The figure of Stella Adler towers high among the memorable acting teachers in American theatre. Her methods of training, her principles of acting and character interpretation, her analyses of the seminal plays of the modern theatre comprise a legacy for everyone who followed her. In Acting With Adler, that legacy gains the special immediacy and authenticity of her own spoken words. Over three years in the 1970s, Joanna Rotté worked with Adler as a student and as an actress under her direction, all the while taking the copious notes that have become the heart of this book.

Stella Adler opened her theatre studio in New York City in 1949. Alone among American acting teachers, she had studied with Stanislavsky, and for more than 40 years she taught her own evolving interpretation of the Stanislavsky System. That system, she believed, ventured beyond psychological realism and reliance on "emotion memory" to make "you relive the sensations you once felt," which was the hallmark of Method acting in the United States. To her students Adler recalled Stanislavsky's focus on doing an action within a specific circumstance--the situation of the play not one's own situation. This became the center of Adler's technique of acting; her teaching stressed discovering the deepest meanings of a play, using imagination to develop ways to express such meanings and grounding the ultimate performance in disciplined training of voice and body.

Throughout, Adler speaks about her principles in a tough-minded and demanding way, inspired by her overriding conviction that as a person an actor "becomes bigger through working." Acting with Adler provides an opportunity to sit in on the classes of this remarkable woman of whom her student Marion Brando said, "My debt and gratitude to her are enormous. As a teacher of acting, she has few peers. As a human being, few equals."

Cover design: Orlando Adiao
Cover photo courtesy of Ellen Adler

It was in April of 1991 that the delegation of 29 American theatre artists and educators had traveled to Eastern Europe to observe and experience the theatrical life of Prague, Moscow and Leningrad. Awaiting them was, of course, drama not confined to the stage. In Czechoslovakia the people, emerging from their Velvet Revolution, struggled fitfully to build a new state under a new president, Vaclav Havel, himself a man of the theatre. While in the Soviet Union, a society stumbled toward the precipice of collapse, and that snowy spring of 1991 saw a kind of rehearsal for momentous change that continues until this day.

The author's sharp eye for the brilliant and truly modern as well as for the stale and retrograde in theatre training, performance and production is equaled by her vivid description of cities in flux, the choking pollution and congestion of Prague, the soldiers, trucks and artillery that crowd the streets to Red Square, the mixture of hope, distrust and unease that is everywhere in Moscow and Leningrad. Inside the legendary Russian theatres, houselights rise and dim, but outside, Joanna Rotté watches as millions unknowingly wait for a final curtain to fall.

Cover design: Andrea Meyer, EmDash Inc.
Front cover: center: Scene from Joseph Svoboda's Minotaurus, Prague.
Top right: VIP bureaucrat's tomb, Cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent, Moscow.
Bottom: Andrei Droznin's movement class, Moscow.