The Group Theatre Passion, Politics, and Performance in the Depression Era

by Krich Chinoy, Helen; Wilmeth, Don B.; Barranger, Milly S.

• ISBN13: 9781137294593
• ISBN10: 1137294590
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-10-10
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The Group Theatre, a groundbreaking ensemble collective based in New York that operated from 1931 to 1941, 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 of the group, based on more than thirty years of research and interviews by the foremost theatre scholar of the time period, Helen Chinoy. She begins the story of the Group's remarkable ten years at the end of the experiment, then resets the narrative against the Depression years and introduces the cast of youthful characters and their issues with the American theatre of their day. Tracing the careers of Group Theatre actors and directors including Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Harry Morgan, Chinoy follows with their collective vision for a new theatre developed around their grand idea for a new approach to an acting process based on an ordered training of the actor's imagination and emotions in exercises and in plays that confront social issues important to the Group.

Author Biography

Helen Krich Chinoy became one of our most distinguished American theater scholars and devoted over three decades to her study of the Group Theatre. This was a natural extension of a number of earlier projects, including the seminal Actors on Acting (1949) and Directors on Directing (1953), both still in print and co-edited with Toby Cole, and Women in American Theatre (1981), edited with Linda Walsh Jenkins. A Columbia University PhD, Helen spent most of her career at Smith College, USA. After her retirement, she held the Hoffman Eminent Scholar Chair in Theatre at Florida State University and the Harold Clurman Professorship at Hunter College, USA. In 1989 the Association for Theatre in Higher Education awarded her its Career Achievement Award.

Don B. Wilmeth is Asa Messer Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Brown University, USA, where he taught, administered, and directed for almost four decades. He is the author, editor, coeditor, or series editor of over sixty books, including the award-winning three-volume Cambridge History of America Theatre and the "Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History" series. In 2007 he completed a new edition of the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, a standard in the field. He has received career achievement awards from several professional organizations, including in 2012 the Theatre History Preservation Award from the New York Theatre Museum and the William Williams Award, the most prestigious honor given by the Brown University Library. Wilmeth, a Guggenheim Fellow, is a former president of the American Society for Theatre Research. Like his co-editor, he is a dean emeritus of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre.

Milly S. Barranger is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. She is the author of several studies about twentieth-century women and modern American theater, including Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theatre; Unfriendly Witnesses: Gender, Theatre, and Film in the McCarthy Era; A Gambler's Instinct: The Story of Broadway Producer Cheryl Crawford; and Audrey Wood and the Playwrights. A former producing director of PlayMakers Repertory Company, she is coeditor of Notable Women in the American Theatre: A Biographical Dictionary. In addition to the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, she has led both the National Theatre Conference and the American Theatre Association.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Cautionary Tale
PART I: PEOPLE
1. The Chosen Ones
2. Summertime and the Living is Collective
PART II: PERFORMANCE
3. Early Rehearsals
4. Early Classes
5. Lee Strasberg: Artist of the Theater
6. Strasberg versus Adler
7. Testing the Theatrical
8. Harold Clurman: Author of the Stage Production
9. Odets in Clurman's Theater
PART III: POLITICS
10. Art That Shoots Bullets
11. Pro Unit is Pro Group
12. Premature Feminists and the Boys
13. Organization, Angels, and Audiences
14. Who is the Group Theater?
Epilogue: Survival of an Idea