ABSTRACT
Of all the conduits of the Stanislavsky System in America, none has achieved a more storied eminence than the Group Theatre. The invention of three unlikely associates – Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford – it borrowed many of the American Laboratory Theatre’s most hallowed principles. The Group formed a true ensemble of professional performers under the directorship of a single artist, produced a repertory of new American plays for mass consumption, and devised a comprehensive program in Stanislavsky Technique. Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya issued few public
statements about the Group. And the mentors’ words were unfailingly polite and always shrouded in commonplace indirection. Privately they could not have been pleased. The treatment that the Lab Theatre had received in the Jazz-Age press paled when measured against the attention lavished on their upstart offspring. How the Group achieved its iconic stature could be explained in
several ways. For one, its crusade to survive on Broadway took place during the entire span of America’s Depression era. To be sure, it was a product of a defiant thirties’ culture but erroneously located at the center of the Workers Theatre movement. The fabled Group later did inspire two institutions long associated with the Stanislavsky System in the postwar United States: the Actors Lab and the Actors Studio. And by 1960, eighteen of the Group’s former actors and directors were teaching acting – and presumably recounting their salad days – in their own studios, workshop courses, or university theatre departments. On a more traceable show business level, the Group helped launch
the careers of three mid-century titans who all began as minor or
apprentice actors with the company. A former reform school graduate, jobbed into the company to play streetwise juveniles, John Garfield established the pattern for a new kind of movie star. His exhaustive preparations in Hollywood to unearth his character’s authenticity were so amusing and novel that his motion-picture colleagues in 1938 mockingly referred him to as “Group.” That year, Time Magazine placed Clifford Odets, the Group’s resident dramatist, on its cover and labeled him as “his country’s most promising playwright.” His lyrical morality tales are still performed and cherished as national treasures. Finally, Elia Kazan, once a technical wizard-cum-actor with the Group, dazzled both Broadway and Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s with his multi-layered direction and panoply of acting innovations. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award during a controversial ceremony in 1999. Throughout their lengthy careers in theatre, Strasberg and Clurman
were denounced as megalomaniacal firebrands or poseurs. Yet their personal understanding of how much they inalterably transformed American culture was astonishingly modest. That and the internecine feuds of the Group members as well as the history of the company’s topsy-turvy fortunes, regrettably, have greatly distorted or ignored how much the Group influenced and continues to influence the teaching of acting in the international marketplace of performing arts. It spawned an army of the innovators.
