The Group Theatre: Passion, Politics, And Performance In The Depression Era (palgrave Studies In Theatre And Performance History)

The Group Theatre, a groundbreaking ensemble collective, 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, based on over thirty years of research and interviews by the foremost theatre scholar of the time period, Helen Chinoy. 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 Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction: A Cautionary Tale....Pages 1-9 Front Matter....Pages 11-11 The Chosen Ones....Pages 13-31 Summertime and the Living Is Collective....Pages 33-50 Front Matter....Pages 51-51 Early Rehearsals....Pages 53-63 Early Classes....Pages 65-79 Lee Strasberg: Artist of the Theater....Pages 81-94 Strasberg versus Adler....Pages 95-112 Testing the Theatrical....Pages 113-128 Harold Clurman: Author of the Stage Production....Pages 129-145 Odets in Clurman’s Theater....Pages 147-164 Front Matter....Pages 165-165 Art That Shoots Bullets....Pages 167-183 Pro-Unit Is Pro-Group....Pages 185-202 Premature Feminists and the Boys....Pages 203-217 Organization, “Angels,” and Audiences....Pages 219-240 Who Is the Group Theatre?....Pages 241-260 Epilogue: The Survival of an Idea....Pages 261-262 Back Matter....Pages 263-283