In the galleries: Stella Adler’s notes on Tennessee Williams’s ‘The Glass Menagerie’

Stella Adler was considered one of this country’s most important teachers of the principles of acting, character analysis, and script analysis. Adler began acting when she was just four years old, alongside her parents, Jacob and Sara Adler, in a production of the Yiddish play Broken Hearts by Z. Libin. Adler performed throughout her youth and young adult years in the New York Yiddish Theater, in which her parents were active. She later became associated with the Group Theatre through Harold Clurman, whom she married in 1943.

In 1934 Adler studied with Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavsky, who would remain an important influence on her throughout her life. Three years later, she moved to Hollywood and acted in films for six years before returning to New York. Her career as a teacher began in the 1940s at the Erwin Piscator Workshop at the New School for Social Research. She left the faculty in 1949 to establish the Stella Adler Theatre Studio, which was later renamed the Stella Adler Studio of Acting.

Adler continued to teach acting for more than 40 years and counted Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, Eva Marie Saint, and many other prominent actors among her students. Adler’s archive, filled with materials related to her teaching career, was acquired with the papers of Harold Clurman in 2004.

The Stella Adler Studio of Acting continues to flourish today as one of the most prominent centers in this country for the study of acting. Adler’s archive is filled with notes from her 40-year career as a teacher, including her analysis of the character of Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie.

In her character dissection, Adler notes the pressure of being a lady that Amanda Wingfield feels in The Glass Menagerie. Adler explains Amanda’s bad behavior as her desperate attempt to clutch onto a sentimental world of charm and poetry, instead of living within the realistic world. Adler’s teaching notes can be viewed in the Ransom Center’s current exhibition, Culture Unbound: Collecting in the Twenty-First Century.