Teaching Video Audio. Back to top. Group Theatre —41 By Malague, Rose. DOI: Personal Login Required. Cite Options. Related Items. We passed a house in which lived an artist I knew.
I was listening to him talk, and suddenly out of nowhere I said, "You know, sometimes a man must wear a beard because he has a weak chin. Several years later, he told me, "You almost didn't get into the Group Theatre because of that insane remark you made.
I thought you were schizophrenic. You never talked, and suddenly out of you burst an incomprehensible, disconnected remark, 'Sometimes a man wears a beard to hide a weak chin.
As we were walking, we passed the house where an artist named Roger Furse once invited me to dinner, and he wore a beard. As we were passing this house, it occurred to me: perhaps that's why he wears a beard. He has a weak chin. Little things occur that can alter your entire fate. I think fate's your inner nature as it meets outside circumstances. Your own nature meets the natures of the other persons you are with.
These interpenetrations make up your fate. Anything can cost you your life—any simple little thing. That little foolish remark might have cost my getting into the Group Theatre, my becoming a playwright. Now came the magical time when we knew! A couple of meetings had been held at Lee Strasberg's apartment at a place called London Towers down on 23rd Street. His apartment impressed me. There was a full-size reproduction of a Gauguin painting with women in various colored dresses on a beach. And that Lee would have this reproduction—a great big long panel it was—felt to me much more connected to art than to the theater.
By then some of us had begun to feel that, if we were being invited down to Strasberg's house, where we were only twenty-five, while uptown there might be a hundred and twenty-five, that maybe we had some special "in," that maybe we were the people who really interested them. I myself had great humility because, well, you know, Franchot Tone was there and J.
Edward Bromberg and Morris Carnovsky, whom I'd seen act, and they were all wonderful actors. Then we began to know that the Group directors were getting some money from the Theatre Guild and were going to visit old Otto Kahn, who was famous for writing out checks for art ventures. Only later did we learn that we had started this theater in the Depression and that Otto Kahn, though he expressed interest, was no longer signing checks. Anyway, the summer of arrived. And the people did receive letters saying that the Group Theatre would have its first summer at a place called Brookfield Center in Connecticut, and we would be leaving in cars from such and such a place.
I still have that note in my files: I was invited. At that moment the value of the Group Theatre to me meant consciously that I would get a job, that I would be taken care of, and that I would be in association with companions, with comrades. It had started to give me a sense of family. A lot of the people felt that way.
Unconsciously this adventure had begun to call out in me some kind of ideal, to stimulate the desire to know more, to be more, to use myself more. Although the least talkative of the three, she was present all the time and would make short manifesto statements: "We will do so and so and so.
To us in the company Cheryl Crawford was the most important person of any of us, because she was still the casting director of the Theatre Guild and a most influential person in the New York theater. People joined the Group Theatre with mixed feelings. Some had doubts about its value. But I was not that sophisticated. I was not that advanced in the theater. I was not that advanced in my sense of life, although I remember expressing doubts during that first summer when every day one actor or actress wrote a page in the daily diary they were keeping.
The members hesitated about putting themselves completely in the hands of these three directors who were telling us time and again that we had to put ourselves in their hands. They were almost like revivalists who say, "Just put yourself in my hands. Give me your soul. I will make it. I will mold it. I will show you God. I will connect you. We commenced to feel religious fervor. It was more than dedication. Dedication simply is doing a job well. Occasionally visitors would come up, sometimes a blasphemous visitor like photographer Paul Strand's wife.
Beck Strand in a kind of sophisticated amusement would say of Strasberg, "Well, how has the little tin Jesus been treating you all? So outside people saw this religious quality. But it didn't matter to us, because we were giving ourselves so completely. The first play we were going to rehearse was very impressive. Many of us were disappointed: for us there were no parts except bits. But an actor like myself didn't expect a large part.
It was a poetic play, a lovely play—one of Paul Green's best. Paul came up. He spent some of the summer, and I was very impressed and awed to meet him, a real playwright. By then I knew I wanted to write plays. I had known that for some time. The desire to write plays was stimulated by the fact that I was acting and by the fact that many things impressed me. Yet nothing about my life impressed me really.
I knew I was knotted up with many problems I didn't quite understand. I knew I didn't see things the way other people saw them. I knew I lacked some normal view of things. I had frequently been in suicidal moods and I wanted to work my way to some healthy, secure posture. I wanted to be able to look at life more steadily, with wholeness. I knew something was the matter with me. I also recognized that something was the matter with a lot of these people around me, because, with all their talent, they were a very neurotic crew with very touchy egos, qualities which manifested themselves more and more as the Group Theatre went on.
We were a strange band, but also a dedicated family that felt, "Gee, you were part of the best things in life when you were in the Group Theatre. You were something special. You were different from other actors, and the Group was different from other play companies. You were bringing something new.
About this work there was a morality that did not exist elsewhere in any theater experience I'd had. Somehow I was now in the heartland of art and culture and creativity. Our people worked and concentrated with the activity of the beehive. They ate, slept, and drank nothing but the new approaches the Group Theatre was bringing to acting. The training of the actors working on Connelly , of course, was completely in the hands of Strasberg.
Nobody else touched them. Clurman had two scripts with some possibilities, and he began to do classwork with us who were not engaged importantly in the play. Very early, and perhaps wrongly, the Group Theatre directors began to call us in, one by one, and—I'd almost forgotten this—make rather keen, but perhaps harmful, analyses of each person's personality, their character defects, what they had to work on, where their problems lay.
They wanted to create the "new theater man. Emotionally and psychologically some of these things were quite damaging. But, you see, the whole relationship was that intimate. We felt that other people cared for you, cared for your problems. They cared about what you could bring to the totality of this theatre. So this was good. This was buoying. This lifted you. That summer you felt you belonged to something quite remarkable.
In fact, that feeling stayed for a long time. Maybe four or five years went by before that quality really began to go. Everybody had his privacy, and yet everybody belonged to the totality, to the whole group. That's why they named themselves The Group Theatre. That's what they felt. They were a group. A collective. We ran into bad trouble. We had acquired bad habits from previous acting training and experience.
The new thing which Strasberg and Clurman were teaching we scarcely understood. Those who worked on big parts with Lee Strasberg got big training. Those who worked on smaller parts got very little training, and we felt jealous about that. We were so rapacious. We wanted to know everything. We wanted more classwork, but there wasn't time. Proper classwork did not come until the next summer when the directors started to say, "Let's not go so fast.
Let's do more classwork, because a lot of our people need training. They're talking about things they don't know about. Strasberg was perturbed by people who talked in big terms about things they didn't know anything about.
He was very generous and unstinting of his time, but he was sometimes annoyed and sometimes very angry. He had a quick temper. He got very angry at people who would talk in a superior way in our Group Theatre lingo, yet give very conventional performances and present very conventional insights in their acting. Once, a year or two later, it was necessary for Strasberg to chide Phoebe Brand, who in a rehearsal in front of the entire company made some very slighting remark about Helen Hayes.
Strasberg turned on her in fury and said, "This theater is what it is! The way we act is the way we act! But, if you live to be a hundred years old, you will never have Miss Hayes's talent. Never let me hear you talk that way again! When Strasberg got angry this way, he could be extremely corrosive. You would shrivel up with the acid of his tongue.
This was a summer of fantastic ferment. Visitors were coming and going, and a great deal of publicity about our company appeared in the papers. You felt you belonged to something very important and you felt you were here to stay. You were in a family. You had some place in the world to go to. You had some place to be at one with. And with it all took place an actual psychological purge.
I think the Group Theatre directors had picked rather well. They'd picked some interesting people. And famous people appeared. I had contact with a world I'd not met before. I was very happy to meet and know in a small way men like Maxwell Anderson and Paul Green. As a matter of fact, Max took a shine to me. And every once in a while—he was a big shy man—he said to me, "I think you need a little money.
I must say I needed the money. I didn't even have a dollar for cigarettes. That summer was almost like Walt Whitman's ideal of a school. The Group Theatre, of course, was divided into classes. The richer and more desirable people were on top, and the others were on the bottom. There were some very rich girls, friends of Katherine Hepburn. There were persons who were very desirable as performers anywhere in the New York theater. They were our leading people, and they got two hundred dollars a week.
From there the salaries scaled down. I belonged in that bottom group who got thirty-five dollars a week and played small parts. I don't know how they could have done differently, or whether they should have done differently. It had to be that way. The directors tried complicated arrangements to deal with individual situations. For instance, if you were a humbler actor, getting fifty-five dollars a week, but had a wife and child, you would get an extra fifteen dollars a week.
And they tried to work out everything like that. But there was always this sense of class in the Group Theatre. And, as we began to develop, I less than the others, a group of malcontents also began to develop, and they were always complaining about not getting big parts. In fact, up to the time I became a playwright, I too bellyached about not getting good parts—and even then I never got a good part in the Group Theatre in all its time.
The first summer was so full of this sense of fervency. It was from the heart. It was very sincere. It was very sentimental. It was very sticky, and in its own way it was wonderful. Not since have I seen this kind of thing happening among a group of extremely egotistic, and gifted, and professional people.
Even today, as low as moral and idealistic values seem to swim in our country, this thing might happen—if it were approached the same way. You really felt you had a reason for living. You felt that you belonged. You felt that you were going to bring light.
You talked as though nothing else existed. You have to have what all young artists have and what all these Group members had. They were gifted, and to them theater had never before had a champion. They were going to be the champion. They were going to be the American theater's first champion.
They were going to play as American actors had never played before. The American stage was in distress, and we would save it. Only we could save it. Well, this is very necessary for young artists. I don't care what their field. This is why one artist can never see another artist work. He thinks the way he does it is the way to do it. And he has to do that, particularly when he's growing up and shaping and bones are falling into the structure they are going to take.
He has to have that. In fact, it's one of the first signs of real talent. We in the Group began to feel that way about all other actors, about all other actresses, about all plays, about all performances. Nothing was any good. Only our way of doing things was the way. And we had it with great ardor. We had it with fire.
And we felt we were dispensing light. Actually we were making enemies for ourselves all around as fast as we could. But it couldn't be helped. It was part of our thing. The theater now had its first champion of the highest possibilities of theater. That first summer resulted in a very beautiful production of Paul Green's play. It displayed Strasberg's unique, very special qualities. To this day Strasberg is the greatest director I have ever worked under or ever worked with.
When he had the Group Theatre acting company in these earlier days, he transferred his own austerity, his own purity, his own tension right into a stage production. Then you saw the stage director as a true creative artist. A creative artist has complete blood and bone and nerve affiliation with the objective work that he produces outside of himself.
And when you saw a Strasberg production, you saw a portrait of Lee Strasberg. You saw his style. You saw that man's purity and austerity there on the stage.
When the actors were most full of feeling on a Strasberg stage, that was the time they didn't look at each other. That was the time they had their backs to each other. Strasberg's work in those times is the finest theater work I have ever seen. Many people were impressed with it. The Theatre Guild directors, Terry Helburn and others, although we resented it, looked upon us as their children.
And we were rather awed when they came every two or three weeks to see our classwork. They were impressed too by the qualities of Strasberg's work, which showed up as very vivid, very strong, very theatrical, and very lovely. There was the special feeling of dedication each member of the company was bringing to the play, which gave it a strange distinction that people didn't understand when they finally saw it. But they knew they were seeing something very special.
And when we finally opened that play at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York City some months later, it was received in a very friendly way. The critics were willing to give us a break, go out of their way to welcome us. They all felt the quality of this special kind of work, even if they didn't know what it was. All kinds of laughing and joking rumors ran around town.
Before a Group Theatre actor walked onstage, it was said that a bell sounded or a gong sounded. That sort of thing. In fact, many things which came out of simple improvisation, when taken into the production, looked like they had been elaborately worked out in minute detail. It wasn't so. Rather, the action was kept improvisatory within the rigid framework of the scenes. We presented that first production very proudly to the New York public, and it was received very well, but—not that they should have mattered—the play had certain weaknesses and didn't run too long.
Paul Green is a playwright and a man of great distinction. When he talks about Thomas Jefferson, you think he is talking about a neighbor who lives down the street. He's that kind of man. Did it harden into a style? Fall apart?
In that period the Group Theatre was not falling apart. But there was a great deal of internal dissension. The acting company must have been about thirty persons, and there were six or so persons connected with staff, stage management, and publicity.
So any show had to meet a payroll of about thirty-eight men and women. And the directors were reeling from this responsibility. We actors expected to be taken care of at the level of wherever we were on the scale. And without realizing the problems of the directors, above all the simple problem of keeping this aggregate together economically, the members of the company went in for a great deal of dissension, of tearing down, of evaluating harshly, not only outside things, but each other.
All this got to have its ugly side. And then, as the Group went on, people would say, "Well, I'm not getting parts. I'm not appreciated. I'm going to leave. For instance, Sanford Meisner, who was a good actor, and, as we now know, a superb teacher and a fine director, threatened to leave the Group Theatre every other week, and the directors would have to meet with him and talk it over and convince him to stay. Many of the people were doing that. Some would only mutter under their breath.
Without doubt you were happiest in the Group Theatre when you were working on a good part. Then all the dissension dropped off you like a garment, and you went ahead working, and you were one of the lucky ones. The plays couldn't give parts to everyone. The class work could not always be organized. Where people would begin to scratch and claw was when they felt they had been passed over in terms of merit or when they were not being given enough work to do.
Running the Group was a full-time job for everyone. It must have been difficult for the directors. We thought from behind our own faces. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. The members of the Group Theatre pose for a photo.
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