Lee Strasberg, the imperfect genius of the Actors Studio /

Popping with hyperbole and glutted with quotation marks, this is ostensibly a biography of a key figure in theater history--but really just an excuse for nonstop gossip and bickering as gathered from interviews with America's gabbiest, feudingest, now-over-the-hill showfolk. Adams starts right off with a grotesque mix of ignorance and oversimplification: reading this, you'd think that, before Lee Strasberg came along to refine ""the esoteric, dramaturgical ideas"" (!) of Stanislavsky into ""the Method,"" all actors were faithfully following the Delsarte System. The distorted groundwork thus laid, she then traces Strasberg's lower-East-Side childhood (""Those formative, growing-up years were characterized by a lack of visible affection""), his beginnings as an actor, his transforming first sight of the Moscow Art Theatre, the Group Theatre triumphs and breakups (with comparisons of Strasberg's versions of who-said-what-when with Harold Clurman's), his lean acting-coach days in Hollywood, his reluctant appearance as guest lecturer at Elia Kazan's Actor's Studio--the ""first step into immortality"" as guru of ""the world's most exclusive club."" And, while freely collecting Strasberg's faults (coldness, etc.), Adams, never putting the Studio in clear focus or theater-history perspective, heaps on fatuous repetitive tributes--""This creature's magic includes perception. He X-rays a man's soul""--and lapses into sheer gobbledygook: ""Ominiscience without specifics. Between the qualifiers and the mangled syntax there are times the medium is beyond the message."" But the real business here is gossip: about Marilyn Monroe (she gets her own chapter), about Lee's unpopular, commanding wife Paula, about his mixed-up kids, about anyone and everyone fairly famous who so much as darkened Lee's door. For Group Theater history, stick with Clurman's enthralling Fervent Years, whatever its biases; for Method-ology, there are countless sources. This one is strictly for those veteran N.Y. star-gazers who still passionately care what Estelle Parsons is saying about Sylvia Miles. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.