The group, while largely Jewish, was diverse in their cultural makeup and in their various skills. Writers, directors, producers and actors all gave of their time and abilities in an effort to create a unified vision that would manifest itself in a very high quality of theater. Their efforts would indeed pay off. Group Theater would stage 20 productions over a period of 10 years, some of which were box office hits, most of which were highly acclaimed and all of which spoke to the human experience of the generation.
“They were the next generation of actors after Yiddish theater and vaudeville. They wanted to be very realistic so they set out to build a uni fied group,” explains Ellen Adler. “They would train together, eat together and do everything together and they would not go to casting calls or auditions outside of the group,” adds Adler, also recalling that the greatest challenge for the group was raising funds. “They had to raise the money for each show, at a time when there wasn’t much money available for theater, especially for doing serious political plays,” notes Adler.1
The first play staged by the group, at the Martin Beck Theater in 1931, was called The House of Connelly, written by Paul Green. Green had already won a Pulitzer Prize for his play In Abraham’s Bosom, and his works were already highly anticipated. A native of Lillington, North Carolina, Green wrote The House of Connelly about the struggles and decline of a southern family. While Green was not particularly pleased with the upbeat ending tacked on by the group, the play and the per-73
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formers, influenced by Strasberg’s method acting, won critical acclaim for the work.
In 1933, the group would enjoy their first box office hit, along with critical acclaim, when they staged Sidney Kingsley’s first play, Men in White, about surgical practices in a hospital and the very real trials and tribulations of the doctors who work there. The play also brought attention to the issue of illegal abortion. Like most of the group members, who championed social issues from a left-wing political perspective, Kings ley would speak out on legalizing abortion, which would occur some 40 years later. Directed by Strasberg, Men in White would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Among the other notable plays performed by the group was Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! One of the great dramatists of the 1930s, Odets wrote this story about a middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx. It was unique in that Jewish characters had rarely been seen on Broadway since the days of vaudeville, and those were typically stereotypes for the sake of laughs. This kitchen sink drama about the family’s struggles through the depression years, from their cramped Bronx tenement, touches on their hardships, their courage and their dreams of a brighter future. The original group production won rave reviews and would be revived on Broadway several times, including a 2006 version that would win a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.
The following show, a Paul Green and Kurt Weill anti-war show entitled Johnny Johnson, gave the group a new challenge as the three acts of the play were different in genre, ranging from comedy to tragedy to satire. Once again the results were critically acclaimed. Another Odets classic, Golden Boy, in 1937, would emerge as the group’s most successful show, running for 250 performances at the Belasco Theatre. Ironically, the success of the show was due in part to bringing in Frances Farmer to appear. Farmer was already established as a box office draw from her film career. This was in contrast to the group’s unity and usual self-con-tained collaborative efforts. The group, however, was having financial diffi culties and was hopeful that by bringing in an established star they would generate enough income to continue. Farmer received mixed reviews and was able to help Group Theater continue a while longer.
None theless, she later explained in interviews that she felt she had been used, particularly when she was not asked to be included in subsequent 74
4. Group Theater, Acting Teachers and Life During Wartime group shows. Farmer was, however, linked to one member of the group in the press, as she was having a widely publicized affair with Clifford Odets.
By the end of the decade it was becoming clear that it would also be the end of the first era of Group Theater. Funding was hard to come by, the lure of Hollywood was siphoning off talent, and friction between various members was taking its toll on the group. In 1941, after a ten-year run, featuring primarily critically acclaimed dramas, but only a few box office hits, Group Theater came to an end. It would, however, have a considerable impact on American theater. Several of the group members, including Strasberg and Stella Adler, would go on to teach acting and become the most respected instructors in the industry. Crawford, Kazan and Robert Lewis went on to form the Actors Studio to train a future generation of performers in the style of Group Theater. Repertory theaters from coast to coast would utilize much of the group’s concept for decades, working together to stage performances.
John Garfield
One of the most notable acting careers launched in the days of Group Theater was that of John Garfield. He was another of the many Jewish performers to emanate from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he was born Jules Garfinkle in 1913. After his mother’s death, when Jules was seven, he would grow up in Brooklyn and then in the Bronx, where he was constantly in trouble as a youth. In an attempt to give him some direction in life, he was introduced to acting and boxing, both of which would steer him away from trouble, provide some discipline, and ultimately set him on a more positive course.
After appearing in his first Broadway show, called Lost Boys, he was cast in the 1932 production of Counselor-at-Law, and join the group shortly thereafter. Known for playing the brooding and “tough guy”
characters, Garfield took on challenging lead roles in Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! before playing the boxer in Golden Boy in 1937, all plays written by Clifford Odets. He was also offered the lead role in the film A Streetcar Named Desire, before Brando, but it did not come to fruition because contract negotiations failed.
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Garfield would go on to change his name from Jules to John in 1938
at the request of Warner Bros., who felt the name Jules was “too Jewish.”
Name changing was becoming more commonplace as news from overseas, coupled with growing anti–Semitism in the United States, was creating a stigma around being Jewish. He would, however, maintain his Jewish identity and settle in Hollywood where he took on a number of leading film roles all through the 1940s, bringing the Strasberg Method, first utilized in Group Theater, to Hollywood.
The Teachers: Strasberg and Adler
Starting in the 1920s, and for some 60 years until his death in 1982, Lee Strasberg would train actors in his own version of method acting culled from the great Stanislavski. Following the decade of Group Theater, he would spend a short time in Hollywood before joining Elia Kazan at Actors Studio in New York City. Strasberg would become known as one of the most prominent acting teachers of the 20th century, and in 1969 opened the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute in New York City and in Hollywood. Still going strong today, the institute has taught “The Method” to thousands of actors for over 40 years.
While there have been many success stories that emerged from the Strasberg methodology, which included concentration and the use of sensory and affective memory, his method also generated criticism. Critics contended that Strasberg’s Method, and his teaching techniques, which delved into the emotional recollections of students, were overly psycho-analytical. They contended that such methods could prove harsh and in some cases damaging to the young actors. His supporters countered that so many of his students had gone on to great success using his methods that they were clearly effective. Ultimately, Strasberg was considered both a genius and a madman, depending on which side of the argument you took.
Strasberg’s primary competitor as an acting teacher, Stella Adler, was said to have asked for a moment of silence in her class upon news of Strasberg’s death. While she had great respect for Strasberg, she then followed the m
oment of silence by saying that it would take a hundred years to undo the damage he had inflicted upon the acting world.
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4. Group Theater, Acting Teachers and Life During Wartime Nonetheless, the Strasberg alumni are more than a little impressive, including Alec Baldwin, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Jill Clayburgh, James Dean, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, Al Pacino and Shelley Winters.
Stella Adler, meanwhile, was the daughter of the legendary Yiddish theater stars Jacob and Sarah Adler. She was born in 1901 in New York City. One of a number of performers in the family, Stella Adler would make her acting debut on stage with her father at the age of four to an adoring crowd. Although she was on stage during some shows with her parents, she mostly watched the Yiddish theater performances from the wings and was heavily influenced by these early experiences.
At the age of 18, she headed to Great Britain to study, while also appearing for a year in her father’s production of a show called Elisa Ben Avia. It was, however, back in the United States that she would be most influenced by seeing the Moscow Art Theatre and, like Strasberg, learning about the work of Russian actor-director Constantin Stanislavski. By 1925, she had become a student of Stanislavski in the American Laboratory Theater School. Even after becoming part of Group Theater in 1931, she took a brief hiatus to go with Harold Clurman to train with Stanislavski in Paris. This trip abroad helped help her resolve questions she had about his methods, as often presented by Strasberg, with whom she had an opposing view. Strasberg would emphasize the use of all of the senses to pull from past emotions and use those emotions in the role.
“Think of something that made you happy or sad,” comes from the Strasberg method, while Adler believed that acting was about the character and that the actor must research the character and use his or her imagination. “What would he or she (the character) do in this situation?”
comes from Adler’s method.
After an acting career that included many roles in the group presentations on Broadway and a few years working under the name Stella Ardler, while appearing in three films in Hollywood, she began teaching acting at the Drama Workshop, part of the New School for Social Research in New York’s Greenwich Village. Then, in 1949, she opened her own acting school, The Stella Adler Conservatory, which still thrives today under the leadership of her grandson, Tom Oppenheim, artistic director since 1994 of what is now called the Stella Adler Studio of Acting.
Oppenheim recalls spending time with his grandmother, sitting with 77
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her in her home, and how easily she could teach you something important about acting. “I had given her a single red rose. At a certain point in the visit she said to me, ‘I will show you something about this rose. You can hold it this way so the audience sees it, or this way so that it’s your secret.’ The revealed rose says something entirely different from the con-cealed rose. By showing me this, she was giving me access to an aspect of the craft unique in the world of acting ... the vocabulary and language of props,” explains Oppenheim.2
In the early 1950s, Adler performed on Broadway in a few shows, but she was dedicated and passionate about teaching a new generation of actors. One of her earliest students, taking his very first acting classes, was a young man named Marlon Brando, who would later praise Adler’s work with him and with her students in general. Other students included Robert De Niro, Melanie Griffith, Harvey Keitel, Warren Beatty and Martin Sheen as well as other film and Broadway actors.
Adler would later become an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Drama and head the undergraduate drama department at New York University. Her work extended the lineage from her own early influences of Yiddish theater to that which she contributed while in Group Theater, on to her teachings and on to current and future generations of actors.
In the end, those early Yiddish theater influences were impacting performers two generations later. Clearly the Adler family would prove to have one the most significant influences on acting, and on Broadway, in the 20th century.
As noted on the Adler Studio of Acting web site, “The spirit that has animated the Adler family for over one hundred years stems from the insight that growth as an actor and growth as a human being are synonymous.”3
The Bergson Group
Stella Adler, like most of the Group Theater participants, was not only concerned about bringing social issues and injustice to the stage, but was also an activist. She would join the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, which became known simply as the Bergson Group, based on the pseudonym of its leader, Hillel Kook, who took the name to keep his identity and his family in Palestine safe.
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4. Group Theater, Acting Teachers and Life During Wartime The Bergson Group was dedicated to spreading the word to Americans about the atrocities taking place in Europe at the hands of the Nazis.
The winds of war were already blowing fiercely throughout much of Europe by the late 1930s, but the United States media provided few details of the horrors that were taking place. At this point, the government was editing reports of the mass murder of two million Jews. The stories were relegated to small articles, such as one found on page ten in the New York Times and a three-inch article on page six in the Washington Post. The public was not apprised of what was going on overseas, as these atrocities were not making the headlines. Additionally, the United States president at the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, remained conspicuously unin volved in the overseas activities.4
Many celebrities joined the Bergson Group to publicize these atrocities and generate public support, urging the United States to “get involved” in saving the Jewish people. At first, most of the participants were Jewish, such as Stella Adler and her brother Luther, as well as Eddie Cantor, composer Kurt Weill, Milton Berle, Carl Reiner and both Groucho and Harpo Marx. Soon, however, many non–Jewish performers also joined the cause, such as Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Vincent Price and Count Basie. Full-page ads placed by the Bergson Group in major newspapers were designed to bring greater awareness to the plight of the European Jews. They also mentioned not only the celebrities involved but also the names of political figures and labor leaders who were supporting this important Jewish and humanitarian cause.
Determined not to sit idly by while such atrocities were taking place daily in Europe, the Bergson Group held rallies to accompany the newspaper ads, many of which were written by Gone with the Wind screenwriter Ben Hecht. A journalist, author of more than 30 books, award-winning screenwriter and playwright, Hecht, a Zionist, was very active in political issues in the 1930s and a strong believer in the formation of a Jewish state.
While their efforts began prior to the war, in hopes of getting America involved, the Bergson Group would get stronger during the war. In the summer of 1943, they challenged the Roosevelt administration, wanting to know why the efforts to win the war did not extend to rescuing the Jewish people in Europe. At a conference in New York City, some 1,500 delegates joined forces to try to figure out ways in which the gov-79
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ernment could help the European Jews. The presiding bishop of the Epis copal Church, the Rev. Henry St. George Tucker; former president Her bert Hoover; newspaper impresario William Randolph Hearst; New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia; and NAACP president Joel Spingarn were among the many non–Jewish participants. Clearly the messages of the Bergson Group transcended cultural and religious lines.
Also in 1943, Hecht’s original play, We Will Never Die, opened at Madison Square Garden in New York City and toured the nation bringing the stories of the European Jews to more than 100,000 Americans.
Hecht would later write another Broadway show in 1946, after the war, called A Flag Is Born to draw attention to the millions of displaced Jewish people and the need for the state of Israel . Many Jews had fled Germany only to be murdered in Poland or unwelcome in other European nations.
The
American League for a Free Palestine, basically another name for the Bergson Group, produced the play. The three-member cast, Celia Adler (Stella and Luther’s half-sister and a star of Yiddish theater in the 1920s and ’30s), Paul Muni and Marlon Brando received praise for their work, and the group’s efforts were sponsored by many luminaries, including Leonard Bernstein and even Eleanor Roosevelt. In the end, A Flag Is Born went out on tour and helped raise money for the millions of Jews displaced during and after the war.
In time, the pressure from the Bergson Group and the support of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., would finally convince FDR
to create the War Refugee Board, which was reportedly responsible for saving roughly 200,000 Jewish people. While the Bergson Group is little more than a footnote in American history, they worked tirelessly in an effort to bring awareness to the American people and the government of the plight of the Jewish people in Europe. Sadly, the loss of life during the late 1930s and through the war years grew to epic proportions. The Bergson Group members and their followers believed that earlier involvement in the war by the United States and the support of the FDR administration might have saved thousands of Jewish people.
The Dramatists
The Jewish people have long needed to be conscious of that which was taking place in the world around them. Perhaps the many oppressors 80
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