An Excess of Talent

...As a founder, director and for many years principal scenographer of the Theatre Guild, Simonson must have had a say pro or con in the early financing of the Guild's pinched and wayward prot?g?, the Group Theatre...

...They couldn't live with it or without it...

...the remaining third was Lee Strasberg, of eventual Actors Studio and Method acting fame...

...The Group exerted mysterious power over its adherents...

...With good reason Smith mentions America in her subtitle...

...The Group represented the finest as well as the most reckless qualities of young American artists of the 1930s...

...They were too intelligent, too gifted to be satisfied with less than perfection...

...Nevertheless after surviving alternations of ecstasy and despair, it died—not only for want of money, but also because it was made up of warring beings with competing visions and ambitions who together had an overabundance of talent...

...It had not yet built enough of a reputation to rate a mention in his pages...

...Tone went to Hollywood and sent back money...

...Its sole stab at a "classic," Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, slumped badly and was virtually abandoned before it opened, although it was a nearly perfect choice for them and would in time be respectably revived by Strasberg and the Actors Studio...

...As an organism, as an entity, theGroup tilted simultaneously in three directions: toward novelty, notoriety and poverty...

...nor did they manage to corral a dependable stable of writers...

...Moreover, the Group failed to apply to older plays what it had learned while doing modern ones...

...In the roles he conjured up, in the brash lines resulting from the collisions of his characters, and in the apparently nonchalant patterns of his dramaturgy he changed the course of heartfelt American playwriting, steering much of it away from the hard, central, suspenseful story line into multiple threads, and thus—whether deliberately or not (but I would swear deliberately)—engaging the art of Chekhov...

...But the players came before the plays...

...Despite their wishes, the Group's component parts never evolved into a repertory company...

...Dissolution was inevitable...

...The collective story is itself a "real life drama"—of Strasberg's insults, rages and exhaustion...

...Cheryl Crawford and Harold Clurman, who were on the Guild's payroll, became two-thirds of the Group's management...

...The Group stayed afloat, more or less, through 10 reef-strewn, penurious years...

...author, "Moli?re's Theatrical Bounty" (1990...

...By 1940 Mordecai Gorelik, who designed many of those productions, could write in New Theatres for Old that the "mere existence of the Group Theatre...

...Odets went to Hollywood and brought back money...

...Two, however, killed themselves...

...They also responded to Clurman's persuasiveness, first as a dramaturge-flagbearer, later as a more relaxed director—that is, less of a drill sergeant than Strasberg...

...Smith has kept her narrative active throughout, braiding together extracts from accounts by the Group's most formidable personalities, including Clurman's The Fervent Years, Bobby Lewis' Method—or Madness...

...caused certain types of plays to be composed which would not otherwise be written...

...So what did the Group leave behind by way of monuments, aside from the sources of Wendy Smith's strong and admirably spun tale of a decade of flights and crashes...

...The seasons are punctuated by various attempts to recuperate from fatigue— excursions to the West Coast or pilgrimages to Russia and the far corners of Europe to renew contact with the sources of the Group's inspiration, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and the living disciples of Eugene Vakhtangov...

...As if to certify Odets' impact, at the end of the '30s and the beginning of the '40s the other big O, Eugene O'Neill, wrote The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey intoNight, today hismost popular and highly regarded works...

...The Group Theatre was too damn good for its own good...

...former "New Leader" drama critic In The Stage is Set Lee Simonson remarked that art theaters capsize after about five years...

...They shared a sense of frustration at the vast forces playing hob with the free market, especiallythe labormarket, and were sympathetic to dubious if wellmeant artistic causes, such as a new kind of drama with positive endings...

...One need not look very hard at O'Neill's earlier plays to see how these two take advantage of the dispersed structure and intertwining subplots that Odets pioneered in Awake and Sing!, Paradise Lost and Rocket to the Moon...

...But in its case his observation, although backed by well-digested experience, proved wrong...

...Playwrights Paul Green, Sidney Kingsley, William Saroyan, Robert Ardrey, John Howard Lawson, Irwin Shaw, and (most often) Clifford Odets provided scripts whose hallmark was an almost painful fidelity to life...

...The Group's parental trio attracted talented individuals now known for their heroic realism on stage and in films— people of the caliber of Morris Carnovsky, Phoebe Brand, Roman "Bud" Bohnen, Elia Kazan, Frances Farmer, Franchot Tone, Eunice Stoddard, J. Edward Bromberg, Stella and Luther Adler, Lee J. Cobb, and Robert Lewis...

...Actors left, came back, left again, returned again...

...Among our playwrights he had, it seems to me, the outstanding natural ability...

...Care must be taken not to let frequent shifts of focus blur the big picture, and description must shun institutional language...

...As a knot of altruistic Socialists and Communists, always at political and private odds, the members were held together by affection, hatred and other consequences of proximity...

...And yet, the Group outlasted other politically driven troupes like the Orson Welles-John Houseman Mercury Theatre and Charles and Adelaide Walker's Theatre Union...

...Wendy Smith's title is a play on words, alluding both to the troupe's dramatic preoccupation and intestinal conflicts...

...Still, the coffers remained empty...

...Smith's weighty chronicle consists of 16 chapters that actually make up 10 acts, with each act featuring one season of shows in New York preceded by a summer of preparation and disagreements, some of Talmudic fervor, in an exurban retreat like Brookfield, Connecticut, or Smithtown on Long Island...

...Clurman's indecision, ardent speechifying, infatuation with Stella Adler, and exhaustion...

...and Slings and Arrows, Kazan's A Life, Odets' The Time is Ripe, and Strasberg's A Dream of Passion, with its letters, plentiful oral memoirs—maybe we should call them "affective memories"—anecdotes, and debates (many of them still topical) by other participants...

...Then there was Odets...

...As it straggled through the several years it needed to expire, the Group even outlived Hallie Flanagan's magnificent Federal Theatre Project, whose productions had ramified on an unprecedented scale when it was struck down by Congress for being too controversial...

...After World War II and the investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, some of these spirituallyyouthful people endured unemployment, ostracism, privation, humiliation, and imprisonment...

...Crawford's peacemaking, explaining, organizing, and exhaustion...

...Assembling the biography of a person is kids' stuff compared with compiling the biography of an organization...

...To start, an array of acting derivatives of Stanislavsky that revolutionized performances as well as rehearsals of plays, films and television productions here and abroad...

...and of the actors' paradoxical yearnings for adventurous plays but a secure income, for tighter control from the top but more democratic choice, and above all, for the type of cohesion, the very "groupness," that their quarrels annihilated...

...When Simonson's book came out in 1932, the Group was entering its second year...

...The actors were drawn to Strasberg's affective memory techniques, sometimes called "the memory of emotions"—whereby they dipped into remembered (occasionally dismembered) feelings to solidify their characterizations...

...Those involved were unable to come up with a manifesto or even a set of principles, much less a policy, they could all subscribe to...