Life of stage director reads like classic drama

The story has all the elements of a great drama: conflict, glory and failure, tension, irony, catharsis, tragedy.

A beloved black sheep strays from his family's proscribed path, giving himself over to drugs and alcohol. He slowly fights his way to sobriety, but just as his hard-won maturity leads him to the greatest achievements of his creative life, the woman he adores -- the one who stuck by him through those traumatic years -- loses her battle with the disease that had made her every breath a struggle.

It's the kind of dramatic, suspenseful story Joseph Adler would jump at producing at GableStage, where his dazzling work in two seasons as artistic director has raised the creative bar for every other South Florida theater.

But this story is not a theater piece. This is Joe Adler's life.

If you've been to GableStage, that wide yet intimate space in the Biltmore Hotel where shockingly good theater is the rule rather than the exception, you've no doubt seen Adler. Unlike some artistic directors, who pop up onstage at gala openings to hard-sell their vision to potential donors and wary critics, the 58-year-old Adler is at GableStage for every performance of the shows he directs.

A stocky man with wire-rim glasses and a long gray ponytail -- no slave to trends, he has always worn his hair that way -- Adler has a compulsion to personally greet and get feedback from the people who find his in-your-face style of theater fascinating. But he's also there to make sure the actors, artists who genuinely are his collaborators during the rehearsal process, hew to his vision of a play throughout its run.

In finding his niche at GableStage, Adler is finally finding himself.

"Doing theater is enormously gratifying on so many levels. It's the greatest feeling I've ever had," he says. "If I'd realized how great that feeling was, I could have spared myself and the people around me so much."

He might have skipped the years spent making industrial films and Clio-winning commercials, for example, of thinking he could become Orson Welles while making movies with titles like Convention Girls, Sex and the College Girl and Scream, Baby, Scream.

He might have spared his beautiful actress-wife, the late Joan Murphy, years of watching her husband trying to numb his insecurities and fuel his creativity with marijuana, cocaine and alcohol.

He might have missed the raging flipouts and obscenity-laced tirades that got him fired from a couple of theater directing jobs.

But then he wouldn't be the settled, sober, insightful, provocative, fiercely passionate man he has become.

FILMING HAMLET IN SCHOOL

Joseph Adler, a self-described nonbeliever named for a grandfather who was an Orthodox rabbi, was born in Brooklyn to the family that owned several Dubrow's Cafeterias. When he was in fifth grade, his parents moved the family to Miami Beach to open a Dubrow's on Lincoln Road.

Even then, he knew he didn't want to follow his family into business.

"I had wanted to be an actor in movies from the time I was 5 or 6," Adler remembers. "Like most kids, I didn't know there was anyone behind the camera."

But he soon found his way there. His best friend since those days, art-book publisher Ira Shapiro, remembers Adler skipping lunch and spending his money on 8-millimeter film, then recruiting Shapiro to play Polonius and the school beauty queen to play Ophelia in a short scene from Hamlet that Adler filmed.

"Joe was considered the black sheep of his family because he was not going to be a merchant, a doctor, a lawyer or an accountant," Shapiro says. "That can create insecurities which are definitely not justified."

His first stop after theater training at Carnegie-Mellon and film school at New York University was the high-profile New York advertising firm of Doyle Dane Bernbach. There he polished his directing and editing techniques, both of which would serve him decades later in theater.

But he also was introduced to the drugs so prevalent in the movie and advertising business of the 1960s, drugs that seemed to make his creativity wax and his insecurities wane.

And it was in New York that he impulsively went on a blind date with the woman who would be his rock through 26 years of sometimes turbulent marriage -- with most of the turbulence supplied by Adler.

LOVE'S LABORS LOST

"I liked her voice and her laugh on the phone," Adler recalls.

"Later we were walking along Riverside Drive, and I heard this heavy breathing, which I thought meant that she was excited. It turned out to be asthma. She had been suffering from it since she was 2."

Quickly, the sunny Irish-Jewish actress and the slightly younger director fell in love. When Adler returned to Florida to make Scream, Baby, Scream -- a low-budget horror flick for the drive-in market -- Joan followed him to the soggy, dilapidated rental house on Miami Beach's North Bay Road where he was editing his movie.

They married in 1968, had a son they named Noah Murphy Adler, and stayed together through the drugs and booze and insecurities until her death in March 1995, nine months into what was to be a yearlong wait for a double-lung transplant.

Though he has forged a new relationship with Barbara Kasuba, a divorced mother of two young adults (daughter Kendra is the GableStage box-office manager), Adler remains haunted by what might have been with Joan, whose photographs, possessions and clothing are still as she left them in the townhouse he now shares with Kasuba.

"Not a day goes by that I don't wish Joan were here to be a part of [his success with GableStage], " he says. "It was very difficult for Joan. She never did drugs because of her health and because she was too devoted a mother; once, she took Noah and left me for a while."

"She always believed that somehow it was going to be over. She was always waiting for it to end. I was only sober for about three years before she died. I'm filled with remorse."

PAINFUL MEMORIES

Regrets? He has a million of them.

Like the time he directed The Shadow Box, a play about three terminally ill people, for the old Players State Theatre at the Coconut Grove Playhouse (he won a Carbonell Award for it) and stood behind the scenery snorting coke.

Or the time he charged into the office of Players Artistic Director David Robert Kanter, who'd informed him that he didn't think Adler could direct there anymore, and swung at a stranger who just happened to be using Kanter's office that day.

Barry Steinman, who went on to help create the Theatre League of South Florida and become manager of the Dade County Auditorium, still recalls the incident.

"I remember very clearly that I met Joe on May 2, 1979," says Steinman, who's now part of the sizable chorus that sings Adler's praises. "He came to the Coconut Grove Playhouse looking for Bob Kanter, and I was sitting at a long folding table in Bob's office working."

"The door burst open, Joe came up to me saying something very loud, and gave me a punch. But by 5 o'clock that day, I was down in the bar having a drink with him. He gave me a rambling apology combined with a lot of philosophy."

Now Steinman calls Adler "one of the unsung heroes of Miami theater," lauding him for doing plays that no other theater will touch, and for making audiences receptive to them. But he's not the only Adler booster who got beyond an unsettling experience with the once-volatile director.

Ellen Beck, the GableStage executive director who brought Adler on board after former artistic director Juan Cejas left, had her run-in during rehearsals for Dangerous Liaisons, which Adler was staging for the Florida Shakespeare Company, the troupe that would evolve into GableStage. And things were not going well.

"Joe directed me with a fifth of vodka and a quart of juice between his legs. It was just out of hand. I didn't feel like we were getting anywhere," Beck says. "One night at 2 a.m. we were still rehearsing. I was exhausted; we hadn't set anything yet. [Artistic Director] Gail Deschamps and some board members were sitting out in the audience watching. There was a fear factor."

"I came down off the stage, and he grabbed me by the arm. I thought, 'I'm going down.' Gail jumped up and defended me. He was fired. That was it. We didn't speak for a long time.&34;

The next night, Adler had his final drink -- a double Absolut on the rocks -- called the doctor at a detox program and went in. He hasn't had a drink since.

TURNING IT AROUND

"I grew up with a romanticized idea of the creative person who has to suffer. I mistakenly believed I was in control of the drinking and the drugs. It just fueled the problem," Adler says. "Every night there was a bar, and I'd close the place. But there was nothing anyone could do until I hit bottom."

"I spent a lot of years struggling with alcohol, drugs and manic-depression. Anyone who knew me knew what I was doing. I put myself above my friends, my family, my fellow workers. I probably spent a small fortune on drugs."

"You can't be a drug addict and an alcoholic and have integrity. You lose your soul."

For all his guilt, Adler has legions of admirers, both as an artist and as an impassioned human being not afraid to stand up for his beliefs.

Last spring, he got GableStage involved in the American Civil Liberties' Union challenge of Miami-Dade County's Cuba affidavit even though the theater wasn't directly affected by the county policy. During the Elián González saga, he protested outside the González family's Little Havana home, contending the child should be returned to Cuba. And he was pelted with eggs after leaving a concert by the Cuban group Los Van Van last October.

"I've always liked to shake people up and get it flowing," he says. "I want to be in an atmosphere of tumult. I want to take sides, stimulate, provoke."

Penny McPhee of the Knight Foundation, who first worked with Adler when she was in television and who has been his neighbor for seven years, says he's undergone some major changes.

"As a person, Joe's become more comfortable with who he is. He has less of a need to prove himself," she says.

"He's still extreme in his advocacy of his point of view, but he can laugh at himself and recognize that there are other points of view. He can present his art in a really compelling way, and let people take it or leave it."

AN ACTOR'S DIRECTOR

Adler's style of theater -- cutting-edge, startling, topical, thought-provoking, sometimes deliberately outrageous -- has made GableStage South Florida's hottest theatrical commodity.

"What are the odds of getting a good venue, a good director, a good cast and a good play in Miami?" says David Kwiat, a New World School of the Arts teacher who acted in Adler-directed productions of Lost Tango and Psychopathia Sexualis. "He's getting those things in place time after time. His consistency is exciting."

Plays like Ben Elton's Popcorn, the current show about a violent filmmaker and the serial killers "inspired" by him, attract audiences that skew younger than those at most area theaters. Adler's patrons, like the director himself, are people who want to feel something when they go to see a play.

"I don't think theater should be about comforting people in their beliefs when they come in," Adler says. "To me, the cardinal sin is to bore an audience. Sometimes I think I go too far because I'm so aware that an audience has to be challenged, surprised, agitated. People have to be turned on and completely involved."

"He comes from a cinematic background and sees things differently," says veteran actress Judith Delgado, who worked with Adler on Full Gallop and Side Man. "He isn't intimidated or frightened by it; he attacks it. He's got a wonderful eye."

And that vision, combined with his passion and the challenging works he stages, has made him popular with his actors.

"He has brought some fire back to the cave," Delgado says. "Actors see it and want in. Actors young and old have said, 'I want to work there.' His seasons are an actor's dream. The focus is on the work, and most times it catches fire on one level or another."

"He has rekindled people's hope that meaty, risky, cutting-edge theater can survive."

Kasuba, who has played a major role in Adler's new-found contentment, said she, too, was initially attracted to his directing. She compares the experience of watching him direct the world premiere of Lost Tango at the Hollywood Boulevard Theatre to watching a conductor in front of a symphony.

But over the course of several years, their relationship his evolved into much more.

"Emotionally and mentally, we're so close," she says. "A soulmate is someone who brings out what you need to be. Is it perfect? Hell, no. We're far enough in life that we've bumped into each other with all our baggage."

"But he's the most fascinating, energetic man I've ever known."

Adler, who will probably be analyzing, searching, questioning and provoking until the day he dies, realizes that younger versions of himself -- ambitious creative types who dream of being the next Quentin Tarantino -- might not appreciate the way he has come to fulfillment and peace.

Once that would have bothered him. Not now.

"I know that young people look at me and think, 'I hope I'm not where he is at that age.' The dream is not to run a theater in South Florida. But how many people are fortunate enough to make a living and get a check 52 weeks a year doing what they love?"

"Things happen when they should. It's so hard for me to stay in the moment. Sometimes, I'm living in the wreckage of the future. Barbara has to remind me to enjoy it now."

Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.