Elia Kazan joined later as an apprentice.
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The earliest members of the group included some thirty actors and playwrights, many of whom went on to stardom, including Morris Carnovsky, Clifford Odets, and Franchot Tone. With all the imperious flamboyance of an older theatrical tradition-European in its roots-she was somehow fragile, vulnerable, gay with mother wit and stage fragrance.” Recalling Adler years later, Clurman described her at this time as “poetically theatrical, reminiscent of some past beauty in a culture I had perhaps never seen, but that was part of an atavistic dream.
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Clurman maintained that the discipline was healthy, but Adler felt that the women in the company were coerced into going along with the men.
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Although she has written that Clurman was her savior, Adler hated having to submerge her personality into the ensemble, rotating between starring roles and bit parts. Clurman invited Adler to join the new theater, initiating a love-hate relationship between the highly individualistic star and the communally committed Group. Strasberg directed the training of the actors based on the methods learned at the American Laboratory Theatre, stressing “affective memory”-the active recall of incidents in the actor’s own life to power her emotion on stage. To develop true ensemble acting, they decided that everyone connected with a production-playwright, actor, stage designer-had to come to agreement on the meaning and perspective of the play. Their intent was to create an ensemble of players, directors, designers, and writers to produce socially relevant plays that would provide an alternative to commercial theater. In 1931, Clurman, Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford formed the Group Theatre. It was at the Laboratory Theater that she met Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, who had also come for acting lessons. Already a veteran performer, Adler said that the Laboratory Theater, with its roots in the Moscow Art Theater, “opened her up” and gave her a new life. Back in New York, she enrolled at the newly established American Laboratory Theater school, where she studied with Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, who were then introducing their students to the revolutionary acting technique of Konstantin Stanislavsky. There followed a period of time on the road, including tours of Europe and Latin America. In the 1920s, Adler achieved star status on the Yiddish stage, appearing in over a hundred roles in such plays as Jew Süss, God of Vengeance, and Liliom, as well as in classics by Shakespeare and Tolstoy, with the foremost actors of the Yiddish theater, including David Kessler, Siegmund Mogulesko, Bertha Kalich, Keni Liptzin, and Jacob Ben-Ami. She played Naomi in Elisha ben Avuya at the Pavilion Theatre in London in 1919, and on her return to the United States had a commercial hit as Butterfly in The World We Live In. Her education in New York City public schools always took second place to rehearsals and performances. At age four, she took the part of one of the young princes in Shakespeare’s Richard III, and at age nine she played the young Spinoza. The fourth among five siblings (Frances, Jay, Julia, and Luther) and younger than her known half-siblings (Charles, Abe, and Celia Adler), Adler was enlisted in her father’s troupe as a toddler.
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and Sara Adler, the foremost actors of the Yiddish stage at the turn of the century. Stella Adler was born February 10, 1902, in New York City, the youngest daughter of Jacob P.