Group Theatre (New York City)

Men in White (1933), winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Luther Adler and Stella Adler in Awake and Sing! (1935)

Eleanor Lynn and Luther Adler in Rocket to the Moon (1938)

The Group Theatre's first production was Paul Green's The House of Connelly on September 23, 1931 at the Martin Beck Theatre. The company asked the Theatre Guild to help cover the $5,000 cost to perform. The Theatre Guild offered to pay the full amount if the group "removed Mary Morris and Morris Carnovsky from the cast and restored the tragic ending" from the more upbeat and hopeful rewrite Green produced.[2] The group refused and instead raised half on its own, receiving support from Eugene O'Neill. The play was an immediate critical success and was recognized for the special ensemble performances which the group would develop.[3]

The group's production of John Howard Lawson'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, received very mixed reviews, with Luther Adler and Stella Adler receiving the majority of the positive reviews.[4]

The group took on novelist Dawn Powell's dark comedy Big Night, rehearsed it for 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."[5]

Later, during the first full season (1933–34), Men in White, written by Sidney Kingsley, directed by Lee Strasberg and produced by Sidney Harmon, became a financial success for the group.[6] It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.[7]

On the night of January 5, 1935, some members of the group participated in a benefit performance for the New Theatre Magazine. Written by Clifford Odets and directed by Odets and Sanford Meisner, the one-act play Waiting for Lefty was performed at the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York City and became a theatrical legend.[8] The play reflects a kind of street poetry that brought great acclaim to the group and to Odets as the new voice of social drama in the 1930s.[9] 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 Stanislavskian aesthetic. The following year, the group produced the Paul Green-Kurt Weill anti-war musical Johnny Johnson, directed by Strasberg.[10]

Some members of the Group Theatre in 1938: Roman Bohnen, Luther Adler, Leif Erickson, Frances Farmer, Ruth Nelson, Sanford Meisner, Phoebe Brand, Eleanor Lynn, Irwin Shaw, Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman and Morris Carnovsky

The Group Theatre's most successful production was the 1937–38 Broadway hit Golden Boy.

Elia Kazan directed Robert Ardrey's plays Casey Jones and Thunder Rock in 1938 and 1939–40 for the Group Theatre.[11]

The group gathered at different summer locations to rehearse and train intensively for six of its 10 years in existence. The group spent the summer of 1931 at Brookfield Center, 1936 at Pine Brook Country Club, located near Nichols, Connecticut.[12][13] Other summer venues included Brookfield Center, Connecticut (1931);[14] Dover Furnace in Dutchess County, New York (1932);[15] Green Mansions in Warrensburg, New York in 1933;[16] a large house in Ellenville, New York (1934);[17] and Lake Grove in Smithtown, New York in 1939.[18]

Despite its success and sweeping impact on the American theater landscape for many years to come, the group ended by 1941, and factors included the impending war, the lure of fame and fortune in Hollywood, the lack of institutional funding, and the friction of interpersonal relationships.[19]

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.[20]

Institutionally, the Group Theatre 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. Harold Prince invokes the group in his foreword to the book Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater.[21]

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 blacklisted. Elia Kazan would later state he abandoned his Communist views in part because of an agenda to transform the Group Theatre into a company devoted to promoting "Marxist ideology." Odets would share similar concerns after experiencing pressure from the party to change the direction of his writing.

Mark Kemble's play Names covers the relationship between HUAC and the former members of the Group Theatre.[22]

Notes

Further reading

• Clurman, Harold (1983). The Fervent Years: the Group Theatre and the Thirties. Boston: Da Capo Press. ISBN 9780306801860
• Kazan, Elia (1997). Elia Kazan: A Life. Boston: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80804-8 OCLC 36713306
• Lewis, Robert (1996). Slings & Arrows: Theater in My Life. New York: Applause. ISBN 1-55783-244-7 OCLC 35813730