Banner Graphic, Volume 15, Number 102, Greencastle, Putnam County, 2 January 1985 — Page 13

Great debate

Enviromentalists, residents decry Georgia officials' effort to divert water in river project

By WILLIAM E. SCHMIDT c. 1984 N.Y. Times News Service AUGUSTA, Ga. When city engineers here devised a plan four years ago to divert water from the Savannah River through a small, city-run hydroelectric plant, local officials expected compliments, not controversy. For one thing, both the dam that would divert the water and the canal that would carry it were already in place, built in 1845 to help provide water power for the textile industry. Not only that, but there seemed little way the city could lose money on the project: Under the terms of federal legislation intended to help restore lowlevel hydroelectric generating capacity at existing dams, utilities were required to purchase all electricity from small projects like Augusta’s. The only thing that has been generated so far in Augusta is controversy, as has been the case at scores of similar endeavors across the country that were spawned by the Public Utilities Regulatory Act of 1978. Projects have been sought from the mountains of the Northwest to those of New England and the Southern Piedmont. The Augusta project’s opponents, including the Sierra Club and officials in neighboring South Carolina, argue that by diverting large flows of water into the old canal, as now planned, the city will draw down levels along a scenic, four-mile stretch of the river. They say that when normal river flows are low, this will damage fish and plant habitat and turn a series of rapids popular with kayakers and rafters into a desultory trickle of water. The city denies this, saying its studies show that flow in the river will not be adversely affected. The Carter administration intended the federal law to encourage small hydroelectric power development as a cost-efficient and environmentally sound solution to energy needs. Compared with costs and controversy associated with nuclear power and synthetic fuel development, the plan had considerable appeal. The notion of putting small turbines beside hundreds of old dams and then feeding their electricity into the power grid seemed like an idea appropriate to The Whole Earth Catalogue. Investors and private developers were attracted by the federal promise to make utilities buy the power the new dams generated, however small the amount, and

Stella ... New York acting instructor puts body and soul into demonstrations to 'inspire' students

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN c. 1984 N.Y. Times News Service NEW YORK Wearing bed sheet cloaks and foam rubber crowns, the students assembled in a room three floors above West 56th Street. They had come to acting class to learn how to play royalty. Their instructor, Stella Adler, need not pretend at the role. Daughter of Jacob Adler, teacher of Marlon Brando, student and disciple of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Stella Adler in her eighth decade is the queen of acting theory. And she carries herself accordingly, with furs and attendants and, next to her reading glasses on a table at home, a fingerbowl filled with rose petals. When the students arrive every Monday afternoon for the advanced course in character - the course that most clearly distills Stella Adler’s approach - they wait in an anteroom until summoned into the classroom. When Miss Adler enters the classroom, they rise in homage. And when she departs 90 minutes later, they applaud. That is appropriate, for the students have witnessed not only a bit of genius but a wondrous performance. Miss Adler has spoken of architecture and the ocean, of Dante and Versailles of arms and the Medicis, all of which find a place within’her theory of acting. She has cursed, cajoled, raged, roared and, from time to time, even complimented her St “Theteacher , ’ ’ Miss Adler said later, “has to inspire. The teacher has to agitate. You cannot teach acting. You can only stimulate what’s already there.” And to that end, she will tell one student “You are vomit” and she will kiss another on the cheek. She will uplift and upbraid her charges with equal facility and equal honesty “I have never worked with a director,” Miss Adler said, “who did not have both extremes. Stanislavsky was wild in order to get what he needed. Tyrone Guthrie was disciplined n the same way the seas around England are disciplined. Max Reinhardt was passionate about character and “ mme Harold Clurman, as everybody knows, was a man who shouted a lot. And he shouted a lot because he wanted the world to know what the playwright meant. Those four were alldvnamic ” She paused. “And I myselt am not a slouch. She hardly could have been one, growing up in New York in the family of Jacob P. Adler, whom she calls “the tyrant of 111 me ’’Tyranny aside, Adler was one of the legends of the Yiddish stage and he was the patriarch of one of America’s

Banner Graphic Greencastle, Putnam County, Wednesday, January 2,1985, Vol. 15 No. 101 25 Cents

by tax benefits. With some developers forecasting a 30 percent return on investment, they rushed to put down applications not only to rebuild old dams, but also to put new ones along hundreds of small, fast-moving streams. Of some 5,000 applications received in the last five years by the federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which administers the program, more than 900 projects have been licensed and about 600 are already running. The largest number of applications is on streams in the Pacific Coast states. In Washington, for instance, more than 700 applications are pending, and developers have asked to put in as many as 48 separate dams in the Salmon River basin in Idaho. As the number has grown, so have the disputes. Those who want to build the projects complain of long and costly delays from federal regulators’ failure to clear a backlog of applications. And environmentalists who once liked the general idea are aghast at the damage they say the projects, especially the newer ones, will do to many small rivers. “What a lot of these projects do is convert what was once a free-flowing stream into a dewatered stretch of river below the dam,” said Vawter Parker, an attorney for the Sierra Club’s Legal Defense Fund, which has gone to federal district court in San Francisco to force federal regulators to prohibit subsidies for new projects. As a result, the federal energy officials said they now know of at least 45 lawsuits filed to block the small hydroelectric facilities. Meanwhile, Parker and others estimate there are more than 100 other cases, like Augusta’s, in which opponents of specific projects are seeking the right to intervene in the federal licensing of hydroelectric facilities. In New York State, where there have been 330 applications for such projects, the Sierra Club has helped force the withdrawal of five that it opposed. It is contesting another planned on the Lachute River. In Transylvania County in western North Carolina, a coalition is battling a developer’s plans to put a dam on the scenic Horsepasture River. Opponents say the plan would effectively destroy a steep, four-mile stretch of the river where it is carried over five waterfalls. In addition to environmentalists, the program has also drawn the ire of some in Congress, including Rep. John D. Dingell,

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What started out as a simple concept turned into a controversial issue in Augusta, Ga., when city engineers planned to divert water from the Savannah River through a small, city-operated hydroelectric plant. Jorge Jimenez,

the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. In recent hearings before a House subcommittee, Dingell was sharply critical of the federal program. He says that in its rush to develop hydroelectric resources, the agency is not being sensitive enough to environmental concerns raised by other federal agencies, including the Fish and Wildlife Service. Raymond J. O’Connor, chairman of the regulatory commission, told Dingell in a letter that the commission was studying new procedures for applications for several projects in the Pacific Northwest, where environmentalists have raised questions about the effect of clustering too many projects in a single river basin. The debate over the project in Augusta has been especially frustrating to local officials, who say that delays in getting a license are costing the city $4 million to $8 million a year from the lost sale of elec-

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ADLER: Instructor (L) can belt out a part

greatest theater families. Stella and her brother Luther (who died Saturday at the age of 81) became the best known of the Adler children, largely through their affiliation with the Group Theater in the 19305. With the Group Theater, Miss Adler acted in “Awake and Sing!,” “Success Story” and other major plays. She worked with Clurman, who would become her director and, for a time, her husband. And she met Lee Strasberg, who would become, with her, the chief American exponent of the Stanislavsky Method he at the Actors Studio, she at the Stella Adler Conservatory. Each, however, had a different method to the Method; and each considered the other’s method madness. “What he does is sick,” Miss Adler once said of Strasberg, who died in 1982. And when Strasberg was once asked to compare his acting theory to hers, he answered. “There’s no comparison.” Strasberg taught acting from inside out, driving his students further and further into their memories and often into hysterics along the way until they found a personal experience to inform their character. Miss Adler basing her method on studies with Stanislavsky in Paris in 1938 taught acting from the outside in, using the art and archiecure of a period and the costume of a character to inspire an actor’s

engineer of the project, said the city plans to use revenue bonds to pay the S2O million needed for a 15-megawatt turbine used in the water diversion process. (N.Y. Times Wire Service photo).

tricity. The city has already signed a contract with a local utility that distributes power to rural areas to purchase the electricity generated by the project. Jorge E. Jimenez, the project engineer, says the city plans to use revenue bonds to pay the S2O million to build the 15megawatt turbine that it plans to install along the old industrial canal. Water would be diverted from the river above the old dam and into the old in dustrial canal, built to carry water to the old textile mills whose Gothic towers and crenelated walls still dominate the landscape. The debate here, as in other places, is over how much water to divert from the river. “We have done numerous studies that show by maintaining a minimum flow in the river of 500 cubic feet per second, river levels will drop only about a foot,” said Jimenez. Officials from South Carolina, which

imagination. “Don’t use your conscious past,” she once said. “Use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character.” On a recent Monday, the students came as clergy. Miss Adler watched from a table at one end of the classroom, with her two assistants, Elizabeth Parrish and Jeffrey Horowitz, flanking her. She wore a black suit and a black fur stole. As she gazed at the students and their costumes, she sipped from a can of Diet 7-Up. One student had made a bed sheet into a cleric’s robe. Miss Adler told him it still looked like a bed sheet drab, wrinkled. “I’m not going to let you rehearse in a sheet,” she said, “unless you have some color in it. ” The student seemed confused. “What happened to using the imagination?” he asked. And Stella Adler was off and running. “When you’re dealing with a costume,” she explained, “you’re dealing with a reality on the body. And the reality awakens the imagination. Costume is always very, very deliberately planned. The king was awakened by his throne, by his staff. You never see the king in his dressing room. You never see the king leaning on a table. You never see the king taking a cigarette ” She told the students to rehearse for a bit. They moved slowly around the room, like the ghosts from a costume rental warehouse, pantomiming prayer and genuflection. “The walk is shabby, the walk is modern,” Miss Adler told one sharply. In marginally softer tones, she said to another, “Honey, your depth isn’t there. You walk like someone who can’t get a movie.” Miss Adler rose from her chair Horowitz moving to help her up, she shrugging off the aid and demonstrated the correct gait. She walked in long, slow steps, her head erect, her eyes unblinking, her entire carriage royally arrogant. After one turn around the room, she slipped out of character and resumed the critiques of her students: “Your hands are wrong, Eric. I don’t know who you are.” “You don’t know where you’re going, who you are. You're mindless.” “You’re a clown. You don’t want to be a clown. But you ARE a clown.” Finally, she came to a young woman in a nun’s habit fashioned from black satin. Miss Adler smiled and said, “Good.” Then it was time for the slide show. The first slide was of a

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borders on the Savannah River, and from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources say they want the city to keep a flow of at least 1,900 cubic feet a second in the river, which they say is the historic minimum flow. Jimenez says that would keep the city from generating enough electricity to make a profit.

painting of waves breaking on a rocky coast. The students had seen it before, for it was an image central to Miss Adler’s theory. As the image remained on the wall, Miss Adler talked about the primary struggles of life, of God versus Satan, of good versus evil. She spoke of man’s need to defy nature, to rise up rather than to be pulled down. “I want you to get that force in you,” she told the class. “That you were born to struggle. Born to fight. You are pulled in two directions. That is your curse.” She drew breath. “Do you understand what I’m talking about?” The next slide showed Western mountains; it resembled one of Ansel Adams’s photographs of Yosemite. Miss Adler talked about having the power of stone. As she expounded, her voice grew a bit harder, a bit louder. Soon she was on the edge of a shout. The slide show ended. “I don’t know why I get mad at you,” Miss Adler said, her eyes scanning the classroom. “You don’t look at enough paintings. You don’t do enough work. Gielgud came to the studio once and what did he talk about? Venetian painting.” Carrying the idea further in a private interview a few days later, she said: “In this particular class, you can’t start from this year or last year. You have to know how man emerged. How he built edifices and churches. How he surrounded himself with an army. It all has to be built from the beginning, so the actor is completely controlled by the culture of the period. If you don’t know Versailles and you don’t know the king, then you don’t know what power is.” And sometimes the lesson is learned. Class was drawing toward the end the other day when Miss Adler asked a student named Paul Sanchez to play a scene. Horowitz massaged her back and shoulders as she watched him. Costumed like a priest of the Holy Roman Church, Sanchez moved toward an imaginary altar. He knelt and prayed. . Then he rose and began to celebrate Communion, blessing the host, breaking it into quarters and placing one of them inside his mouth. When Sanchez was done, Miss Adler gently told him he had hurried the ritual a bit, had worked too quickly with the host. She asked him if he understood. ”1 treated it like a wafer,” Sanchez said, nodding. “Instead of the body of Christ.” Miss Adler smiled. “He knows,” she told the class, “how to help himself.”

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Proponents of the Savannah River project say that diverting large flows of water into the old canal, as now planned, will damage fish and plant habitats. Also, kayakers claim lower water levels, along the four-mile stretch of the river, will end their sport as the area becomes no deeper than a trickle of water. (N.Y. Times Wire Service photo). The South Carolina officials say flows at the level sought by Augusta will leave only a series of isolated pools and a bare trickle of water in a four-mile stretch up to six months a year. Among other things, says Paul League, counsel for the South Carolina Water Resources Commission, this will hurt owners of riverfront property. “It just not very appealing to build along a former river,” League said.