TOM OPPENHEIM ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: So, this is Christa Whitney and today is March 8th, 2016. I'm here in New York with Tom Oppenheim. We're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

TOM OPPENHEIM:You do indeed.

CW:Thank you. So, I wanted to mostly talk about your grandmother. But I thought we could start a generation earlier. So, can you tell me who your great-grandparents were? Stella's parents?

TO:Yeah. Jacob Adler was my great-grandfather and Sarah Adler was my great-grandmother.

CW:And who were they?

TO:Well, they were actors and theater makers. And I don't know as much about 1:00Sarah, but Jacob Adler was born -- I believe it was 1853 in Odessa, Russia. And he fell in love with the theater and -- fell in love with the Russian theater initially, to which he went and he was in charge of claques and engaged as an audience member but, of course, couldn't participate as an actor because he was Jewish. And then, he -- there was a burgeoning Yiddish theater coming from Romania. And he joined that at, I imagine, a pretty young age, I would guess, in his teens, maybe late teens. And grew with it and grew it, and then fled Russia 2:00in -- I think the date is 1883, when the tsar outlawed Jewish theater and many other Jewish endeavors -- and fled to London and then came to the United States. I think it was first in 1887, but briefly went back and then came again in 1889 to these shores, to New York City, and built his theater. And, pursued his idea of theater and ideals of theater, which were mighty, which were of a Yiddish theater that was equal in stature to other great theatrical epochs, and which was theater as an institution whose purpose was to uplift, edify, educate people 3:00of his community. And so, that -- yeah, I mean --

CW:Yeah, he's sort of known as -- people say sort of trying to bring Yiddish theater up a level.

TO:Yeah, right. So that --

CW:What do you understand about that?

TO:Well, as I understand it, when he came here, the -- I mean, if you read his memoir, that idea came early in his life, even walking around in Russia. He had a girlfriend whose name -- and maybe they may have married. Maybe it was his first wife, I think it was, who spoke to him about Yiddish theater in the context of world theater. And so, he had that idea. He had that idea. And, I mean, that -- I wish I had the authority of a scholar. If I did, I would 4:00contextualize it in relationship to the Haskalah, which was, I guess, the intellectual context of Yiddish theater and Yiddish literature and Yiddish intellectual endeavors or, as I understand it, Jewish intellectual endeavors, which had a similar goal to uplift the Jewish people. And so, it utilized the language of the people, which was Yiddish. So, I think when he came to the United States, he found a theater that was an immigrant theater that's -- function was to entertain and he -- and so, he was at odds with it. And I believe it was in 1892, he met Jacob Gordin and that -- and Jacob Gordin had a 5:00similar life's mission. And so, the expression, as I understand it, that was used for theater, was shund [theater deemed to be of inferior quality], or garbage or mere entertainment. We have a ton of it in our time, alas. And so, I mean, I think he identified with great classical plays and presented them, but also wanted to do plays by contemporary Jewish writers. And the first of those was Jacob Gordin. And there's wonderful accounts in his memoirs and also in a book called "Jacob Adler and the Yiddish Theatre," which was initially called "Bright Star of Exile," that my cousin Lulla wrote where he talks about that first performance of a Jacob Gordin play, and how it was rejected by an audience 6:00and he had to step forward and argue on its behalf and urge the audience to be patient. And so, it was a hard-fought battle.

CW:And do you have a sense of -- from family lore, just your reading of what the Yiddish theater scene was that he was involved in?

TO:Right. Yeah, I mean, I think it was a wild scene full of bigger-than-life characters. Wildly extravagant people. So, it was that. I mean, my family -- my experience of it -- that I really own, I think, through my family, through my 7:00experience with my family was that it was also loads of fun, just enormous fun, celebratory. So, when you get into Stella, I think her understanding of theater was of a family endeavor and -- with lots of family and lots of friends and gaiety. Guess it's sort of old-fashioned word, but appropriate. That's my sense of that world. I mean, there was lots of sort of famous fights, too, and famous family fights, and I think fights between companies and actors, as well. So, very, very colorful, extravagant world.

CW:Did you ever get to see any glimpse of that, like the Second Avenue scene 8:00when you were growing up, or through the lens of the family lore?

TO:Just, yeah, not -- I mean, I was -- I'm old but not that old. I was born in '59. So, that was sort of over by then, so -- but it was just family cousins, lots of cousins, and Stella and Harold and Luther and Lull and Pearly. And it was just feeling, absorbing it through them. Yeah, I guess.

CW:Yeah. So, can you just introduce Stella Adler? Who was she?

TO:So, she was my grandmother.

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Born 1901, and she was on -- as I understand it, her first performance was in 9:001905. So, she's really, literally born onto the stage and, I think, absorbed Jacob Adler's passion and his sense of theatrical purpose and artistic purpose. She was certainly bigger than life. Very extravagant. Big human being. I think she developed the demeanor of a kind of royal figure. I'm not so sure that was -- think if you speak to my mother, you'll learn that her mother, Sarah Adler, was not like that. She was like a down-to-earth peasant figure. And Luther wasn't that way, either. He didn't have that kind of grandeur. But Stella had a 10:00kind of grandeur and regality, she was sort of a regal figure. Deeply intelligent. Very, very intelligent. Very, very committed student of theater for the whole of her life. Studied it incessantly. Had an endless appetite for learning. And that included learning about the theater but also even learning art forms beyond the theater, that kind of thing.

CW:Can you describe what she looked like when you knew her?

TO:She was beautiful. She seemed tall, but I think if you look at her, she's all of five-seven or five-eight. But she had the quality of -- I think she was tall 11:00for a woman of her time and exuded height. Beautiful, blonde, in a family, as I understand it, of brunettes. Blue eyes and penetrating eyes and absorbing eyes. Eyes that would open up and look at you and see you.

CW:And when you knew her, was she still performing? Did you ever get to see her perform?

TO:No, never. I mean, I think she stopped performing in the mid-'60s, I think, is what it was. And I think the last performance may have been in London, so -- but I saw her teach a great deal and performance was part of the way she taught. 12:00So, I saw her in that context. And I saw her sitting around the living room and the whole family performed. That's how they told stories. So, you'd be sitting around the table and somebody would stand up and deliver a story. And I remember her and Pearly, standing up and they did a routine of truck drivers. That's all I remember of it, except that everybody was in gales of laughter. So, performance was part of who she was.

CW:And can you tell me a little bit about her career? So, she started out in Yiddish theater.

TO:Right. Yeah, so as to -- what I understand is she started out -- I know she started out in Yiddish theater and she was in that theater as a little girl and as a teenager, and then performed in other Yiddish -- performed with her family, 13:00but then I think she performed with Maurice Schwartz, I believe, and was part of his company. And so, other Yiddish companies and -- but then, she was able to cross over and do Broadway performances, as well. And then Harold Clurman found -- I mean, that's a whole other personage in all this. If you read his memoir called "All People Are Famous" -- have you read that one?

CW:Mm-mm.

TO:Yeah. But he talks about -- and he was also born in 1901 in the Bronx, and also Russian-Jewish descent. But he talks about how he, at the age of six, was taken to Jacob Adler's theater and he saw Adler, and so he had an early awareness of -- and the impact that had on him and, in particular, he talks 14:00about the relationship. I think he understood the greatness of the performance but, as I understand it, what impressed him enormously was the relationship between player and audience member, between the actors and the community, which became a -- integral part of the Group Theatre and his conception of the purpose of theater. So, I think there was important influence there. Anyway, so he had an awareness of Stella and he recruited her to be part of the Group Theatre. So, she joined the Group as a founding member, which would have been in the -- I'd say in the realm of 1929, 19-- the '20s, early '30s. So, I think the first performance was in '31 and the Group disbanded in '41. But she did those ten years with the Group or the better part of those ten years. In the midst of 15:00that, she -- I mean, another unique, I think, important part of Stella's life as an Adler is that she studied with Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya at the American -- what's it called? Do you remember? Do you know?

CW:I don't know, sorry.

TO:The American Laboratory Theatre, I think.

CW:Oh, right, yeah.

TO:And so, I mean, what family lore. I mean, I've known from -- early age that her cousin -- her brothers and sisters, everybody made big fun of her for studying. What a funny thing to do, since they'd been acting since they were kids and -- but that's -- that tells you about Stella and who she was. And so, she did that formative training then, and somewhere in the midst of that, she 16:00went to New York University and got a degree. But then, in 1934, on a trip to -- I think, first, Russia that -- where they came back through Paris, she met with Konstantin Stanislavski and ended up studying with him, working with him daily for five weeks.

CW:Did she talk to you about that experience?

TO:She spoke about it a lot, yeah. She -- I don't remember she and I -- well, I remember one important thing she said to me was that she said, "I'll be remembered for having taught Stanislavski's technique, but most of what I teach," she said, "didn't come from Stanislavski." I'm sure that's not true. But I do feel that when you studied with her, you were absorbing information that she got from Stanislavski and information that she got from her mother and 17:00father. And that was something that I think students of hers that spent real time in her classes would tell you, that she would sometimes speak Yiddish and -- to show how the language felt, and the difference between the Yiddish language and the English language. Think she felt that the Yiddish language was a warmer, more intimate language. And she'd probably say the same thing about Russian, so --

CW:Are there specific techniques that are known as coming from Yiddish theater?

TO:I couldn't say that there are. But if you read her introduction to Jacob Adler's memoirs, she talks about absorbing, as a little girl -- she says her 18:00first memories of a room was of a dressing room. And then, she talks about watching this miracle, this man turn into another man, that that sense of transformation. I mean, it was just -- clearly in Stanislavski, but it's something I think that she had this visceral, indelible early experience of, and a passion for otherness, for transformation, for the capacity, the room that a human being has within the self, to identify broadly. It strikes me as unique in 19:00the American actor training scene. Also, in the documentary on her, she talks about how her father would tell her to study young Spinoza when she played Spinoza. You've seen that? Yeah. Again, that's in Stanislavski, there's -- clearly there and it's in his charts, but she absorbed it. It was a pre-Stanislavski absorption, and one that I think relates to Jacob Adler's theater. Also, the idea of the elevation of self, the elevation of humanity, the big ideas, finding big ideas and delivering them vividly, putting them in your 20:00body and in your blood and bones and your soul so that you become -- so that you're embodied thought. I think that that could be related to Jewish interests and predilections. And I think you feel that in Harold, and in a certain sense in what the group did, and certainly in her techniques. I couldn't argue that you wouldn't have those were it not for the Yiddish theater and that they don't exist in Stanislavski. But they exist in America very, very powerfully, I think, through Stella. And, I guess --

CW:Can you describe a class with Stella? What would that be like?

TO:I mean, so there were a number of them. So, the script interpretation class was more like a lecture kind of class where -- and at one point, she did it in a theater, in a temple, in a synagogue somewhere in Midtown, Uptown. So, always, she would enter -- there would be enormous sort of preparation. She'd come in and there would be standing ovation. That was standard for all her classes. And 22:00then, she would open out a subject in the script interpretation and you'd have to read a play and then she would break down a scene. And slowly and meticulously, and you would find that there would be a crevice in a piece of text through which the entire culture would suddenly come flooding up out of it. Piece of text that would -- two words or two phrases where you could easily just slide right over them. She would stop you and show you the psychosexual intellectual preoccupations of that period of time and -- so that you'd understand issues and tensions and ideas that were working, that were at work 23:00there. And the -- is that helpful? Okay. I took a character class. That was different, but that was a unique class to Stella, where she would describe character in terms of archetypes that were sort of societal -- I guess one might say Western archetypes, the peasantry, the aristocracy, the clergy, the middle class. So, you'd sort of go through them and there would -- one by one and explore them by way of cultural expressions way beyond the theater. So, if you 24:00were doing the clergy, for example, you'd go through the Metropolitan Museum and you'd feel the height of the ceiling or columns, or you'd look at paintings and -- or you would dance, or -- and the military was another one. You would march and you'd listen to military music and you'd costume yourself and -- but the costumes would be critiqued. So, those were very active and, I think, extraordinarily imaginative classes, and classes that always were intended to marry your -- I guess one might say your habitual daily self with these huge mythological realms that are our birthright as human beings. Scene study class, 25:00same thing. She'd walk in, be applauded. She would graciously accept her applause, sit down, and then scene work would start. And she'd usually -- often, she'd stop it even before anybody said anything. And she would go completely insane. You should listen to tapes of her. She took it very personally. Funny thing was that if you were on the receiving end of that, it looked awful, it looked bruising, and I think probably it was. I think people taught in those days differently than they do now and don't teach that way, for worse and for better, and also for -- to our detriment. But when you were on the receiving end 26:00of it, often it didn't hurt as much as it looked like it would've if you were just sitting on the sidelines. It was this impersonal, powerful, uncompromisable artistic standard just coming at you. And at the other end of it wasn't hatred or sadism, but profound love. Really, if you abstract it, maybe that's the right word, to the ultimate, it was profound love of humanity. It was like a religious fervor that, You as a human being, you as an actor, we as theater practitioners -- we owe ourselves, we owe the world much more than what you thought coming in 27:00here today. And I won't let you leave without sharing with you this responsibility. And if you can't -- and I think probably it was ruthless. If you can't take it, then maybe you shouldn't be in the theater. But if you can take it, there's maybe a place for you in the theater, because -- so, they were thrilling, it was thrilling. It was a thrilling experience.

CW:And how long did you actually study with her?

TO:Yeah, I couldn't quantify it. When I was in my teens, I would leave high school and go over and sit and watch her teach, and so I sort of absorbed a lot like that. And then, when I was in my early twenties, I went to the National 28:00Shakespeare Conservatory, which was like a Stella Adler Studio without Stella, and had great teachers, many of whom had worked with her, like Alice Winston and Mario Siletti and -- some of whom still teach here, actually. And then, afterwards, I observed classes. And then, I went back years later and took the character class. So, it was just a -- in and out around a lot.

CW:Can you talk a little more about imagination and how that factored into her specific technique?

TO:Right. Yes. So, imagination, for her, for Stella, is the central tool, the 29:00central aspect of oneself to utilize for the sake of one's acting or for one's art. And I suppose the most -- the clearest way to understand it is that you're -- as an actor, you're faced with a script which is black marks on white paper. And your job is to bring that script to life, so that wherever there's a reference in the script to a past, you have to create that past. Or even the present, every present needs a past, so you're -- some of which is given, but 30:00it's always skeletal and scant compared to you sitting there with a whole life behind you. So, that it's by way of the imagination that that work is done. Being able to stand, exist on stage but create a landscape in front of you and to see it, specifically, and not only to see it but to create it, to create that which you see in such a way where you're genuinely moved by it, that has to be -- that's a function of the imagination. Everything that you see, touch, think, do onstage has to be woven through your imagination or cleansed by your 31:00imagination. So, a lot of the foundation exercises function that way. You're asked even with -- before you go to a script to create, in enormous detail, landscapes or -- a Fifth Avenue apartment was one that she did. It's changed. Some people -- it's different things for different teachers, and so -- but it's like a muscle that -- you keep exercising it. Stella said that even your daily habitual self exists in your imagination. So, it wasn't a revolution against who you are by birth and name and sex and religion and economics and all that. For 32:00her, it was understanding that if you limit yourself to that, you limit yourself as a human being and as an artist. Is that helpful?

CW:Yeah.

TO:Okay.

CW:And the -- a lot is written of the difference between that and Method.

TO:Right.

CW:So, can you explain that a little bit?

TO:So, I mean, just from my point of view, I think that Stella felt limited by the Method because I think she felt it was taking -- pulling her into her own individual life and away from the text. And there's techniques in relationship to the Method -- for example, substitution, where you substitute your own life 33:00or a circumstance in your own life for the circumstances, the given circumstances. And so, that was the conflict, yeah. And so, yeah. She had a passion for literature and the archetypal and mythological and that kind of thing. And she had a profound conviction that our responsibility as theater artists is to raise ourselves up to literature. So, I mean, that's, I think, 34:00what she felt most passionately. However you got there was, I mean, up to you and I -- but that if you pull characters down to yourself, if you level them off or bring them down to yourself, you're depriving them of their function in the world. And to some extent, I would think she'd say the same thing: You're depriving yourself of the function of an artist, the purpose of art, that it's raising yourself up. She had exercises like that, where you would take a -- just a daily object like a pencil. And then you would raise it up, that this pencil expresses the highest aspirations of humanity to communicate its depth of 35:00thought and feeling or something, so that when you picked it up onstage, it had weight.

CW:When you knew her, did she have any connections with the Yiddish theater?

TO:Not to my knowledge. But my cousin Lulla, who wrote the "Bright Star of Exile" or "Jacob Adler and Yiddish Theatre" and then translated the memoirs, she did, and Stella was engaged with that. And, I mean, she -- as I say, she would use Yiddish and refer to it. And if you read even her book, for example, on 36:00Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, she says -- the first thing she says is that she -- what she got from her father was that if you don't make it better, why do they come? I think she herself was a living, breathing, ongoing echo of Yiddish theater.

CW:And --

TO:Same is true of Marlon Brando, by the way. I would say that he studied with her prior to the creation of this organization. This was founded in -- Stella Adler Studio of Acting is founded in 1949. I think they studied in mid-'40s and maybe even the early '40s at the New School. But then, he was in a play called 37:00"A Flag is Born." Do you know about that?

CW:Mm-mm.

TO:And that's an aspect of Stella's life and work that is, I would think, relevant, which is that the Group Theatre disbanded '41 and by -- and '43, she joined something called the Bergson Group. Do you know about the Bergson Group?

CW:Yeah, little bit.

TO:Yeah, which was created by Peter Bergson, a.k.a. -- was really Hillel Kook, a.k.a. Peter Bergson. But a man who was, I think, a Polish Jew that began trying to lobby both the British government and then the US government to create a Jewish battalion to fight in World War II. And then, there was an article, I think, buried on page eleven of "The New York Times" reporting that two million Jews had been exterminated. And at that point, he -- in Europe, in World War II. 38:00And so, at that point, he changed his mission, which was to lobby the Roosevelt administration to save the Jews of Europe. And Stella joined that committee, and -- which I think is relevant to -- I mean, she was a political animal. And her technique operates that way, too. There's a social activist part of it, as there was in Yiddish theater and in the Group. It wasn't art for art's sake. It was art for the sake of provoking, of edifying, uplifting, provoking, providing leadership to the people of the community, inspiring, so on. Inspiring activism, activity. So, she joined the Bergson Group but she was on the executive committee of that. And the Bergson Group, she did a number of -- they utilized 39:00actors in a kind of innovative way that -- way that exists much more today, as I understand it, than then. But anyway, the guy who wrote "Gone with the Wind," Ben Hecht -- Ben Hecht wrote a play called "A Flag is Born," which was -- this was after the war was over. And so, the Bergson Group was then trying to raise money for the creation of the State of Israel, but also to help the DPs, the displaced persons. And so, Ben Hecht wrote "A Flag is Born" and my uncle, Luther, directed it. And my cousin Celia Adler -- was it Celia or Cecilia? Celia Adler was in it and Brando was in it. That was his first thing he did on 40:00Broadway. And Paul Muni was in it. And that's something I remember hearing my whole life, was that -- my mother told me that Marlon's favorite actor was Paul Muni. And when he died, when Brando died, Sean Penn went on the Charlie Rose show and Charlie Rose said, "Why is acting different after Marlon Brando than it was before?" And Sean Penn, the first thing he said was, "Marlon would have said why is acting different after Paul Muni than it was before?" So, there was lots of influence -- he might have said after Stella Adler, and he did in many places. He wrote and spoke with great pride about Stella as his teacher. Why did I get onto Brando? Do you remember?

CW:You were talking about the --

TO:You have to rewind the tape (laughter) and find out.

CW:You were talking about the production of --

TO:"Flag is Born."

CW:-- "A Flag Is Born," yeah.

TO:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway.

CW:And Stella teaching him and -- yeah.

TO:Right. Right, right.

CW:And, I mean, one question that's hard to figure out how to ask, but I'm going to ask anyway. But what was Jewish about her?

TO:Jewish about Stella?

CW:And maybe just thinking more about your family, too. What is important about being Jewish in your family?

TO:Hm. I mean, that's a complicated question. I mean, we weren't religiously Jewish, though we had Passovers. But they were -- we also celebrated Christmas, so -- we were that kind of Jew. So, what is Jewish about being Jewish is a 42:00question that comes to mind. I mean, because the first thing I think of is that the -- is laughter, frankly, and storytelling and -- but also, I guess I'll say -- I don't know that this isn't true of other cultures, but for Stella, I mean, great love of ideas and a love of the mind. Of course, Lee Strasburg was Jewish and so was Sanford Meisner. But Stella's technique, her contribution seems to me -- and I'm sure Sandy would agree, I would guess he would agree with this and appreciate it -- was the unabashed use, utilization of the brain of an actor, of 43:00demanding actors be thinking individuals. Teach them how to use their mind, that their mind is important, that their understanding of thought is important, that they be co-creators with playwrights. And there's a passage in -- more recent book, which is called -- on the American masters, master playwrights, where she's talking about -- as I recall, it's an Odets play and she says, "He gave me the father," he described this character's father, "but I created the mother all by myself," as though she's almost standing up next to the playwright. So, the idea of a script interpretation class, a class in reading, the -- I think 44:00there's something characteristically Jewish in that, that she challenged actors to -- her students to cultivate their humanity, cultivate themselves through education. I think that could be argued as a Jewish interest, Jewish preoccupation. In a book that Lulla wrote, she talks about the Haskalah, and she talks about the Jew breaking down the walls of the ghetto through education. And that's in relationship to Jacob Adler. And I think that echo -- that was very strong in his life. I think he always felt funny because he didn't have higher education, but he writes beautifully and thinks with great clarity. And there's 45:00moving passages about -- it's in the passage which I would read you if I had the book with me, where he talks about Shylock and where -- his depiction of Shylock as a higher being, as a culturally higher being. Well, that echoes through Stella, and it seems to me you could draw a line between Jewish culture and Spinoza and Mendelstam [sic] and Jacob Adler and Stella and so on. And that's my answer. I think of the Upper West Side when I was a kid -- I said I was born in '59 -- but we'd go to the cemetery, for example, and bury relatives. And there 46:00were Stars of Davids and there was Jewish delicatessens and Isaac Bashevis Singer was alive and writing then. And the world just felt -- Manhattan felt more Jewish in a certain way. And that was the milieu of the family. And so, I suppose there's some relationship there, too.

CW:Can you describe a Passover in your family when you were growing up?

TO:I mean, yeah, I have memories of Passovers at my grandmother's where there was several tables set up, tons of people. Luther would speak the text and he'd have that kind of rabbinical cantor -- singing the text. But just tremendous 47:00amount of laughter and fun, and that's what I remember. Just celebratory fun laughing. Just I remember going to bed and, as a little -- I was a little boy -- and hear this loud, roaring laughter in the other room. So, that's how I -- and lots of non-Jews there, because Stella had students, many of whom were serving. She would teach people to serve and recruit students who were always honored to be there.

CW:Would Luther do it in Hebrew?

TO:I don't remember him doing that, no.

CW:No?

TO:I don't. Maybe he would.

CW:Did you ever hear Yiddish between family members?

TO:I mean, just little snippets of it and words and -- but I didn't grow up with -- it was English, yeah.

CW:What was she like as a grandmother?

TO:Oh, she's terrible. She was not a -- we called her Stella. And she was, it seems to me, a reluctant grandmother, so -- and there was -- that's what that was about, yeah. She wanted to be called, as my mother -- you should meet with my mother. She wanted to be called "memya," I think, which was the word that, as I recall, my mother used for her mother, Sarah. So, my mother grew up with her great-grandmother. And somehow, that wasn't possible. So, she became Stella. And 49:00she was very -- she was a good grandmother and a -- close to my sister, who'd be somebody else you might want to speak with. They were close, and -- but having said all that, I mean, having said that, she was the center of the family, and all of the family occasions were around her or in her -- related to her. And she was the center and she held it together. And she valued family and she was a good family person.

CW:Were you different than other students when you were in her class?

TO:Yeah, probably. And so much of my time in her class was just as an auditor, observing, so -- but I think, yeah, I think it's probably -- yeah. The one that 50:00I really worked in was the character class. So, I was more or less coordinated and capable of delivering stuff. So, I don't think that she was ever embarrassed by me, and -- but a lot of it was just me watching.

CW:When do you think about her?

TO:Oh, gosh, I run the Stella Adler Studio of Acting and my whole life is about animating this organization. So, I think of her a great deal. I mean, my first concern was that the studio not degenerate into a wax museum devoted to Stella. 51:00So, I really felt -- and I went to the National Shakespeare Conservatory where there were a number of different kinds of teachers there. And I thought that was useful. Also felt that she herself, she had a kind of a -- Evgeny from Russia and they would teach next to each other and argue. She connected to Paul Sills, who taught improv, and she wanted him to teach in her school. She brought someone from the Peking Opera to teach. And I found she was more interesting than her disciples, although we have great people like Betsy Parrish and Ron Burris that studied with her. Maureen Megibow and Alice Saltzman. There's really wonderful teachers here that had worked with her. But I think she was way above discipleship. And so, I thought about -- I mean, there was -- so, I wanted to 52:00make sure that we didn't degenerate into dogmatism and didn't become parochial in the world, a parochial expression of this teacher that died a long time ago, that we be a living, breathing expression of her spirit. So, the way I understood that was that the essence of her -- so, I really studied the Yiddish theater in that regard and the Group, and what I understood -- what I really felt was she -- was her body cry. That was the insight, that growth as an actor and growth as a human being are synonymous, that -- and so, I've tried to -- so, I worked very hard to build the institution to say that. So, the mission of this institution is to create an environment that nurtures theater artists and 53:00audiences so that they value humanity, their own and others, as their first priority while bringing art and education to the community. And that all allowed me to connect with people that I think are good and great teachers, whether or not they study with her, but also, build this kind of culturally rich environment so that it works the way her class worked, where you -- so, we have poetry readings, we have jazz and classical concerts, we have our own professional theater company. We have a movement theater, dance theater company -- really movement theater company. We have lectures and symposia, and we have a playwright division. I proposed something called the Jacob Adler Center, and I've been thinking a lot about that lately, that it should be a center that both explores the ongoing echo of Yiddish theater and subsequent American theater, 54:00but also serves as a host for the whole immigrant experience through theater. So, the more Donald Trump talks about xenophobic ideas, the more I'm thinking, What's Syrian theater about? We should make a home for Syrian theater and Mexican theater and Latino theater and so on in Jacob Adler's name. So, all that's based on a kind of ongoing conversation I have inside me with Stella and the tradition. I think about her opening her eyes and looking at the world today, and wonder what -- how she would respond to what's going on around here, 55:00and try to act accordingly. So, think about her really daily.

CW:Did you feel any specific encouragement to go into acting?

TO:No, not in particular. But I think she was pleased, and she wasn't discouraging. I think she was very discouraging to my mother and just -- overwhelming kind of Medusa-like figure, which is a shame because my mother, you may come to find out if you talk with her, she maybe was -- I think she would have been a wonderful actress. She's extremely charming and funny and smart and can imitate things -- people, but also even inanimate objects like furniture and stuff. And so, I think she was -- it made sense to her and she was fine with it. 56:00But there was no pressure to become part of the theater.

CW:What do you see -- is there a place for Yiddish theater today from your perspective?

TO:Actually, there is and I'm pleased that it's making a -- it seems to be -- the language itself seems to be reviving, and I gather that there's the Folksbiene Yiddish theater, but there's other people doing Yiddish theater and I think that's great. I imagine that there is a place for it. And I think it presents itself to American theater makers as a wonderful resource, like a well of creative energy that we should partake of.

CW:Well, is there anything else you want to share about Stella that we didn't talk about? I feel like we could do other interviews about all your other family members, but -- (laughs)

TO:Right, right.

CW:-- since that's the topic of the day.

TO:Yeah, no, I had (UNCLEAR). I'm pleased to talk about her. I think we could benefit from a robust conversation about the Yiddish theater in America, about what -- and I think she herself could benefit from that. And, could use some contemporary appreciation, because she had enormous integrity in her lifetime in 58:00relationship to her own celebrity status or -- she had no interest in celebrity and she didn't engage in self-promotion, ever. It would never have occurred to her to say, "I'm the person who taught Marlon Brando," or Robert De Niro anything like that. And we live in a world in which people can't get out of bed without some PR around it as an event. So, if there's a way in which the studio could -- I mean, I've been having conversations with the Museum of Jewish Heritage about -- and there's a show opening today at the Museum of New York 59:00City, but I'm curious about it. But I think there's -- it would be beneficial to continue to study it and see, feel, and create contemporary echoes of it and resonance and so on.

CW:Well, thank you very much for taking the time.

TO:My pleasure. Thank you.

CW:Thanks.

[END OF INTERVIEW]