Memories and Visions

This statement was written in Fall 2005.

I have many memories of my Grandmother, Stella Adler, teaching. Here’s one: I remember a class where she observed that when actors bow to the audience at the end of a performance they are putting themselves beneath the audience, the way servants or subjects put themselves beneath Royalty. It stayed with me perhaps because Stella herself had a rather regal stature and nature and was often treated by her students and others as Royalty. Her observation, delivered very pointedly, as was most of what she had to say to her students, stood in stark contrast to her carefully cultivated persona of theater diva, daughter to the great Yiddish actors Jacob and Sara Adler. Ultimately, Stella was saying that actors serve not themselves, not even the playwright or the play, (to which she was deeply devoted), but the audience.

Stella was advocating the idea of actor as servant; not in a demeaning way, as she had nothing if not the highest respect for actors and for the art of acting. But in the sense that doctors serve their patients, or priests or rabbi, their congregation. In Stella’s mind the audience, or public, stood for something sacred; something like an artistic occasion, the reason to speak, to perform, to reach down into the depths of your self and the world of the play and to make a gift of it all to the audience.

Stella understood the audience as world. But not just as “world” in general; she had a dual sense of the audience as world in crises, or world in need, but also as a world where we are privileged to serve. This dual sense of the audience was mirrored by a dual sense of the actor: Actor as teacher and actor as servant. Stella inherited this sense of theater, of the actor as servant/ teacher and audience as world in need/ world as master, first from her father, then from Harold Clurman.

Years ago I witnessed my Grandmother, Stella Adler, teaching her students the deeper meaning of the ritual of actors bowing to their audience at the end of a performance. “Actors bow to their audience the way subjects bow to Royalty” she instructed. Actors serve. The Adlers have been serving the City of New York and its Citizens and by extension the rest of the country and the world for over a century. This is our passion, our privilege, our deepest need and most desired end. The legacy of Jacob P. Adler and the Yiddish Theater, of Harold Clurman and the Group Theater, and of the way both those theatrical movements resonated in Stella Adler and extended through the Stella Adler Studio of Acting continues and evolves in full force today. We must and will continue to serve and bow, serve and bow to the many facets of society that are and have become members of the community of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. With that promise and that conviction, a conviction I send back to my ancestors and forward to you, I end this statement with a most heartfelt and sincere bow.