Group Theatre

Group Theatre, company of stage craftsmen founded in 1931 in New York City by a former Theatre Guild member, Harold Clurman, in association with the directors Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg, for the purpose of presenting American plays of social significance. Embracing Konstantin Stanislavsky’s method (an acting technique that stressed the introspective approach to artistic truth), the characteristic trend of the Group’s productions was primarily in the staging of social protest plays with a point of view from the left. After its first trial production of Sergey Tretyakov’s Roar China (1930–31), the Group staged Paul Green’s House of Connelly, a play of the decadent Old South as reflected by the disintegrating gentry class. The play was favourably received by the critics and ran for 91 performances. The Group then followed with two anticapitalist plays, 1931 and Success Story; the former closed after only nine days, but the latter ran for more than 100 performances. Financial and artistic success came two years later with the production of Sidney Kingsley’s Men in White (1933), a melodrama of hospital interns. Directed by Strasberg and with settings by Mordecai Gorelik, the play ran close to a year and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for that season.

(Read Lee Strasberg’s 1959 Britannica essay on Stanislavsky.)

In 1935 the Group staged Waiting for Lefty by one of its actors, Clifford Odets. The play, suggested by a taxicab drivers’ strike of the previous year, used flashback techniques and “plants” in the audience to create the illusion that the strikers’ meeting was occurring spontaneously. The group also staged Odets’ Awake and Sing, a look at Jewish life in the Bronx during the Depression, as well as his Till the Day I Die (1935), Paradise Lost (1935), and Golden Boy (1937). Other productions included Paul Green’s Johnny Johnson, a satirical, anti-war play, partly in blank verse, with music by Kurt Weill; Bury the Dead (1936, by Irwin Shaw); Thunder Rock (1939, by Robert Ardrey); and My Heart’s in the Highlands (1939, by William Saroyan).

The Group exercised a profound influence on the American theatre in three ways: (1) it stimulated the writing talent of such playwrights as Odets, and Saroyan; (2) many of its actors and directors, including Clurman, Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, Stella Adler, and Strasberg, went on to prominent positions in theatre and film after the Group’s dissolution; and (3) its presentations established a unified acting and working method that became virtually standard after the Group disbanded in 1941.