Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights: Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, et al.

Culled from the voluminous lectures of the late American actress, Group Theatre cofounder, and renowned teacher, this companion volume to Stella Adler on Strindberg, Ibsen, and Chekhov (2000) shares the same forceful qualities and inescapable drawbacks of the earlier selection, but will be essential reading for the actor as well as a bracingly original introduction (or refresher) for the general reader. Beginning with a discussion of O’Neill, Adler establishes key themes, including an explication of the marginality that produces great theater and its implicit challenge to the mainstream convictions of its audience. She then moves through playwrights who were defined by, and in turn transcended, their particular eras. With respect to the Great Depression, for example, there’s a keen, stimulating consideration of Thornton Wilder (along with William Saroyan, discussed in a later chapter) as a Chekhovian writer of enormous, universalizing humor, paradoxically cosmopolitan and thoroughly (ambivalently) American. Although editor Paris (Louise Brooks: A Biography) takes pains to reduce the natural redundancy across these talks (in addition to offering synopses of the plays discussed and judicious explanatory footnotes), the transfer to the page inevitably entails compromise; chapters land somewhere between transcripts and cohesive essays. Nevertheless, nearly every page shimmers with Adler’s bounding personality and discerning grasp of her subjects. (Aug.)