Stella Adler: Awake and Dream! from "American Masters"

Summary

The documentary follows Stella Adler’s development from a child performer in a celebrated Yiddish acting family to a leading actor and influential teacher. It presents her demanding coaching style and her belief that actors should use imagination, knowledge of life, and their inner resources to give a play’s ideas force—not merely recite its words.

Adler’s approach included several key principles and practices:

• Find the character’s action. Identify what the character is trying to do in the scene—for example, make someone understand something—and pursue that goal actively. The scene’s conflict comes from pursuing it despite resistance.
• Work from the play’s ideas and circumstances. Adler valued understanding the author’s characters and dramatic world. She opposed relying primarily on personal emotional memories, arguing that imagination was an actor’s essential tool.
• Give language life. Words on the page are not the performance itself. Actors must discover the ideas beneath them and make the words express those ideas.
• Use the whole self. Acting draws on the actor’s soul, imagination, body, voice, mind, background, and accumulated experience. Adler urged students to observe and absorb life deeply.
• Make choices serve the play. Costumes, props, and stage business should support the play and the actor’s work, rather than simply reflect the performer’s personal taste.
• Build theatrical style and scale. Adler pushed students beyond timid, passive, or overly literal readings, asking them to make bold, expressive choices suited to the play and its characters.
• Improvise, then stage deliberately. In one exercise, actors improvised a confrontation from All My Sons. Adler praised the emotional intensity the improvisation uncovered, then emphasized shaping the movements so the scene’s meaning—not uncontrolled action—remained clear.

The film also traces Adler’s theatrical roots. Her father, Jacob Adler, trained her through performance, imitation, research, and responsibility for a role. After encountering Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theater, she studied his system and later challenged the American emphasis on emotional memory, saying that Stanislavski had come to favor imagination.

Her work with the Group Theatre included major artistic disagreements, but also some of her most acclaimed performances. In 1949, she opened her acting studio, where she sought to give performers confidence, craft, and a wider understanding of the world.

Creators and Contributors Mentioned

Stella Adler; Jacob Adler; Sarah Adler; Luther Adler; Mitchell Wilson; Konstantin Stanislavski; Sarah Bernhardt; Harold Clurman; Lee Strasberg; Cheryl Crawford; Clifford Odets; Maurice Schwartz; and Arthur Miller. The documentary also includes unnamed actors, students, colleagues, and friends.

Funding Credits

The closing credits name the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Marilyn M. Simpson Charitable Trust, Rosalind P. Walter, and participating public television stations.