This speech was written by Tom Oppenheim and read on Sunday, November 8, 2009 at the Jewish Historical Society of New York.
It is my deep honor and pleasure to be here this afternoon. Thank you to the Jewish Historical Society of New York and to James Goldman for the invitation. I’m not used to speaking engagements such as this. I’m inclined to say speaking at the Jewish Historical Society has filled me with some good old Jewish Historical Anxiety. I hope my words are adequate to the honor and task. The working title for this presentation is Stella Adler and the Yiddish Theater: the Resounding Echo. Some of that echo will be sounded today.
However, as I understood it, the Society was interested also in Stella Adler’s political activism in the 1940’s with the Bergson Group, a group dedicated to lobbying the Roosevelt Administration and rallying the American people, including American Jews, to help rescue European Jews from extermination at the hands of Hitler. I am especially grateful for this assignment because, hitherto, I knew very little about this aspect of Stella Adler’s life. I should say at the outset that I am not qualified to write as an historian about this important aspect of my grandmother’s life. I am qualified and inclined to discuss Stella Adler’s political activism in view of a tradition and history I want very much to keep open, healthy, and alive. I am deeply impressed and touched by this new found knowledge and understanding of Stella’s activism, but not surprised. I am however inspired and driven all the deeper into my conviction about who Stella Adler was, what she stood for, what the entire Adler tradition was and is about, and therefore how best to organize the Stella Adler Studio of Acting today. Let me explain. But before I do, allow me to plant a question before you that I pose for myself, our students, and ever growing
community: what might actors do in the face of atrocity and injustice?
My grandmother died in 1992 and I took over the Artistic Directorship of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in 1995. At that time I was theatrically young, a malady I continue to suffer from, but am doing my best to correct. Many of my faculty members were older than I, with more wisdom and experience. What I did have was a lifetime of experience of the Adler home, family, and memories. I remember much: In my childhood and youth there were frequent visits with Stella; my mother Ellen, my sister Sara, and I went to her house weekly. Holidays were family affairs involving not only Stella, but my uncle Luther Adler, and my cousins Lulla Rosenfeld, and Pearly Pearson, their children Josie and Lizzy, Mary Adler, her daughter Ally, Harold Clurman, and many others. I remember laughter and laughter deep into the night. People took turns not merely telling jokes, but long elaborate stories with multiple punch lines and one big cosmic wallop at the end. My mother described the laughs as like a baseball that was hit way up in the air and you knew it was coming closer and closer, and you knew it was going to hit you, and then it hit you. Marlon Brando described the same phenomena “…jokes flew around the dinner table like bullets, half in Yiddish and half in English, and I laughed so hard that I nearly got a hernia.”
My recollections of Stella the teacher are numerous and deeply meaningful to me. Some of them happened around Stella’s living room. For example, once my sister and I were gathered with Stella around her piano. Stella was talking to us, about joining in, and being playful.
She started playing the piano and my sister joined her. Suddenly, with a voice that seemed to open up from the heart of the earth itself, Stella said “PLAY TOMMY!!!!” It never left me, the strength, the energy, the directive, “You have a right to play. More than that, you have a moral imperative to join in, express yourself, fulfill yourself.” Another time in her living room, quite a few years later, it was just me and her. She’s much older now. I had given her a single red rose. At a certain point in the visit, she said to me “I will show you something about this rose. You can hold it this way so the audience sees it, or this way so that it’s your secret.” The revealed rose said something entirely different from the concealed rose and by showing me this Stella was giving me access to an aspect of craft unique in the world of actor training in America – the vocabulary and language of props. Looking back I believe she must have learned this long before her legendary five-week visit and work with the great Russian acting teacher and theorist, Constantine Stanislavsky. She must have picked it up in Yiddish Theater of her father Jacob P. Adler. Stella was a master at handling props. She understood the power of the prop to ground an actor in concrete reality, she would say: “props don’t lie, actors do”, as well as the power of the well-handled prop to reveal character.
I began sitting in on Stella’s classes in my mid teen’s, long before I decided to be an actor or had any idea that I would end up running the Stella Adler Studio. I remember Stella’s command of the classroom, the theatricality of her teaching, her entrance into the black box theater in which she taught, the standing ovation, her bow with the grace and elegance of a star of old. I remember the passion she unleashed, the power, the sense that theater, done right, could save the world, could civilize, and uplift humanity.
I remember a student working on a Shakespeare monologue from Henry VI Part I, the character of Joan of Arc:
“First let me tell you whom you have condemned
Not me begotten of a Sheppard swain
But issued from the progeny of Kings;”
The words were spoken with strength and size. The actress was physically engaged and committed. But she pushed. Stella stopped the young women. “You don’t understand what you are saying…again.” The young women began again. “No!” said Stella. “You don’t know what you are saying, you don’t understand the epic idea you are representing…again.” The young women spoke again, “STOP!!!” Stella walked up onto the stage, held the young women’s hand, looked out to the class and said quietly, simply, with overwhelming dignity and nobility, “I am an actress. I am from a family of actors.” “She’s talking about the Adler’s,” I thought. “This family is over three thousand years old.” I understood; we all did. For Stella actors were Kings and Queens, nobles, aristocrats of the mind. When actors root themselves in this truth, they need not push; their acting takes on power, poise, and size. Stella used to explain why actors bow to the audience. Actors bow to the audience the way subjects bow to royalty. We serve the audience, the community, humanity. “You serve the playwright” said Stella “who serves God, who serves the universe, who tells these babies out there what’s wrong with the world. If you think, ‘I gotta get a television job, that’s fine, but it isn’t your ultimate growth!”
When I took over the Stella Adler Studio in summer of ‘95 I had the sure and unsettled sense that the spirit of my grandmother was absent. I sensed dogma and ossification of something, which I witnessed in Stella, both at home and in class, was alive, free, and fearless. I was determined that the Studio that bore my grandmothers name should be a living, breathing, extension of her spirit, not a wax museum devoted to her memory. The following question formed inside me: what does it mean to be the Stella Adler Studio of Acting today? This question led me on a journey into the work of my grandmother, but also into the history of my family, to discover exactly what constitutes “the spirit” of Stella Adler. This journey has revealed to me that the spirit of Stella Adler is also the spirit of Jacob Adler and the Yiddish Theater, Harold Clurman and the Group Theater.
My primary source for research into the life of Jacob P. Adler is his memoir, translated by my cousin Lulla Rosenfeld. From that document one senses a young man enflamed with life, a favorite son, gifted, energetic, always reaching out for pleasure, danger, heroism. “Nobody ever had so stormy a youth as I.” said Jacob. “I burned up the world! All of Odessa was too small for me, and in my soul good and evil battled for supremacy.” You see this force of nature discover Russian theater, then Yiddish theater, then march slowly but surely into the life of a great artist, from actor, to producer, to visionary; from Odessa, to London, to the Lower Eastside of New York City, from a birth into an obscure Jewish family in 1855, to stardom and a hero’s funeral in 1926.
As Lulla describes it the background for the extraordinary life of Jacob P. Adler, as well as the greater context of the Yiddish Theater, was the Jewish movement of the Haskala, which she describes thusly “Education was the battle cry of this Jewish revolution. If the world would not break the wall of the ghetto from the outside, the Jew must break it from the inside. Education—secular education—was the tool that would break the wall. Free, no longer isolated, the Jew would take his place in science, in art, in political action, in every great endeavor of the time.”
Strong political unrest in Russian throughout the period of Jacob Adler’s youth led in 1881 to the assignation of the liberal Tsar Alexander II, and to the ascension of his son Alexander III. A staunch conservatism spread throughout Russia making life more difficult for Jews. Pogroms were regular events. This was different. In 1883 the Tsar outlawed Yiddish Theater. What might actors do in the face of injustice? Might they raise their voices, build theaters, fight for freedom? Adler fled first to London, and then to the Lower Eastside of New York City, in search of artistic freedom.
By all accounts a great actor, truly a child of the Haskala, Jacob Adler’s lifelong dream was to elevate the Yiddish Theater to the level of a great theatrical epoch like Elizabethan or Greek theater. He understood theater as a means to grow for actor and audience alike, theater as a means to elevate, educate, and civilize humanity. He writes “Except in 1887 when I spent several months in America, I lived in London almost seven years. How in London I grew, how, with me, our theater grew-grew in its soul-and how, in the same moral sense, our audience grew.
‘How did we grow’, you ask? Through plays. Workman climb on ladders.
Sailors climb on ropes. Actors climb on words. On plays.”
The growth Adler sought, then nurtured in his fellow players and audience also involved literature and ideas. He tells an important story. He was young and playing in the provinces and coveting a good review from a respected writer. Instead he and his company were panned. When he asked the reviewer why, he was told “Even in a melodrama one can, and should, portray a human being. You are clowns not actors…Study. Learn.” Deeply depressed, Adler walked the streets, not knowing what do. One day as he walked he said out loud to himself, “Enough of the fake! Let’s be an actor!” He was advised to study and develop himself through art and ideas, but how? He went to the critic’s home, knocked on the door and said “You told me to learn.
Here I am. Teach me.” He and his company were invited in and introduced to the intellectuals of the city and the works of the great artists of the day.
It was it was in America that Jacob Adler built a theater of big ideas, artistically motivated and socially engaged. He pitted himself against the Yiddish theater as he found it in America, a theater devoted to mere entertainment, not art. He writes “In 1891 I formed a company of my own…It was time, I felt, that our theater touched on the deeper sides of life, time that plays of a more serious character found a place on our stage. In this task-the task of deepening our theater, of, so to speak, tragicizing it-I had to stand alone.”
He soon met a fellow traveler, another child of the Haskala, the great writer, Jacob Gordin. Gordin wrote two plays for Adler: Siberia and Two Worlds, both enigmas and failures, for audience and actors alike. They were serious, realistic plays without musical intervals or comedic improvisations, as the audience expected. By the time Gordin produced his third script, A Yiddish King Lear, Jacob Adler had lost a number of key company members and his audience thinned. It is moving to read how Adler stepped out onto the stage between acts of Siberia, to plead with an unhappy audience who mocked the play: “Believe me, gospoda, if you would open your hearts, if you would open your minds and your understanding, you would not laugh at this play by the great Russian writer Jacob Mikhailovich Gordin, but would give it you most earnest attention.”
The Yiddish King Lear was a great success and with its triumph the Yiddish Theater was forever altered, elevated, ennobled and with it all subsequent American Theater. The Jews of the Lower Eastside developed a need for a “…theater…” as Jacob Adler put it, “that touched on the deeper side’s of life.” The Yiddish King Lear like of all of Gordin’s plays was artistically charged, but also socially relevant. It bravely took on the contemporary themes such as science versus old world orthodoxy and was strongly feminist, as well. Other important Yiddish writers emerged, Sholem Alcheim and Sholem Ashe, for example, who worked in a similar vein. One senses in this Yiddish soil the ground being tilled for subsequent Jewish American playwrights such as, Clifford Odets, Patty Chayefsky, Arthur Miller, David Mamet, and Tony Kushner…echoes’.
Sara Adler, Jacob Adler’s third wife and the mother of Stella and Luther, writes of Jacob’s opening performance “He was not an actor that night, but a force.” She writes: “It was clear from the first rehearsal that Adler was going to do something extraordinary with this part. Everyone caught the spirit. And if any of us clung to the old bad way, striving for cheap laughter, cheap effects, it only reminded us all the more how great the change taking place before our eyes…”
One senses the pre-Stanislavsky birth of modern acting in American from Jacob, to Stella and Luther, to Marlon Brando and beyond…. more echoes. This was the beginning of a tradition which was further shaped by the Group Theater of Harold Clurman…my journey continues…
Harold Clurman was born in the Bronx in 1901 to a middle class Jewish Family. In 1907 Harold’s father took him to see Jacob Adler in Uriel Acosta. Wendy Smith writes “The Yiddish Theater enthralled (Harold Clurman) with its productions of classic drama: Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gogol, brought to life in performances of extraordinary realism by actors with an emotional fluency unknown to their English-language counterparts…. Most of all, it was the intense relationship between and among actors and audience he adored, the sense of theater as a gathering place for the community.”
It would be reckless to claim that the Group Theater was a replica of what the young Clurman witnessed on the Lower Eastside in his youth. There are many contrasts between the Group Theater and the Yiddish Theater of Jacob P. Adler. Furthermore the Group Theater had many influences including Constantine Stanislavsky, Richard Boleslavsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, and Jacques Copeau. However there are significant similarities between the Group Theater and the Yiddish Theater.
The principals of the Group are summoned up by Harold Clurman as follows: “A theatre is created when people with common interests and tastes unite to devise ways and means whereby they may give their group feeling an adequate theatrical expression.” This Group must perform plays that address the “living problems of our time.” These plays must therefore be “relevant to the audience for which they are presented.” Harold insisted The Group must build and be responsible to an audience. “A theater in our country today should aim to create an audience. Where an audience feels that it is really at one with the theater; where audience and theater-people can feel that they are both answer to one another and that both may act as leaders to one another, there we have the theater in its truest form.”
This deep concern for building an audience and for using the theater to create community, as well as to edify and uplift that community strongly connects the Group Theater and the Yiddish theater. Another point of contact between the two theater movements, and one that very much relates to Stella Adler is a shared vision of an actor and by extension of theater. Harold Clurman, like Jacob Adler, envisioned actors as human beings who cultivate themselves through the arts and ideas. Wendy Smith writes that: “(Clurman) was fascinated with works of the imagination and how they related to the world around him; his friendship with Aaron Copeland introduced him to many creative artists, and he understood his desire to create meaningful theater as part of a larger effort in all the arts to capture and comment on the teeming reality of American life.” Elsewhere Smith writes of Clurman’s “…obsession (with) a Group restaurant, which he saw not just as a place for the members to gather…but as a center for the many different kinds of creative people interested in their ideas. And that was only the beginning: he dreamed of the Group inspiring a magazine, a school, a film, an art gallery, a lecture program, a publishing house…” “It is an intrinsic part of the Group idea…” says Harold…“to make the Theater not merely a show-shop but a cultural center”.
Another shared similarity between these two theaters is the fact that not only did Stella Adler join the Group as a founding member but she herself reports, “I can truthfully say it was only the Group that gave me again what I experienced in my youth—a vision beyond personal success. A conception of the actor’s art as an expression of the highest human principals, the highest human aspirations. These are the values I brought my students as a teacher. For me they can never change. Those principals, those aspirations, will always remain for me the best, the surest, the only way for the actor.” More echoes…
Coming full circle, a picture emerges, and more than a picture, a vision, a force of thought, a spirit. Stella Adler, born in 1901, was rooted in these two extraordinary epochs the Yiddish Theater and the Group Theater. And though she came into the world gifted, her vocabulary of influences and experiences, were utterly unique in the twentieth century and blessed. With the richness of her background, her prodigious intelligence, fierce beauty, and towering talent, Stella was perfectly positioned to challenge her contemporaries and change the world. Being a member of the Group was not simple for Stella. She was not inherently a group person. Furthermore she was restless and dissatisfied with the approach to acting she received from Lee Strasberg, then sole director of all Group plays and in charge of actor training. Lee’s methodology focused on the personal past of the actor. For Stella this felt unfamiliar and limiting. In1934 Stella traveled to Paris where she met and worked with Constantine Stanislavsky every day for five weeks. She went on to create her own techniques for acting. Though she took a great deal from Stanislavsky and paid tribute to him her whole life, at least some of what she received from him was confirmation that her sense of theater, a sense she must have developed very early in life, was for her and others artistically valid and righteous. That there is a grandeur to theater, that actors must raise themselves to the heights of great dramatic literature, and not lower the literature to themselves, that actors must grow as human beings, through plays, through ideas, and through the arts, to make themselves worthy vessels for dramatic literature and worthy of the name actor. That art is primarily a challenge of the imagination and therefore it is through rigorous use and development of the imagination such growth occurs, “actors grow through words, through plays”. That by way of this path the community, which is to say, humanity is served. These were ancient murmurings for Stella, ancient insights and understandings. From Stanislavsky she received tools; what she made with those tools and the material she worked with, was from another time, a different place.
I give myself to this tradition, dedicate myself to its perpetuation, devote myself to its renewal. It is through this search, through memories and through history that answers emerge from past to questions about the present and the future. To be the Stella Adler Studio of Acting today means to affirm a vision of an actor as an ever-evolving human being, forever reaching out to life, affirming self while transcending self, culturally alive, and socially engaged:
what might actors do in the face of atrocity and injustice? The institution I build in Stella’s name therefore has strong teachers, but also surrounds its students with cultural expressions including but exceeding theater, for example, Jazz and Classical music, great poetry, lectures and symposia, theater and Dance Theater. Furthermore this Jacob Adler/Yiddish Theater, Harold Clurman/Group Theater tradition inspires not only a vision of an actor, but a vision of a Theater as a means to create community, as a meeting place of a multiplicity of art forms, a place of debate, a cultural center, and a hub of social action. It is in this context and in the interest of perpetuating a “…conception of the actor’s art as an expression of the highest human principals, the highest human aspirations” that the question is asked in the form of an open challenge: What might an actor do in the face of injustice? We respond with our Stella Adler Outreach Division whose twofold mission is to bring free actor training to inner city youth, while providing our fulltime students with a model of social engagement.
It is in this context that I was approached by James Goldman and the Jewish Historical Society of New York to discuss my grandmother’s activism with respect to the holocaust. Perhaps you can now understand why I am not surprised by her behavior, her bravery, the outrage she must have felt at the Roosevelt administration for its refusal to rescue the Jews of Europe, for its policy of rescue through victory, that left the camps intact and operational until the war’s end, six million lives later, in 1945; the gall she must have felt towards her fellow American Jews for their silence and passivity. She was conditioned through a lifetime of engagement with theater and the arts, through the example of courage and fortitude of her parents and Harold Clurman, and through her own indomitable spirit, to not remain silent but to fight for humanity.
Stella joined the Bergson Group in 1942, a year after the Group Theater disbanded, and the same year official word came to America that mass killings of Jews were taking place in Europe at the hands of Hitler. Stella became an active and highly engaged member of the Executive Committee of the Bergson Group. She lent her name to the cause, hosted many meetings at her home, and recruited fellow actors and entertainers, from Broadway and Hollywood. Thanks to Stella people like Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Carl Reiner, Groucho and Harpo Marx, Paul Robeson, Vincent Price, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Count Basie, and many others became involved.
It is important to understand that in 1942, when the government sanctioned the publication of the facts about the extermination of what were then two million Jews in Europe, the New York Times ran a seven and one half inch article on page 10, and The Washington Post buried a three inch article on page 6. The public was kept in the dark, and therefore recruitment of celebrities who could effectively publicize the atrocities, was a brilliant strategy of the Bergson Group and an important contribution of Stella’s.
Stella also contributed her theatrical talent, performing in two pieces for the stage written by fellow Bergson Group member, Academy Award winning screenplay writer of Gone with the Wind and Front Page, Ben Hecht. The first entitled We Shall Not Die, helped make the public aware of the death camps. The second A Flag is Born, raised awareness of the displaced persons, and raised funds for the creation of a Jewish state. In addition to performing Stella recruited Luther Adler to direct, and Cousin Celia Adler and student Marlon Brando to perform in A Flag is Born. Among the many meetings Stella hosted was a meeting to discuss The Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People. This meeting and the conference that grew out of it led to the only legislation the Roosevelt Administration passed, The War Refugee Board, which resulted, in the last fifteen months of the war, to the saving of over two hundred thousand lives.
After the war the Bergson Group focused on the survivors, the displaced persons, and on the creation the State of Israel. They sent a delegation to Mexico to procure financial and political support and Stella led to the group and gave the keynote address. Bergson Group colleague Baruch Rabinowitz recalled: “Stella spoke Yiddish, a beautiful Yiddish, a beautiful woman with a beautiful soul. Tall, graceful, proud like a prophetess of old, her words rang out sharply and clearly as she read Ben Hecht’s ‘My Dark Prayer’ in a Yiddish translation…Stella was a great actress, but it was no act she put on that night. The words were written by Ben Hecht, but they poured out of her soul like a furious fire. She felt what she spoke” Stella said of this time and work “It was one of the most important experiences of my life. The people were men of value, aristocrats of the mind, with social responsibility and the force to do something about it.” I have often heard her refer to actors in the same way as “aristocrats of the mind”.
What might an actor do in the face of atrocity, of injustice? This question can only be answered individually. For my purpose as the Artistic Director of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, as guardian of a vital tradition and legacy, the important thing is that the question is asked, that our community is challenged to see the world outside themselves, outside of the theater, in a way that informs the work we do inside the theater. For this question applies not just to the horrors of the past: rape of the earth, global warming, violence toward women, racism, bigotry towards homosexuals, abject poverty, unbridled capitalism, militarism, fundamentalism, terrorism, and the list goes on and on. Furthermore, in spite of national and international legislation, genocide continues as Rwanda, Sarajevo, the Sudan, and Northern Uganda demonstrate. Some would say that actor training and theater making should not take place in an ivory tower, but right out in the open in view of the world such as it is replete with glories but atrocities too.
Stella Adler answered this question resoundingly with her whole life: You act, you raise your voice, and you fight for humanity. I am proud of my grandmother, grateful to the Jewish Historical Society of New York for helping me to see her anew, and thankful to you all for listening. The Haskala continues, the echoes resound, The Great Work Begins…Thank you…
