What then is the valet’s motivation? One student emphasized a servant’s need to exercise power another said that he is committing a sort of euthanasia for an emotionally wounded woman. “Even if Julie doesn’t know what she wants, the actor has to figure out what she wants,” Ms. Megibow stressed that actors needed to realize that Julie was suicidal from the play’s opening and that the valet’s prodding might be one flimsy factor in her tormented calculations. In the spare, black-curtained loft, two students acted out a scene from Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” in which the valet, Jean, insinuates that Julie, given that she has disgraced her noble family by sleeping with him, has no choice but to commit suicide. The other day an Adler teacher, Maureen Megibow, who studied with Stella Adler, led a class of 20 students through performances of scenes from two plays. Both approaches, he said, relied on the circumstances facing a play’s character and both capitalized on an actor’s emotional life. Still, Andreas Manolikakis, director of the drama school at Pace University run by the Actors Studio, a rival of the Adler Studio, said the differences have been overstated. Tom Oppenheim of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, with a portrait of his grandparents Stella Adler and Harold Clurman. “To think of your own mother’s death each time you want to cry onstage is schizophrenic and sick,” she once said. Her byword was imagination rather than memory. Stella Adler argued for deeply understanding the play’s ideas.
Strasberg, they say, would more readily press actors trying to evoke a tragic emotion to recall tragic moments from personal experience. The emphasis is on building the character, but not, strict Adlerian champions would point out, in the way that had been encouraged by Lee Strasberg, another acolyte of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the director famous for the acting techniques he developed. Students act out scenes and try to flesh out themes the playwright had in mind and analyze motivations. While voice, speech and physical movement are mainstays, the studio’s Adlerian philosophy emphasizes script interpretation and close study of pivotal scenes. The studio works pretty much the way Stella Adler, who died in 1992 at 91, conceived it. Oppenheim’s father, David, was that school’s dean.)
#STELLA ADLER STUDIO OF ACTING DIRECTING SERIES#
It instructs 500 students a semester through a two-and-a-half-year conservatory program, a one-year series of evening sessions and the theater courses it offers to undergraduates at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Rue Faris DrewĪpproaching its 60th anniversary next year, the studio is chugging along nicely. Stella Adler teaching acting technique in 1976. Ellen Adler, her daughter, is a painter but keeps her fingers in the theater world as executive chairman of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in Chelsea. His daughter Stella, an actress of aristocratic bearing, became a legend as a teacher, instructing or producing disciples who taught a top-drawer lineup: Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, Harvey Keitel, Shelley Winters, Susan Sarandon, Martin Sheen, Mark Ruffalo and Benicio Del Toro. The paterfamilias was a Jewish immigrant from Russia, Jacob Adler, one of the greatest actors of the Yiddish stage and the leading force in transforming it from schlock to serious drama. He is, after all, the fourth generation of Adlers in the New York theater, earning his family the right to challenge the Barrymores as an enduring dynasty. Oppenheim is understandably saturated in family legacy. Oppenheim’s grandmother Stella Adler, the teacher who instructed the definitive Stanley, Marlon Brando, in her version of the Method. When he has heard Stanley Kowalski bellow “Stella!” over the years in assorted productions of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Tom Oppenheim has wondered whether Tennessee Williams chose the name as an insider’s bouquet to Mr.
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