When the legendary acting teacher,
Lee Strasberg, died, another famous acting teacher, Stella Adler, came into her
class and said, “I’d like a minute of silence. A man of the theater died today.” Following the silence Adler added: “And it will take a hundred
years to undo the damage that that man has done to the theater.” What brought about such
bitterness? Strasberg and Adler
had been part of The Group Theatre.
You can read all about The Group Theatre in Harold Clurman’s memoir, The
Fervent Years: The Group Theatre And The Thirties.
Begun in 1931, The Group
sought to transform American theater from light entertainment to work that was
a serious dramatization of the times they lived in. For ten years they did just that, emphasizing strong
ensemble work. Their work together
was based on the techniques of the Russian man of the theater, Constantin
Stanislovsky. The names of Group
members and their contributions to American theater are legendary, among them: Clifford Odets, Irwin Shaw, Luther
Adler, Frances Farmer, Elia Kazan, Harry Morgan, Stella Adler, Robert Lewis, John Garfield, Franchot Tone, Will Geer, Howard Da Silva. Michael Gordon, Paul Green, Paul Strand, Morris Carnovsky, Sanford Meisner, Marc Blitzstein, Anna Sokolow, Lee J. Cobb, and many others.
By the late 1930’s the cohesiveness of the collective began
to come apart. Finances, the beckoning of Hollywood, and bitter disagreement
over interpretations of Stanislovsky’s work led to fractures that still exist
today. Various members began to
emphasize the aspects of Stanislovsky that were of particular interest to
them. Today actors still study the
interpretations of Meisner, Strasberg, Stella Adler, and other teachers, all stemming
from the Group’s work. For
example, students at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts are assigned to different
studios. They include: The Stella
Adler Studio of Acting, The Meisner Studio, and The Lee Strasberg Theatre
Institute. As time has passed, the
work of these teachers has been handed on to various acolytes. Too often the acolytes and the students
who train under them are dogmatic and cult like, unable to agree about what
they share in common.
Why, you may ask, do I write
about theater on a website devoted to addiction? First, I have spent my life teaching and directing
actors. Thankfully much of my
training was with teachers who took a broader, more eclectic approach, including Larry Moss, whose book on acting, The Intent to Live, could easily be a
title for a book on recovery.
Indeed, much of his advice to actors could certainly prove useful to
those in recovery.
Since the death of my son,
William, nearly a year ago, as I’ve puzzled with the question of how I,
personally, might be most effective in advancing the common cause of battling
addiction, I’ve had the benefit of two very wise leaders in the field, both
exceedingly generous with their time, Tom Hedrick and Robert Lindsey. They each suggested I could make
beneficial use of my background as an acting teacher and director – that
working directly with recovering addicts using skills and talent I already
possess, to use my art to help enable recovery, might be the most positive
thing I could do.
I’ve taken this advice to
heart. I’m heading down the path
of finding ways to use storytelling, theater games, and acting to help those in
recovery find or regain a truer sense of themselves.
My concern is that the world of
addiction education, prevention, and treatment seems to me to be every bit as
fractured, divided, dogmatic, and cultish as the world of training and
nurturing theater artists. In my
short exposure to the world of addiction I’ve seen too many eyebrows raised
about the way “someone else does it.” There seems to be too much interest in defending turf and not
enough questioning of practices that may need refinement or are just plain out
of date. The people least served by this state of affairs are the teenagers,
people using dangerously, and the full blown addicts, all of whom need our full
attention now. The world of addiction
has too much to do to enlighten and battle the outside world without fighting
itself.
In his book, Larry Moss
writes: “Not long after
Strasberg’s death, Stella Adler called Anna Strasberg, his widow, and said, ‘We
should have talked. . . we should have talked.’ Later she wrote Anna a note, ‘In history there are battles
that now end in love.’”
We do not have the luxury of
saying “We should have talked.” We
cannot wait to see if the battle ends in love. Our battle must be to find the common ground, to agree there
is more than one path up the mountain, and to be willing to blaze new trails
with urgency and purpose. We
cannot become shatterproof while the shards of old bitterness lie at our feet.