Good morning, it's Friday, Dec. 3, 2021, the day of the week when I reprise quotations intended to be uplifting or educational. Today's comes, with an assist from Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando, from a woman born 120 years ago and raised in dynastic Jewish acting family. Although little-remembered outside the professional film fraternity, her influence is still felt by any American who enjoys movies or the theater.
Seventy-four years ago today, director Elia Kazan and his cast of stage actors electrified the audience at New York's Ethel Barrymore Theatre with the debut performance of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire."
When the curtain went down on opening night after the last shocking scene, the crowd sat momentarily in stunned silence. Then they erupted in applause, which soon became a standing ovation, wave after wave of clapping that didn't fully die down for 30 minutes. Postwar America was not a time or place when audiences routinely did such things. "In those days, people only stood for the national anthem," producer Irene Mayer Selznick wrote later. "That night was the first time I ever saw an audience get to its feet."
But new days were coming, both on stage and in cinema, and one of the artists at the vanguard was the 23-year-old dynamo playing Stanley Kowalski. In casting the transfixing story, Elia Kazan assembled a respected cast that included Karl Malden, Kim Hunter, British-born Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois and, of course, Marlon Brando. The young man from Omaha had made his stage debut in 1944 and was impressive enough to be named "most promising young actor" by New York's drama critics. But no one was prepared for what happened at the Dec. 3, 1947, premiere of "A Streetcar Named Desire," or in the hundreds of subsequent performances and the 1951 movie that followed.
"I will never forget the impact Brando had on me and the rest of the audience," novelist Budd Schulberg wrote. "The bar for dramatic actors was being raised before our eyes. The way Brando's Kowalski raged at his fragile victim and totally destroyed her at the climax was like a hard punch to the belly of the audience, and at the curtain there was a strange pause, as if the audience were trying to catch its breath. Then the thundering applause, the standing ovation, and the bravos came as a burst of relief that Blanche's ordeal was over and that the cast could return to their dressing rooms and become themselves again."
"Who was this incredible newcomer?" Schulberg added. "Where had he been while we were enjoying more conventional Broadway fare?"
The short answer was that Brando, like Mississippi-born Tennessee Williams, had been trapped in his own miserable childhood in a town and family that didn't understand his rage or pent-up creative energy. The playwright unleashed his grievances in New Orleans, where "A Streetcar Named Desire" was written and set. Brando found his calling in an acting class at the New School.
His bellowing of "STELLAAAA!" remains an iconic moment in American arts, but it was another Stella, an actress and drama teacher named Stella Adler, who helped Brando find his craft. She was a disciple of Konstantin Stanislavsky, via Lee Strasberg, the autodidactic and self-styled master of "The Method."
Strasberg's devotees were taught to draw on their own life's experiences -- and their deeply held fears and anxieties --to interpret the characters they were portraying. It was almost a combination of group therapy and self-analysis.
Stella Adler took these ideas but went in another direction with them. Yes, her students were encouraged to be aware of their inner feelings while interpreting a character, but also to go far beyond them -- to employ their imaginations in fleshing out their characters as well as expanding their own minds. "She urged them to grow as human beings, to study nature, art, and history," Schulman noted, "because the more they knew, the more choices they would have."
As a drama teacher, Stella Adler's best-known line is probably "Don't be boring." Those who knew Adler and studied under her understood this admonition to be more than a reminder that their livelihoods depended on audiences being entertained by what they see on stage or on the screen. She was suggesting something more profound.
"I think, for Stella, theater was a door that was opening to the divine," her grandson Tom Oppenheim, artistic director of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, told writer Tatum Hunter in 2019. ‘"Don't be boring' was in service to delivering humanity the big ideas and bitter truths we need."
Viewed through this lens, Stella Adler was a life coach as well as an acting coach, and therefore her insights are applicable to everyone. If all the world's a stage, in other words, we are all players in a larger drama. In 1989, three years before her death at age 91, she exhorted her students (and the rest of us): "Get a stage tone, darling, and energy. Never go on stage without your motor running."
And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
