Barry Paris News

Published: November 30, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/books/review/stella-adler-on-americas-...

"Life is boring. The weather is boring," Stella Adler used to say. "Actors must not be boring. Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one." When I first started taking classes with the already legendary Adler in 1955, I was only 16, having lied by two years to get accepted. I studied with her for four years, and took every class she offered: from Beginnings, through Scene Class, finally to Script Analysis, which was both the most daunting and the most electrifying. The excitement came because of Stella's delivery, which was very theatrical but real, because Stella was nothing if not theatrical and real. Theater was in her blood, her parents having been major stars in New York's Yiddish theater.

The difficulty lay in following her explosive, sometimes stream-of-consciousness manner of speaking, all of it extemporaneous; I don't recall her ever looking at notes. Her allusions to other plays and playwrights came one on top of the other. She was not just teaching how to act these plays — how to interpret them, as Stella preferred to put it — she was also teaching direction, and literature, and history. As a teenager, even an avidly attentive one, I could not possibly follow everything she was saying. But it was all so wonderfully expounded that I was never less than riveted. I wished I could have had tapes, but she didn't even like her students to take notes: "Stop with those notes!" she would cry out. "You're going to get me arrested!"

Well, eventually audio and video tapes were made of Stella's classes long before her death in 1992 at the age of 91. And a few months before she passed away, her stepdaughter, the Knopf editor Victoria Wilson (who is also my editor), and the biographer Barry Paris had discussed with Stella two books to be put together largely from her script analysis classes. The provocative first volume, "Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov," also edited by Paris, appeared in 1999 and is happily still available in paperback. The second volume, "Stella Adler on America's Master Playwrights," is even more intoxicating than the first.

Edited & Annotated by Barry Paris
[Publication slated by Alfred A. Knopf for 2012]
In “Stella Adler: The Europeans” [Vol. I, Alfred A. Knopf 1999], the most enduring, influential acting teacher of the 20th century illuminated the plays and performance techniques of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov.
In “Stella Adler: The Americans” [Vol. II], her penetrating gaze and powerful voice are focused on the great plays and playwrights of her own country---nearly all of whom she knew, loved and worked with personally.
Once again, Adler’s revelatory script and acting lectures of half a century have been distilled, edited and annotated by Barry Paris in accessible form for general readers, as well as actors and directors.