Group Theatre was an American theater organization. It was formed to create a company of actors trained in a unified style of acting and to produce new American plays of social significance. The Group Theatre lasted only 10 years, from 1931 to 1941, but its influence on American theater has extended into the 2000’s.
The Group Theatre was founded in New York City by the American director Harold Clurman, producer Cheryl Crawford, and director and acting teacher Lee Strasberg. The company experimented with the acting theories of the Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski. Those theories called for realistic performances and used techniques that helped actors call up inner feelings from past events. The techniques resulted in acting that provided greater psychological truth and was more natural and more intense than previous styles. The technique became known as Method acting.
The Group Theatre presented 22 new American plays during its existence. In 1933, the Group Theatre produced Men in White by Sidney Kingsley. The play won a Pulitzer Prize for drama. The Group Theatre was the first to present the plays of Clifford Odets. Odets wrote a series of dramas during the 1930’s noted for their realistic portraits of urban American life during the Great Depression. Those plays included Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, and Paradise Lost (all 1935); Golden Boy (1937); and Rocket to the Moon (1938). Other major playwrights who wrote for the Group Theatre were Maxwell Anderson, Robert Ardrey, Paul Green, William Saroyan, and Irwin Shaw.
A number of noted actors and directors were connected with the Group Theatre. They included Luther Adler, Stella Adler, Phoebe Brand, Morris Carnovsky, John Garfield, Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, Sanford Meisner, and Franchot Tone.
The influence of the Group Theatre style of Method acting continued with the work of the Actors Studio, a famous workshop for professional actors. The Studio was founded in 1947 by three Group Theatre alumni—Cheryl Crawford, Elia Kazan, and Robert Lewis. Harold Clurman wrote a history of the Group Theatre called The Fervent Years (1945).
See also Method acting; Odets, Clifford.
