Authors: Howard Kissel, Howard Kissel
ISBN-13: 9781557833730, ISBN-10: 1557833737
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Applause Theatre Book Publishers
Date Published: October 2000
Edition: 1st Edition
Stella Adler was one of the 20th Century's greatest figures. She is arguably the most important teacher of acting in American history. Over her long career, both in New York and Hollywood, she offered her vast acting knowledge to generations of actors, including Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro. The great voice finally ended in the early Nineties, but her decades of experience and teaching have been brilliantly caught and encapsulated by Howard Kissel in the twenty-two lessons in this book.
This second collection of Adler's papers precedes the material found in the previous collection (Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekov, LJ 4/15/99), ending as she begins text analysis. Here Kissel (David Merrick) has taken tapes, transcriptions, notebooks, and other sources to reconstruct an acting course in 22 lessons. What results is Adler at her strongest. Coming from a theatrical family and having studied with Stanislavsky, she became an old-fashioned autocratic teacher determined to pass on the best that she knows. She was certainly the best of her generation. The lessons are graduated from very basic matters to quite complex issues of textual analysis and decorum. Though mostly monologs, they include enough exercises and student responses to get the flavor of Adler's work. Some themes run through these classes: American culture is bankrupt, Lee Strasberg got Stanislavsky wrong, and class and its formality must be learned in order to do major plays through the realist period. This is required reading for anyone interested in theater practice.--Thomas E. Luddy, Salem State Coll., MA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\
Preface | 7 | |
Class 1 | First Steps On Stage | 9 |
Class 2 | The World of the Stage Isn't Your World | 29 |
Class 3 | Acting Is Doing | 44 |
Class 4 | The Actor Needs to Be Strong | 53 |
Class 5 | Developing the Imagination | 63 |
Class 6 | Making the World of the Play Your Own | 75 |
Class 7 | Getting Hold of Acting's Controls | 86 |
Class 8 | Learning Actions | 94 |
Class 9 | Making Actions Doable | 103 |
Class 10 | Building a Vocabulary of Actions | 114 |
Class 11 | Instant and Inner Justifications | 125 |
Class 12 | Complicating Actions | 138 |
Class 13 | Giving Actions Size | 148 |
Class 14 | Understanding the Text | 160 |
Class 15 | Character Elements | 178 |
Class 16 | Dressing the Part | 189 |
Class 17 | Learning a Character's Rhythm | 199 |
Class 18 | Actors Are Aristocrats | 207 |
Class 19 | Making the Costume Real | 215 |
Class 20 | The Actor Is a Warrior | 226 |
Class 21 | Stanislavski and the New Realistic Drama | 235 |
Class 22 | Portraying Class on Stage | 249 |
Afterword | 262 |