Know Thyself

When Barry Paris met with Stella Adler about her book, Stella Adler on Ibsen Strindberg and Chekhov, they chatted about what playwrights would be included in her book and discussed her background.  When Stella Adler pointed out that her parents and grandparents were from Odessa, Barry Paris enthusiastically informed her that they shared a common heritage.

She became emotional, as he writes in the preface of the book:

"Suddenly, the big eyes that hadn't left mine got bigger and watery.  Her benign conversational smile vanished.  She held out her hand in the traffic cop's firm palm-up signal of 'Halt!'  What the hell had I said?  I was riveted with alarm to that dramatic hand in the dramatic pause before her dramatic whisper:

'Stop --- don't make me cry!'

I replayed it many times on my tape recorder and in my mind, wondering if the tragic tone was real or theatrical, before figuring out it was a precisely equal combination of both.  Alone with an audience of one or onstage before hundreds, Stella Adler gave the same performance:  Emotion was something felt, not faked.  'Real' and 'theatrical' must be the same."

In these three paragraphs in the preface of a much larger and more educational book, we can take a great lesson.

First of all, it is important to note that the common connection between Adler and her editor dramatically changed the tone of their conversation.  Why?  Because Stella Adler was keenly aware of and emotionally attached to who she was.  Odessa is a city steeped in history and she came from its people.  She was proud of her roots and would happily proclaim them.  When Adler starred in the movie Love on Toast, her name was credited as "Ardler."  After that movie, she stuck to her original name.

In order to fully function as a human and an actress, Stella Adler had to know exactly who she was and why she was that person.  It wasn't a matter of "inventing" herself or "molding" herself into the person she wanted to be, and it didn't start with her first independent thought or action.  It went back generations, like links in a chain or cause and effect.  Her heritage is why she ended up where she was, when she did, and why she became the person she ended up being.

No person just appears one day.  People and circumstances influence us all, and those influences provoke us to respond both in action and emotionally.

It is hard to wrap our minds around Paris' observation that "real" and "theatrical" must be the same, but the line before it explains.  "Emotion was something felt, not faked."  What he is trying to convey is that Stella Adler was completely genuine, and she allowed herself to feel her emotions deeply.

That was why it was important to her to pick apart the play and analyze the actions of the characters.  It was not simply technical work.  She had to know where they were coming from, what influenced them, and why they reacted to things the way they did.  By understanding the character, and putting herself in their place, she could feel the same emotions they would.  She lived and breathed her characters.  On stage, her actions and emotions were genuine.  She never had to "act" or "pretend" or "fake."

The phrase "know thyself" applies.  After all, if you cannot identify your own characteristics, flaws, motivations, and emotions, how can you be expected to sympathize with others?  To many, emotions are a sign of weakness.  We are conditioned to keep check on them.  For many of us, we instinctively want to hold back tears during the sad part of a movie or turn a cold shoulder to a painful situation rather than feel the hurt it caused.

To be an actor, we have to explore why we behave this way, and allow ourselves to not only understand why we are who we have become, but also to feel and respond from our very nature.  Then, not only do we sympathize and empathize with others on a very human level, but we are able to understand the motivations of our characters, and live in them.

The Harbor At Odessa On The Black Sea by Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky