The Group Theatre

Passion, Politics, and Performance in the Depression Era

Kenneth A. Loparo, H. Chinoy, D. Wilmeth, M. Barranger, H. Chinoy, D. Wilmeth, M. Barranger

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137294609
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

The Group Theatre, a groundbreaking ensemble collective, started the careers of many top American theatre artists of the twentieth century and founded what became known as Method Acting. This book is the definitive history, based on over thirty years of research and interviews by the foremost theatre scholar of the time period, Helen Chinoy.

Part I People

1. The Chosen Ones

On a rainy June 8, 1931, they packed wives, children, friends, Victrolas, and radios into a caravan of cars, and squeezed rotund Bobby Lewis and his cello into the rumble seat of Margaret (nicknamed “Beany”) Barker’s car. They were the Chosen Ones: the 27 young professional actors that Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg had selected to share a unique destiny. The colorful caravan took off from the front of the Theatre Guild on West 52nd Street in the heart of New York City on a pilgrimage to a barn and some cottages in Brookfield, Connecticut. Here they planned to work on Paul Green’s play The House of Connelly. During that fateful summer these eager adventurers would become the Group Theatre.

What had brought them together were some wild, utopian ideas elaborated in a series of talks given by Harold Clurman the previous winter and spring. “You would hear people say, ‘Come and hear Harold talk,’ ” the talented Ruth Nelson remembered. “It went all around town. All the youngsters were there” (Reunion, 527). Very late Friday nights, after the curtain had fallen on the Broadway shows most of them were playing in, the sessions would begin. Cofounder Lee Strasberg was away much of the time, playing the pedlar in the Theatre Guild production of Green Grow the Lilacs, and Cheryl Crawford, the third member of the team, was behind the scenes as an assistant stage manager, but Clurman talked. From November 1930 to May 1931—first in apartments belonging to Clurman, Crawford, and even their photographer friend Ralph Steiner, who one evening rented chairs from an undertaker to accommodate the growing crowd, and then in Steinway Hall on West 57th Street—young professionals listened to Clurman’s fervent oratory. Using rhetoric that Crawford once dubbed a combination of Jeremiah and Walt Whitman, Clurman gesticulated wildly, like a juggler. Sometimes he would grab a chair, twisting and turning it, giving it a terrible beating. With the same wild enthusiasm, he was able to beat the rather inchoate, eager desire of his audience into that large vision that was to become the distinguishing mark of the Group Theatre.

The passionate style—unique, explosive, frenetic, humorous—carried a message whose inspirational power was vividly recalled by all those who attended. Although we do not have transcripts of the original talks, these words taken from one of Clurman’s later attempts to recapture the initial inspiration of the Group suggest his rousing rhetoric.

We are people who want to act. It’s the essential impulse from which anything we do derives. Why do you want to act? You say, “I want to make money.” Well, you can’t make any money because there’s terrific unemployment prevalent. You might want to act for fame. Your ego needs that. Will you give up acting if you aren’t one of the big stars? Suppose you want to become an actor to show off. That’s not a bad thing either. It’s part of human nature to take pleasure in a kind of exhibitionism . . . This makes it necessary for us to question why we want to act, and how we can get ourselves to the point where we are permitted to act. We have to fight for the right of a theatre in which to act.

Clurman’s exhortations challenged the American theater of the “roaring twenties.” The United States had come of age theatrically with Eugene O’Neill at the head of a long line of exciting new writers: Elmer Rice, Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, and many more. They had moved American drama out of Puritanism and provincialism onto the international stage. There were important new directors—Arthur Hopkins, Philip Moeller, Rouben Mamoulian—and innovative new designers—Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Simonson, Jo Mielziner. Stars shot across the sky: John Barrymore, Laurette Taylor, Jeanne Eagels, Pauline Lord. Brilliant as they were, they couldn’t seem to find personal or professional nurture for their talent. A leading lady like Katharine Cornell, for instance, controlled her destiny by being her own producer, but to many, she seemed more a radiant personality than an important artist. Then there were the run-of-the-mill actors, slick, superficial, cliché-ridden. They filled the stage with “genteel behavior,” “crisp diction,” “the barest hint of emotion and the mere fig leaf of an idea,” in Morris Carnovsky’s witty words.

One of the pet grievances of Eugene O’Neill during the 1920s was “the inadequacy of actors.” Performers seemed unable to infuse the vivid reality of rough American life with the sense of tragic mystery he wanted to communicate. He blamed theaters and audiences for not helping actors become artists capable of portraying his elevated themes. O’Neill urged his Provincetown Players to develop a plan

that will make young actors want to grow up with it as part of a whole, giving their acting a new clear, fakeless group excellence and group eloquence that will be our unique acting, our own thing, born in our American theatre as not so long ago Irish acting was born in the Irish plays, modern Russian acting in the Moscow Art Theatre, or modern German acting in the Reinhardt group.

He prophesied that the “immediate future of the theatre is in the actor,” who must reject “type casting” for “long painful self-training.”

Clurman offered his young listeners a view of acting that came close to O’Neill’s dream. He placed the actor at the very center of theater. In his marvelously apoplectic way, he would shout:

The impulse, “I want to act,” where does it come from? From saying, “I am alive; I experience certain things.” . . . It comes from where you come from, the family that bore you, and those you lived with and loved, from what you read, and so forth. We are really acting out our life in imaginative form.

None of the actors had ever heard anything like this before!

In The Fervent Years, Clurman later restated in more subdued prose the essence of these messianic talks. “The theatre begins with the actor and achieves expression through him,” he wrote, “but he is not by himself the theatre, for the content of the theatrical performance generally arises from a unifying group experience.” He declared that “our interest in the life of our times must lead us to the discovery of those methods that would most truly convey this life through the theatre.”

On Broadway, where Clurman and most of his audience worked, there was very little reflection of the life of the times. It was 1930–31, the first years of the Depression, but one would hardly know it from the theater. The Great White Way was still lit up by the sparkle of the usual commercial hits: rowdy and exuberant farces, action-packed suspenseful melodramas, sentimental romances, and titillating comedies. Only a few plays running in 1930 seemed artistic or poetic—Marc Connelly’s Pulitzer Prize–winning, if patronizing folk play, The Green Pastures; Rudolf Beisier’s literary romance, The Barretts of Wimpole Street; Maxwell Anderson’s pseudo-Shakespearian Elizabeth the Queen. In the opinion of the day, these plays were art, but in Clurman’s view they had no “blood relationship” to either the players or to the audience.

The harsh reality of the Depression was casting its dark shadow over this theater. With the stock market crash of 1929, the United States collapsed into economic chaos. Industrial output fell, banks defaulted, businesses failed, unemployment soared, and hunger spread. On Broadway, which is as much business as art, 50 fewer shows were produced in 1930 than in 1929. By the end of that year, Variety reported that half the legitimate theaters in New York were dark and attendance fell to “a new low for modern times.” Destitute actors had to turn to the Stage Relief Fund for a handout.

In his talks, Clurman did not address these social dislocations with any sort of dogmatic program; indeed, he didn’t deal directly with economics or politics. His talks concentrated on theater as art. Looking back in The Fervent Years, he explained: “From considerations of acting and plays we were plunged into a chaos of life questions . . . From an experiment in theatre, we were in some way impelled to an experiment in living” (FY, see chapter 3).

In those hard times Clurman’s listeners were led to probe their own motives, asking “Why do I want to act?” He pressed them to calculate the problems and possibilities of theater as never before. In an article in The Drama (April 1931) at the time of his talks, he identified the origins of theater in the primitive tribe, tracing its evolution as a form from the interaction of the actor and the community who share a single vision. “We have, on the American stage, all the separate elements for a Theatre, but no Theatre. We have playwrights without their theatre-groups, directors without their actors, actors without plays or directors, scene-designers without anything. Our theatre is an anarchy of individual talents.” Only a “conscious approach” to the “Idea of a Theatre” could provide the “starting point” and “basis” for a new unity.

Clurman took what he later called an “almost metaphysical line which . . . emphasized the theatre’s reason for being.” The Depression intensified his commitment to the composite, collaborative art of theater as a paradigm for a dynamic relationship of individual and society. Indeed, he had come to believe that “laws of the theatre are really the laws of society.”

Clurman was articulating for theater the redefinition of basic values taking place across the nation in the 1930s. A reassessment had begun in the late 1920s, when the frenzied roller coaster of the jazz age slowed down. The search for psychological and cultural freedom of the early half of the decade began to be replaced by a new concern for economics and politics. It was a period of transition from the “self-discovery and self-expression” of the early 1920s to the “social discovery and social experience” of the early 1930s. The execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927, a signal turning point, radicalized many young artists. The pressure to participate in the social conflicts of American society undermined the earlier aloofness, detachment, and aestheticism of the artistic community. As the crisis destroyed confidence in the myth of rugged individualism, it forced a painful recognition of the social determinants of people’s lives. Collectivism became the transforming concept for change, and realigning the self and society the crucial task of the decade. The critic Alfred Kazin caught the new spirit when he wrote in his autobiographical Starting Out in the Thirties that “there seemed to be no division between my effort at personal liberation and the apparent effort of humanity to deliver itself.”

In a similar vein Clurman urged the actors to abandon a life in the theater as conventionally defined, with its illusion of fame and fortune and its reality of lifelong insecurity and isolation. By 1931, the actor’s life, precarious even in the 1920s, had become “unspeakable,” according to contemporary commentators, who were beginning to realize that without steady work an actor could not learn his or her craft. In the opening days of the 1930s, even the critic Burns Mantle, no radical, noted a characteristic 1930s paradox, namely, that “shaken by the economic element,” the theater “might be finding its soul in this widely advertised depression.” In contrast to the expansive 1920s, which had the luxury of literary and theatrical growth and experimentation, the lean years of the 1930s identified the neglected actor and his provocative human acts as the essence of theater. The activist idealism of the time inspired the actors to believe that they could change themselves and the theater, and in turn change the world through the collective experience.

In his harangues, Clurman linked the critique of American life with the innovative technique of acting Lee Strasberg was developing from the Stanislavsky system, which embodied the same humanistic principles. Clurman talked of an economically secure, permanent ensemble of professional players trained in a unified way of working, which would allow them to reflect and affect the life around them. With a common approach they would start a theater in which, as he put it, “our philosophy of life might be translated into a philosophy of theatre.” He insisted that a true theater depended on “a unity of background, of feeling, of thought, of need, among a group of people” and envisioned an organic community sharing a large unifying purpose.

The first prototype of the Group Theatre took place in 1928. Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, then fellow bit players in the Theatre Guild, loved to exchange ideas about theater. Between scenes, on walks, or over salami and eggs, they tore into Broadway and fantasized about “our theatre.” They decided to take some steps toward its realization by inviting a few actors—among them Morris Carnovsky, Franchot Tone, and Sanford Meisner—to work on Waldo Frank’s New Year’s Eve. They had no immediate production plans. For some 17 weeks they rehearsed in the Riverside Drive studio of well-to-do real estate broker Sidney Ross, who they hoped would sponsor a theatrical venture. Directed by Strasberg, the text was explored primarily for the actors’ personal artistic growth, something almost completely neglected in regular productions even by the Theatre Guild, the most artistic of the Broadway institutions. “The rehearsals themselves would constitute a schooling” was the way Clurman put it. (Reunion, 473)

The participants probed the craft of the actor according to the teaching of Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya at the American Laboratory Theatre, where Strasberg and several others had been studying. Former members of the Moscow Art Theatre, the Russians introduced American students to Konstantin Stanislavsky’s systematic analysis of acting and the concept of the theater as a laboratory for an ensemble of players. The training Boleslavsky offered required the actor to go well beyond mere technical improvements to an intimate linking of the self with the inner life of the character, the overall vision projected by the playwright, and the collective spirit of the ensemble. The actor had to be in touch with and make use of his own senses, his feelings, his thoughts, his whole life and society. Only through these means could the actor realize the true purpose of theater, which Stanislavsky defined as “the creation of the inner life of a human spirit, and its expression in an artistic form.” Acting became a spiritual exercise involving a disciplined struggle for self-discovery, personal authenticity, and social concern that was capable of transforming both the artist and the audience.

Clurman, Strasberg, and Crawford hoped that, in addition to actors, playwrights, directors, and designers would share this approach to art. Someday, perhaps, they would have their own theater. For the moment an opportunity to practice the new technique of acting was all that was promised. It was what the actors wanted and could not get in the show business production process. They dreamed of working together in the country during the summer as Boleslavsky and Stanislavsky had done, but could not find the necessary backing. Still, a start had been made.

In 1929, some of the same people plus others—Cheryl Crawford, Ruth Nelson, Eunice Stoddard, Luther Adler, William Challee, and a very young Julie (later John) Garfield—were involved in a production of Red Rust by V. Kirchon and A. Ouspensky. It was offered as a special event by the Theatre Guild Studio, newly organized on the model of the studios of the Moscow Art Theatre. Only the second Soviet play to be shown on Broadway, Red Rust was directed by Herbert Biberman, who with Crawford and Clurman comprised a production committee. Not surprisingly the production stirred considerable political and artistic discussion. Although many negative judgments were leveled, critics, nevertheless, liked the play’s documentation of the current lives of students and young Communist Party workers in Moscow. The immediacy of the drama roused the audience. Clurman himself was “startled at the applause when the ‘Internationale’ was sung before the curtain on opening night.” Photographs of the production show future Group members in strong revolutionary stances. Although the production lost some $13,000, it perked up a dull season and the Theatre Guild won praise for allowing the young performers to stage contemporary Soviet life.

Four or five who had been in Red Rust continued to meet informally to bridge the isolation each felt in the increasingly chaotic times. Clurman, ever the spokesman for their personal and artistic longings, stigmatized the alienation of American society. “People don’t seem to talk to one another enough. We are separate. Our contacts are hasty, utilitarian or escapist.” He urged his friends to work together in the theater for their personal and social salvation. “We must get to know ourselves by getting to know one another.” This was to become one of the basic themes of the Group Theatre.

Behind these efforts to come together were even earlier experiences. Clurman, Strasberg, and Crawford knew one another from their work at the Theatre Guild. Clurman recalled seeing Strasberg for the first time in a 1925 trial performance by some of the young Theatre Guild actors of Pirandello’s Right You Are, If You Think Are. This “intense-looking” young man with a “face that expressed keen intelligence, suffering, ascetic control,” though well cast for the “typical Pirandello hero,” in Clurman’s view, “did not seem like an actor.” As they came to know each other, he discovered that Strasberg was, indeed, an actor with a difference. Strasberg had already taken courses at the American Laboratory Theatre, to which he introduced Clurman, and had begun to try his hand at using what he was learning by directing amateurs at the Chrystie Street Settlement House on the Lower-East-Side of Manhattan.

Short, shy, and intense, young Strasberg took an indirect route to professional theater. Looking for individuals who shared his interests and also for what he called “female companionship,” he had joined the amateur Students of Art and Drama, the SAD’s as they called themselves, largely as a social activity. “I had no romantic ideas about myself as an actor and therefore would never have involved myself in any kind of professional activity in the hopes of some ego gratification.” The introverted son of immigrant parents with no theater in his background, he was in business as a manufacturer of ladies’ hairpieces, “the human hair business,” as he dubbed it. He had shown considerable talent playing a few small parts in productions by the Yiddish cultural groups that were an important part of Lower-East-Side community life. Nevertheless, he did not think of himself as an actor. Yet, he was fascinated by the parade of great performers who appeared on a newly sophisticated Broadway in the early 1920s. Recalling in vivid detail the art of Eleonora Duse, Giovanni Grasso, Laurette Taylor, Jacob Ben-Ami, Pauline Lord, Eva Le Gallienne, and Jeanne Eagels, as well as such greats of the Yiddish stage as David Kessler and Jacob Adler, Strasberg felt grateful to have witnessed what he called “a golden age of acting.” He also read voraciously the current books...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: A Cautionary Tale
• Part I People
• Part II Performance
• Part III Politics
• Epilogue: The Survival of an Idea
• Note on Sources
• Select Bibliography
• Index