Whether or not he improvised the third act, everyone agrees Kazan was a godsend to the Theatre of Action. But “Nik Ray” kept to the background, eleventh-billed as the camp barber in The Young Go First. Kazan gave this first stage of their acquaintance only glancing mention, with scant warmth, in his memoir.
At first, Ray struck up a closer empathy with Kazan’s wife, Molly Day Thacher. A tall, deep-voiced, cultured blonde, Thacher was an unsung writer and editor who often contributed silently to her husband’s projects. She had met Kazan when both were at the Yale School of Drama. When Kazan went into acting, Thacher became a volunteer worker for the Theater Union, a reader for the Group Theatre, and an editor of New Theater magazine. The couple had just collaborated with documentary filmmaker Ralph Steiner on an experimental short film, Pie in the Sky, which was being screened around town while The Young Go First was in rehearsal.
Being “codirected” by Kazan, even at this formative stage of his career, was like being a student in a master class. Kazan studied the actors as closely as they watched him, deriving much of his staging from the actors’ own ideas and behavioral traits. Kazan was results-oriented, and the results he got were sometimes amazing. Kazan brought “this tremendous energy and this tremendous interest in you as an actor,” explained Norman Lloyd, who was in The Crime, the second play Kazan codirected for the Theatre of Action. “He preserved your ego, so to speak, by being constantly interested in you, with fantastic energy which communicated itself to you and you gave it back, and there was this kind of great flow.”
Inspired by Kazan, Ray and the collective threw themselves into The Young Go First when it opened at the Park Theatre, not far from Broadway at Columbus Circle, in late May 1935. The opening-night crowd was packed with left-wing friends and sympathizers who warmly applauded the Theatre of Action’s condemnation of the CCC. “Perhaps a little too warmly,” chided the New York Times critic, who thought the cast was stronger than the patched-together script. Variety agreed the play was “bad, very bad”—but went out of its way to mention “Nik Ray,” despite his low billing among “several actors in the troupe,” as one who “looks like a film bet.”
The negative reviews were a blow to the young troupe, who had scavenged the financing and paid themselves scale for months, pinning their hopes on success. John Howard Lawson, a stand-up guy, penned a sharp letter to the Times complaining about its review: The Young Go First, he insisted, was “thrilling” and “acted with great glow and vigor” by “brilliantly promising professionals.” But the damage was done; the show hung on for five weeks before closing.
Nursing their disappointment, the collective retreated to new headquarters on East Twenty-seventh Street—a bigger space that Charles Friedman had wangled from a wealthy handbag manufacturer. The members debated whether to follow up their first three-act play with a musical revue or another straight-line message drama. Various possibilities were floated in the press, yet one by one the projects evaporated. “All very indefinite,” reported the New York Times.
Over the summer of 1935, though, the Theatre of Action gradually rebounded. The East Twenty-seventh Street building opened up separate rooms for members of the collective and, eventually, even shared private accommodations for Ray and Evans. The months of struggle had brought the two closer together. The “orthodox” regimen and cramped quarters had tempered Ray’s drinking, and the Communists were officially puritanical (if, often, personally hypocritical) about womanizing.
The collective resumed its classes and spot agitprop performances. They recruited a handful of new eager beavers, including Norman Lloyd, who was sent over by Joseph Losey after he’d directed Lloyd in a stage play in Boston. The Theatre of Action was “one of the first theatre groups to use The Method in a social way,” Lloyd recalled fondly. “They were a mobile theater, going to picket lines, union halls and all over town. They were very good at singing, dancing and cabaret, in a European tradition.”
While Saxe and Kazan huddled with possible investors and theater-of-the-left playwrights, Ray and the others waited for the two codirectors to decide the group’s next move. The more esoteric parts of their regimen petered out, but acting classes persisted under Kazan’s friend Bobby Lewis, another emissary from the Group Theatre. “We were in a sense a studio of the Group,” recalled Lloyd.
Finally the decision was announced: Saxe and Kazan would codirect an evening of disparate one-acts, crowned by a new message playlet called The Crime by Michael Blankfort, an established radical playwright. Clearly patterned after the popular Waiting for Lefty, Blankfort’s play concerned meatpacking workers who are debating whether to defect from the corrupt American Federation of Labor (AFL) and join the more progressive Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO). The Theatre of Action could take months to craft and polish the material for a March 1936 slot in a Lincoln Center series sponsored by New Theatre magazine.
Again Saxe and Kazan worked as a tag team. “Al Saxe would start an improvisation by having us lie on the floor in pairs,” recalled Lloyd. “We were ‘the town asleep in the morning before the strike, before going out on the picket lines.’ This was to find relationships.
“Kazan would come in to run rehearsals, and he would supervise improvisations too. I was attracted to the Method in the hands of Kazan; he was craftsman-like with it. Al Saxe, on the other hand, seemed to be prying into personal lives; he psychologized, which I resisted. In the abandoned factory loft where we rehearsed, we would pretend dawn was breaking on our improvisation as townspeople, lying in couples on the floor. ‘And did you feel anything for her, lying there?’ Saxe would demand. Instinctively, I resisted, although I did feel something.
“Kazan, however, got very good performances out of us when we did the play.”
Lloyd, the newcomer, was awarded the lead, playing the main labor organizer. After months as a dutiful member of the collective, Ray was still relegated to the large supporting cast. A bider of time, he continued to watch and listen to lessons from both Saxe (the strict psychologizer) and Kazan (who continued to advocate “whatever works”).
In the months ahead, even as they were rehearsing the night of one-acts, the Theatre of Action stayed politically engaged, cranking out skits and shows for political benefits. But their own finances suffered, and by the time The Crime was unveiled in March 1936 their material circumstances were dire. Since the days of The Young Go First, the Theatre of Action had become an increasingly shoestring enterprise: Where that play had boasted sets by the eminent production designer Mordecai Gorelik, everything about The Crime was bare-bones, including “skeleton sets.”
The comparisons to Waiting for Lefty did not help matters. The Crime was an altogether gloomier proposition, with a central character who ultimately betrays the labor movement. The negative reviews didn’t hurt the left-wing collective as much as the feeling that they’d deviated from the correct path. “It dawned on us that, however psychologically shrewd a portrait Blankfort had drawn” of the union leader who rats out his cause, Earl Robinson wrote years later, “we simply did not want to expose any negative side to the labor movement.”*
Something was dawning on Elia Kazan too. He also felt betrayed—by the Theatre of Action. Working closely with the group, he learned that he “was not a collective person, or a bohemian; I was an elitist.” Collective decision-making, he decided, was anathema to creativity. He was repulsed by the group’s “squalid,” often “rancorous” togetherness, “sleeping three to a room.” (“Where did they fuck? I wondered.”) Worst of all, Kazan claimed in the autobiography he wrote fifty years later, he had finally realized that the agitprop group was taking marching orders from the Communist Party. Kazan had already been growing disenchanted with the left-wing ideologues of the theater world, and this was just another brick in the wall.
Kazan said good-bye to the Theatre of Action and moved on with his ambitions.
For Ray, the experience was altogether different: He may never have been as happy as during his time wi
th the Theatre of Action. A collectivist and bohemian, at least in those years, he didn’t mind the squalid lifestyle that came with it. Although his Communism was the tag-along kind, he would remain in the Party for the rest of the 1930s.
The Theatre of Action served as another substitute family for Ray, like the Buskin Club or Taliesin: dysfunctional like all families, but fundamentally caring and supportive. Over the next ten years, as he divided his time between New York and Washington, D.C., you might say that Ray became the ultimate “Gadge” in left-wing show-business circles—an invaluable factotum who didn’t mind anonymity and showed little interest in personal aggrandizement. Where Kazan was a cocksure go-getter, Ray was an introvert who struggled with his own inner voices. It would take him ten years to build the confidence and strength Kazan already displayed.
The Crime straggled on for a few more performances before the rapidly crumbling Theatre of Action abandoned the one-act. The East Twenty-seventh Street rooms quickly emptied out, and Ray and Jean Evans moved into their own place uptown on Fifty-second Street.
Because the Theatre of Action had been nominally professional, Ray and Evans qualified for emergency unemployment relief, allowing them to draw a weekly welfare check for subsistence. They felt as rich as Rockefellers in their new flat, and in April 1936 they got married in a civil ceremony at city hall. Esther McCoy, a young architecture critic who was friends with Jean Evans, was maid of honor, and Theatre of Action stalwart Al Saxe was best man.
On his marriage certificate, the twenty-four-year-old husband listed his occupation as “actor.” That was still Ray’s dream. His hopes were dashed the following month, however, when his best man held auditions for a George Bernard Shaw one-act called The Great Catherine, which Saxe was directing as part of an evening of playlets sponsored by the Federal Theatre, presented at the Experimental Theatre at Sixty-third and Broadway. Ray went up against David Kerman, another Theatre of Action Johnny-come-lately, for the role of Patiomkin (a.k.a. Potemkin), the crafty Russian prince who is the empress’s lover in the comedy. Shaw had been Ray’s forte in La Crosse, and he coveted the juicy role. But Ray was passed over in favor of Kerman, leaving him “very unhappy” about the casting, as Kerman recalled. Worse yet, the newly married man was left out of the cast altogether. The end was near for alter ego “Nik Ray.”
Once the Theatre of Action disbanded, its unemployed members scattered only briefly before reuniting and flowing into the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre Project. The next wave of left-wing theater would be subsidized by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The Federal Relief Appropriation Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in the spring of 1935, allocated $5 billion to create jobs for the jobless. Out of this legislation grew the WPA and its many satellites—including the Federal Theatre Project, established to launch or underwrite programs that stimulated the employment of stage artists. Harry Hopkins, the chief architect of the WPA, appointed a friend, Hallie Flanagan, the director of Vassar College’s experimental theater, to administer the Federal Theatre. He announced the goal of fostering “free, adult, uncensored theater,” in Hopkins’s words, throughout the fifty states. By the end of 1935, Flanagan had appointed playwright Elmer Rice, another advocate of theatrical experimentation, to head the new Federal Theatre’s all-important New York City branch.
Flanagan had been greatly influenced by Stanislavski and Meyerhold during a 1926 visit to Russia; while at Vassar, she had staged provocative dramas based on true-life and topical events. But she was a New Deal idealist, not a Communist. She didn’t foresee, or initially care about, just how thoroughly Federal Theatre–affiliated troupes, in New York and across the United States, would be swarmed by jobless left-wing or Communist theater personnel.
At Flanagan’s suggestion, Rice began planning a series of large-scale “Living Newspaper” plays spun from the news and headline events, designed to put a maximum number of unemployed journalists and theater people alike to work. Rice appointed Morris Watson, an out-of-work officer of the National Newspaper Guild, to head the New York Living Newspaper unit.
The first announced Living Newspaper play, however, had turned into a fiasco. The script for Ethiopia, dealing with Italy’s October 1935 invasion of the African nation, was proudly leftist, incorporating real-life diplomats and foreign ministers as characters while sharply condemning the world’s democracies for tolerating Mussolini. When furious isolationists in Congress denounced the show, Flanagan was forced to order compromises; after defiantly inviting press and dignitaries to a full dress rehearsal, Rice resigned. Ethiopia was canceled a short time later.
To direct the second Living Newspaper production, Hallie Flanagan and Morris Watson chose that other young man from La Crosse: Joseph Losey, who had just finished staging Rudolph Fisher’s play Conjur’ Man Dies for producer John Houseman and the WPA-funded Negro Theater of Harlem.
In Losey’s hands the second Living Newspaper show would prove as sensational as Ethiopia. Triple-A Plowed Under, as it was called, sketched the struggle of American farmers in the 1920s and 1930s, the widespread drought, the farmer-consumer cooperatives, and the fate of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) at the whim of the conservative Supreme Court. Again, characters in the elaborate piece of agitprop were based on real people, including Earl Browder, head of the U.S. Communist Party, and the “nine old men” (as Roosevelt had dubbed them) of the Supreme Court, which had struck down the AAA and other New Deal programs.
This time, however, Flanagan deftly mediated changes in the script, and the play was allowed to open in March 1936. Outside the theater there was picketing; inside the lobby police stood guard; in the audience reactionary plants stood and shouted their objections. Nevertheless, Triple-A Plowed Under scored a hit with New York critics; the play ran on Broadway for two months around the same time The Crime was proving the swan song of the Theatre of Action.
Losey’s contract was renewed, and he was announced as director of the third Living Newspaper. Knowing Ray was out of work, Losey offered him a job with the new Federal Theatre production. The acting involved would be trivial. The important thing is that Joseph Losey was the first to recognize that Ray’s future did not lie in performing. Instead, Losey promoted Ray to stage manager.
The two had crossed paths with increasing frequency in New York theater and left-wing circles; Losey had kept up with the Theatre of Action, seeing both The Young Go First and The Crime.
They had known each other only superficially in high school, and Losey was gone before Ray became “famous in La Crosse.” But Losey knew about Ray’s directing and producing accomplishments in the city from their mutual friend Russell Huber and from Ray’s high school classmate Mary Losey, Joseph’s younger sister, with whom Losey shared an apartment in Manhattan.
In these early days of their respective careers, Losey outshone not just Ray but even Elia Kazan. After attending Harvard and Dartmouth, he had directed notable plays in Boston and on Broadway; he had just returned from a long stay in the Soviet Union, where he had mingled with the titans and innovators of Moscow theater. Losey had rubbed shoulders with Bertolt Brecht and directed a version of Waiting for Lefty; he had attended rehearsals run by Stanislavski, watched Okhlopkov block a play, sat in on Meyerhold’s classes.
Engaged to marry the iconoclastic fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes, who had accompanied Losey to the Soviet Union and who created the costumes for Triple-A Plowed Under, Losey even had posed for an Edward Steichen portrait—“arms resolutely crossed, mouth heavy, eyes faintly resentful, expression resolute and sullen,” in the words of one biographer.
Ray’s friendship with Losey never quite transcended Losey’s patrician superiority. Some, like John Houseman, who knew them both, saw theirs as a love-hate relationship. More than once, however, Losey would throw Ray a lifeline, as he did in the late spring of 1936.
When he contacted Ray, Losey was already deep into the planning of the next Living Newspaper. Called
Injunction Granted, the play would recount the history of organized labor’s unfair treatment in American courts. The text would be as inflammatorily left-wing as the previous Living Newspapers, extolling the Molly Maguires, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Haymarket Square martyrs, the Pullman strikers, and CIO founder John L. Lewis, while excoriating Mayor La Guardia, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, and the Supreme Court. Morris Watson, the Newspaper Guild activist who headed the New York unit,* and journalist Arthur Arent were busy collating the skits and contributions of unemployed colleagues.
Injunction Granted would be the largest, most ambitious Living Newspaper yet. As backstage manager, Ray would preside over one hundred and twenty-five performers dispersed over one hundred separate scenes, with a Rube Goldberg–type set subdivided into platforms, ramps, levels, and steps. The production would entail five hundred lighting cues and one hundred and forty musical ones (the Virgil Thomson score would be played by a singular orchestra heavy on snare, kettle drums, ratchets, sirens, and ship’s bells). Last but not least, Losey planned on using lantern slides and projectors to cast headlines and photographic images on a screen overhead.
They rolled up their sleeves and dug in, aiming for a late-July opening. Losey was yet another sterling role model for future film director Ray. While Kazan’s effect on Ray was obvious, Losey’s influence was more ambiguous. Never known as a nurturer of actors, Losey still managed to extract strong performances from his players; he directed less like a friend than a general, cold and domineering. He was less interested in theatrical intimacy than in intricate construction and mise-en-scène.
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