1960. You’ve got to know where and when. This is a crucial part of craft.
The only person who doesn’t know where he is is an actor. A girl got up the other day to do a scene and didn’t know where she was. She went from there to here. She started sobbing. I said, “What are you doing? Don’t you know that the cheapest thing in the world is beauty and temperament? Don’t you know that every stinker has temperament? Every cab driver has temperament. You’ve got temperament. So what?” She didn’t know where she was stepping. She didn’t know if she was in a room or a garden or an airplane. She was “acting.”
You have to know what class you come from. You have to know the season, the ethic of the time, the morality of the time. You must know that every play starts with the present but every play has a past. If you don’t know the past of your play, you don’t know your play. This is technique. This is craft. The play is in the present, but it deals one million percent with your past.
There’s a doctor who comes to you because he wants to make money, and there’s a doctor who comes to you because he’s interested in science, and there’s a doctor who comes to you because he works for the poor. It’s not in the play. It’s behind the play. The past is the actor’s job. That is where his talent is.
When Karl Malden came to the class, I said, “The actor’s job is to provoke himself and his own talent. For that, his character has to have a past.” He said, “That’s all. I got it.”
A big part of that is knowing your social situation. You are now in a situation where there is 10 percent unemployment, there’s rampant divorce and sleeping around. It’s a change in morality. Mugging in the street is a big change in America, compared to when I was young. You live in a highly industrial, capitalist society. Reagan’s in the White House. We are gearing ourselves up to spend an unprecedented amount of money so we’ll have enough armaments to wage another war. The reason we need another war is economic. We can increase our economy by making enough armaments to sell to the world.
What is your attitude toward that? Toward the church? You have to know. You have to know what job you’re in, what education you have. The social situation is what makes the writer write the play. In Odets’s Awake and Sing!, the mother had to work because the father had to go to school. He was weakened. The son didn’t have money, so he didn’t go to high school. The girl slept with the boarder because she no longer had the home training of discipline.
Work on the social situation of the play. If you don’t know it, you can’t work on the stage. Don’t be dumb. You have to develop enough technique to be able to handle the play.
You are in a different time and situation because you have something new: you have movies. Movies are mostly action. You are mostly interested in what’s going to happen. Is the guy going to win or lose? Escape or get caught? Live or die?
It’s fine. But it’s not going to help you to understand Strindberg or Pinter or the American playwrights. There is virtually no writer in movies who has a signature. Hitchcock, maybe. But usually you don’t know or care who wrote it. There is not one playwright who does not have a signature. The signature is the size of the man who is giving it to you as a collaborator, and you must become as big as the writer because you will be with his ideas, with his mind.
Who is the most important element in all theater history? It is the actor. “Did you see Kean in King Lear?” The growth of the actor is what people want to see, and what you should want to see in yourself.
You gave this up for movies. Take it back again. Take it back so that we can work together.
1 Adler is speaking in 1983, during the Ronald Reagan administration.
2 Leonid Andreyev (1871–1919): prolific Russian playwright and novelist, who combined elements of naturalism and symbolism in such works as He Who Gets Slapped (1922). Nikolai Evreinov (1879–1953): Russian symbolist playwright and director. Karel Cˇapek (1890–1938): the most influential Czech social- and science-fiction writer of the twentieth century, who wrote such plays as R.U.R. (1921). Paul Claudel (1868–1955): French poet and dramatist most famous for verse dramas conveying his devout Catholicism.
3 Ernst Toller’s 1931 Sturm und Drang play in which a German soldier returns from World War I a wrecked man, astonishing sideshow crowds by biting the heads off guinea pigs. (“They want blood? They get it.”)
4 Yiddish show-biz term for “fool” or “second-rater.”
5 John Barrymore played Fyodor Vasilyevich Protasov in Redemption (1918), an English-language version of Tolstoy’s Living Corpse.
6 Adler co-starred as an impostor-villainess with William Powell, Myrna Loy, and Asta, the wirehaired terrier, in Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), the fourth of the Nick and Nora Charles detective films.