Group Theatre
Encyclopedia
The Group Theatre was a New York City
theater collective formed by Harold Clurman
, Cheryl Crawford
and Lee Strasberg
in 1931. It was intended as a base for the kind of theater they and their colleagues believed in — a forceful, naturalistic and highly disciplined artistry. They were pioneers of what would become an "American acting technique" derived from the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavski
, but pushed beyond them as well. The company included actors, directors, playwrights, and producers. The name "Group" came from the idea of the actors as a pure ensemble; there were to be no "stars".
The New York-based Group Theatre had no connection with the identically-named London-based Group Theatre
founded in 1932.
In the ten years of its existence, the Group Theatre produced works by many important American playwright
s, most notably Clifford Odets
and Irwin Shaw
. Its most successful production was the 1937-38 Broadway
hit Golden Boy, starring Luther Adler
and Frances Farmer
.
The Group included Elia Kazan
, Harry Morgan
(billed as Harry Bratsburg), Stella Adler
, Robert Lewis, John Garfield
(billed as Jules Garfield), Canada Lee
, Franchot Tone
, Phoebe Brand
, Ruth Nelson, Will Geer
, Howard Da Silva
, John Randolph
, Joseph Bromberg, Michael Gordon
, Paul Green, Clifford Odets
, Paul Strand
, Morris Carnovsky
, Sanford Meisner
, Marc Blitzstein
, Anna Sokolow
and Lee J. Cobb
, Roman Bohnen
and many others.
's Success Story, which chronicled the rise of a youthful idealist who sacrifices his principles as he rises to the top of the advertising business, won generally favorable reviews for its script, and enthusiastic praise for Luther Adler's starring performance. Later, during the first full season (1933–34), Men in White
, written by Sidney Kingsley
and directed by Lee Strasberg, became the Group's first financial success and also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
.
The Group took on novelist Dawn Powell
's dark comedy Big Night, rehearsed it for close to six months and asked for extensive revisions from the playwright. The result was a critical and box-office disaster that ran a scant nine performances. Harold Clurman, who took over the production late in the rehearsal period, later admitted the Group's role in the fiasco. "The play should have been done in four swift weeks — or not at all. We worried it and harried our actors with it for months."
On the night of January 5, 1935, the Group gave a benefit performance of the one-act play Waiting for Lefty
by Clifford Odets
at the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York City. The play reflected a kind of street poetry that brought great acclaim to the Group, and to Odets as the new voice of social drama in the thirties. Odets became the playwright most strongly identified with the Group, and its productions of Awake and Sing and Paradise Lost, both directed in 1935 by Harold Clurman, proved to be excellent vehicles for the Group's Stanislavskian aesthetic. The following year they produced the Paul Green-Kurt Weill
anti-war musical Johnny Johnson
, directed by Strasberg.
Elia Kazan
directed Robert Ardrey
's plays Casey Jones
and Thunder Rock
in 1938 and 1939-40 for the Group Theatre.
The group gathered during the summer at Pine Brook Country Club
, located on a natural lake in the countryside of Nichols, Connecticut
from 1931 until the early 1940s.
After the war, in 1947, Robert Lewis, Elia Kazan, and Cheryl Crawford founded the Actors Studio
, where the techniques inspired by Stanislavski and developed in the Group Theatre were refined. Under the leadership of Lee Strasberg, who later joined the Actors Studio and became its director in 1951, what is now referred to as The Method
emerged as a lasting force in modern drama.
Institutionally, the Group influenced the Chelsea Theater Center
, a later theater in New York (1960s and 1970s), born of idealism and destroyed by lack of funding and friction between its co-directors. Hal Prince
invokes the Group in his foreword to the book, Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater
.
In the 1950s, many of the former members were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC). Those who appeared as "friendly" witnesses, such as Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, and Lee J. Cobb, avoided the fate of their colleagues who refused to name Communist Party members and, as a result, were blacklist
ed.
The Group Theatre is described in Robert Lewis' Slings And Arrows, Theater in My Life, Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years, and Wendy Smith's authoritative history Real Life Drama.
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
theater collective formed by Harold Clurman
Harold Clurman
Harold Edgar Clurman was a visionary American theatre director and drama critic, "one of the most influential in the United States". He was most notable as one of the three founders of the New York City's Group Theatre...
, Cheryl Crawford
Cheryl Crawford
Cheryl Crawford was an American theatre producer and director.Born in Akron, Ohio, Crawford majored in drama at Smith College. Following graduation, she moved to New York City and enrolled at the Theatre Guild's school...
and Lee Strasberg
Lee Strasberg
Lee Strasberg was an American actor, director and acting teacher. He cofounded, with directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective"...
in 1931. It was intended as a base for the kind of theater they and their colleagues believed in — a forceful, naturalistic and highly disciplined artistry. They were pioneers of what would become an "American acting technique" derived from the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavski
Konstantin Stanislavski
Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski , was a Russian actor and theatre director. Building on the directorially-unified aesthetic and ensemble playing of the Meiningen company and the naturalistic staging of Antoine and the independent theatre movement, Stanislavski organized his realistic...
, but pushed beyond them as well. The company included actors, directors, playwrights, and producers. The name "Group" came from the idea of the actors as a pure ensemble; there were to be no "stars".
The New York-based Group Theatre had no connection with the identically-named London-based Group Theatre
Group Theatre (London)
The Group Theatre was an experimental theatre company founded in 1932 by Rupert Doone and Robert Medley. It evolved from a play-reading group in Cambridge that Doone had been involved with during his years studying with the Festival Theatre there...
founded in 1932.
In the ten years of its existence, the Group Theatre produced works by many important American playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
s, most notably Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, socialist, and social protester.-Early life:Odets was born in Philadelphia to Romanian- and Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Louis Odets and Esther Geisinger, and raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York. He dropped out of high...
and Irwin Shaw
Irwin Shaw
Irwin Shaw was a prolific American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and short-story author whose written works have sold more than 14 million copies. He is best-known for his novel, The Young Lions about the fate of three soldiers during World War II that was made into a film starring Marlon...
. Its most successful production was the 1937-38 Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
hit Golden Boy, starring Luther Adler
Luther Adler
Luther Adler was an American actor best known for his work in theatre, but who also worked in film and television. He also directed plays on Broadway.-Life and career:...
and Frances Farmer
Frances Farmer
Frances Elena Farmer was an American actress of stage and screen. She is perhaps better known for sensationalized and fictional accounts of her life, and especially her involuntary commitment to a mental hospital...
.
The Group included Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan was an American director and actor, described by the New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history". Born in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, to Greek parents originally from Kayseri in Anatolia, the family emigrated...
, Harry Morgan
Harry Morgan
Harry Morgan is an American actor. Morgan is well-known for his roles as Colonel Sherman T. Potter on M*A*S*H , Pete Porter on both Pete and Gladys and December Bride , Detective Bill Gannon on Dragnet , and Amos Coogan on Hec Ramsey...
(billed as Harry Bratsburg), Stella Adler
Stella Adler
Stella Adler was an American actress and an acclaimed acting teacher, who founded the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City and the The Stella Adler Academy of Acting in Los Angeles with long-time protege Joanne Linville, who continues to teach and furthers Adler's legacy...
, Robert Lewis, John Garfield
John Garfield
John Garfield was an American actor adept at playing brooding, rebellious, working-class character roles. He grew up in poverty in Depression-era New York City and in the early 1930s became an important member of the Group Theater. In 1937 he moved to Hollywood, eventually becoming one of Warner...
(billed as Jules Garfield), Canada Lee
Canada Lee
Canada Lee was an American actor who pioneered roles for African Americans. A champion of civil rights in the 1930s and 1940s, he died shortly before he was scheduled to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He became an actor after careers as a jockey, boxer, and musician...
, Franchot Tone
Franchot Tone
Franchot Tone was an American stage, film, and television actor, star of Mutiny on the Bounty and many other films through the 1960s...
, Phoebe Brand
Phoebe Brand
Phoebe Brand was an American actress, who was blacklisted along with her husband, Morris Carnovsky, in the McCarthy era.-Early life:...
, Ruth Nelson, Will Geer
Will Geer
Will Geer was an American actor and social activist. His original name was William Aughe Ghere. He is remembered for his portrayal of Grandpa Zebulon Tyler Walton in the 1970s TV series, The Waltons....
, Howard Da Silva
Howard Da Silva
Howard Da Silva was an American actor.-Early life:He was born Howard Silverblatt in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Benjamin and Bertha Silverblatt. His parents were both Yiddish speaking Jews born in Russia. He had a job as a steelworker before beginning his acting career on the stage...
, John Randolph
John Randolph (actor)
John Randolph was an American film, television and stage actor.-Early life:Randolph was born Emanuel Hirsch Cohen in New York City, the son of Jewish immigrants Dorothy , an insurance agent, and Louis Cohen, a hat manufacturer...
, Joseph Bromberg, Michael Gordon
Michael Gordon (film director)
Michael Gordon was an American stage actor and stage and film director.-Life and career:Gordon was born in Baltimore and raised in a middle class Jewish community. He was a member of the Group Theatre , and was blacklisted as a Communist in the days of McCarthyism...
, Paul Green, Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, socialist, and social protester.-Early life:Odets was born in Philadelphia to Romanian- and Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Louis Odets and Esther Geisinger, and raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York. He dropped out of high...
, Paul Strand
Paul Strand
Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century...
, Morris Carnovsky
Morris Carnovsky
Morris Carnovsky was an American stage and film actor born in St. Louis, Missouri. He worked briefly in the Yiddish theatre before attending Washington University in St. Louis...
, Sanford Meisner
Sanford Meisner
Sanford Meisner , also known as Sandy, was an American actor and acting teacher who developed a form of Method acting that is now known as the Meisner technique....
, Marc Blitzstein
Marc Blitzstein
Marcus Samuel Blitzstein, better known as Marc Blitzstein , was an American composer. He won national attention in 1937 when his pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles, was shut down by the Works Progress Administration...
, Anna Sokolow
Anna Sokolow
Anna Sokolow was a Jewish American dancer and choreographer.-Training:...
and Lee J. Cobb
Lee J. Cobb
Lee J. Cobb was an American actor. He is best known for his performance in 12 Angry Men his Academy Award-nominated performance in On the Waterfront and one of his last films, The Exorcist...
, Roman Bohnen
Roman Bohnen
Roman Bohnen was a stage and film actor.Born Roman Aloys Bohnen in St. Paul, Minnesota, Bohnen attended the University of Minnesota, where he was a cheerleader. He cheered so vigorously that it changed his voice for the rest of his life. After graduating in 1923 with a B.A., Roman served his...
and many others.
Early productions
The company's first production was Paul Green's The House of Connelly on September 23, 1931, at the Martin Beck Theatre. It was an immediate critical success and was recognized for the special ensemble performances which the Group would further develop. Playwright Green, however, was not happy with the more hopeful, upbeat ending that the Group had imposed on his brooding work. The Group's production of John Howard LawsonJohn Howard Lawson
John Howard Lawson was an American writer. He was head of the Hollywood division of the Communist Party USA. He was also the cell's cultural manager, and answered directly to V.J. Jerome, the Party's New York-based cultural chief...
's Success Story, which chronicled the rise of a youthful idealist who sacrifices his principles as he rises to the top of the advertising business, won generally favorable reviews for its script, and enthusiastic praise for Luther Adler's starring performance. Later, during the first full season (1933–34), Men in White
Men in White
-Film and theatre:* Men in White , a 1933 drama written by Sidney S. Kingsley* Men in White , an American drama film* Men in White , a comedy film by National Lampoon Inc...
, written by Sidney Kingsley
Sidney Kingsley
Sidney Kingsley was an American dramatist. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Men in White in 1934.- Biography :...
and directed by Lee Strasberg, became the Group's first financial success and also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Pulitzer Prize for Drama
The Pulitzer Prize for Drama was first awarded in 1918.From 1918 to 2006, the Drama Prize was unlike the majority of the other Pulitzer Prizes: during these years, the eligibility period for the drama prize ran from March 2 to March 1, to reflect the Broadway 'season' rather than the calendar year...
.
The Group took on novelist Dawn Powell
Dawn Powell
Dawn Powell was an American writer of novels and stories.-Biography:Powell was born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, a village 45 miles north of Columbus and the county seat of Morrow County. Powell regularly gave her birth year as 1897 but primary documents support the earlier date...
's dark comedy Big Night, rehearsed it for close to six months and asked for extensive revisions from the playwright. The result was a critical and box-office disaster that ran a scant nine performances. Harold Clurman, who took over the production late in the rehearsal period, later admitted the Group's role in the fiasco. "The play should have been done in four swift weeks — or not at all. We worried it and harried our actors with it for months."
On the night of January 5, 1935, the Group gave a benefit performance of the one-act play Waiting for Lefty
Waiting for Lefty
Waiting for Lefty is a 1935 play by American playwright Clifford Odets. Consisting of a series of related vignettes, the entire play is framed by the meeting of cab drivers who are planning a labor strike. The framing situation utilizes the audience as part of the meeting.While this was not the...
by Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, socialist, and social protester.-Early life:Odets was born in Philadelphia to Romanian- and Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Louis Odets and Esther Geisinger, and raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York. He dropped out of high...
at the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York City. The play reflected a kind of street poetry that brought great acclaim to the Group, and to Odets as the new voice of social drama in the thirties. Odets became the playwright most strongly identified with the Group, and its productions of Awake and Sing and Paradise Lost, both directed in 1935 by Harold Clurman, proved to be excellent vehicles for the Group's Stanislavskian aesthetic. The following year they produced the Paul Green-Kurt Weill
Kurt Weill
Kurt Julian Weill was a German-Jewish composer, active from the 1920s, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht...
anti-war musical Johnny Johnson
Johnny Johnson (musical)
Johnny Johnson is a musical with a book and lyrics by Paul Green and music by Kurt Weill.Based on Jaroslav Hašek's satiric novel The Good Soldier Švejk, it focuses on a naive and idealistic young man who, despite his pacifist views, leaves his sweetheart Minny Belle Tompkins to fight in Europe in...
, directed by Strasberg.
Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan was an American director and actor, described by the New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history". Born in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, to Greek parents originally from Kayseri in Anatolia, the family emigrated...
directed Robert Ardrey
Robert Ardrey
Robert Ardrey was an American playwright and screenwriter who returned to his academic training in anthropology and the behavioral sciences in the 1950s....
's plays Casey Jones
Casey Jones (play)
Casey Jones is a 1938 play by Robert Ardrey.Casey Jones was produced in the United States by the Group Theater in 1938, and directed by Elia Kazan. Kazan also directed Ardrey's play Thunder Rock for the Group Theater in 1939.-References:* * ]]...
and Thunder Rock
Thunder Rock (play)
Thunder Rock is a 1939 play by Robert Ardrey.In the United States, Thunder Rock was produced by the Group Theater and opened 14 November 1939 and closed three weeks later. Lee J...
in 1938 and 1939-40 for the Group Theatre.
The group gathered during the summer at Pine Brook Country Club
Pine Brook Country Club
-Introduction:Pine Brook Country Club began when Benjamin Plotkin purchased Pinewood Lake and the surrounding countryside on Mischa Hill in the historic village of Nichols, Connecticut. Plotkin built an auditorium with a revolving stage and forty rustic cabins and incorporated as the Pine Brook...
, located on a natural lake in the countryside of Nichols, Connecticut
Nichols, Connecticut
Nichols, a historic village in southeastern Trumbull on the Gold Coast of Fairfield County, was named after the family who maintained a large farm in its center for almost 300 years. The Nichols Farms Historic District, which encompasses part of the village, is listed on the National Register of...
from 1931 until the early 1940s.
Demise and later influence
Despite its success and sweeping impact on the American theater landscape for many years to come, by 1940, impending war, the lure of fame and fortune in Hollywood, the lack of institutional funding and the friction of interpersonal relationships within the Group eventually led to its demise. In the spring of 1941, Elia Kazan and Bobby Lewis accompanied Harold Clurman as he turned the key on the Group offices for the last time.After the war, in 1947, Robert Lewis, Elia Kazan, and Cheryl Crawford founded the Actors Studio
Actors Studio
The Actors Studio is a membership organization for professional actors, theatre directors and playwrights at 432 West 44th Street in the Clinton neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded October 5, 1947, by Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford, Robert Lewis and Anna Sokolow who provided...
, where the techniques inspired by Stanislavski and developed in the Group Theatre were refined. Under the leadership of Lee Strasberg, who later joined the Actors Studio and became its director in 1951, what is now referred to as The Method
Method acting
Method acting is a phrase that loosely refers to a family of techniques used by actors to create in themselves the thoughts and emotions of their characters, so as to develop lifelike performances...
emerged as a lasting force in modern drama.
Institutionally, the Group influenced the Chelsea Theater Center
Chelsea Theater Center
The Chelsea Theater Center was a not-for-profit theater company founded in 1965 by Robert Kalfin, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama. It opened its doors in a church in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, then moved to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1968, where it was in residence for ten...
, a later theater in New York (1960s and 1970s), born of idealism and destroyed by lack of funding and friction between its co-directors. Hal Prince
Hal Prince
Harold Smith Prince is an American theatrical producer and director associated with many of the best-known Broadway musical productions of the past half-century...
invokes the Group in his foreword to the book, Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater
Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater
Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater is a book by Davi Napoleon about the onstage triumphs and the offstage turmoil at the Chelsea Theater Center of Brooklyn...
.
In the 1950s, many of the former members were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee
House Un-American Activities Committee
The House Committee on Un-American Activities or House Un-American Activities Committee was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. In 1969, the House changed the committee's name to "House Committee on Internal Security"...
(HUAC). Those who appeared as "friendly" witnesses, such as Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, and Lee J. Cobb, avoided the fate of their colleagues who refused to name Communist Party members and, as a result, were blacklist
Blacklist
A blacklist is a list or register of entities who, for one reason or another, are being denied a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition. As a verb, to blacklist can mean to deny someone work in a particular field, or to ostracize a person from a certain social circle...
ed.
The Group Theatre is described in Robert Lewis' Slings And Arrows, Theater in My Life, Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years, and Wendy Smith's authoritative history Real Life Drama.