Download Stanislavski to the Group Theatre

Stanislavski
Meyerhold
Biomechanics
Vahktangov
adjustment (justification)
M. Chekhov
atmospheres
Boleslavsky
Theatricalism
overall justification
psychological gestures
adjustment
American Lab Theatre
Lee Strasberg
Group Theatre: Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, Sanford Meisner,
and Clifford Odets.
focused on realistic productions, rehearsing with Stanislavski’s System
and improvisation. Strasberg began his focus on affective memory which
caused a controversy among Group members, particularly Meisner and
Adler.
Lee Strasberg
After The Group
became the head of the Actor’s Studio and is considered to be the developer of the American
Method, which focuses on the emotional inner life of an actor.
Areas Examined
Concentration
Relaxation
Sense Memory
Affective (Emotional) Memory
Animal Exercises
Private Moments
Harold Clurman
After the Group’s demise became a theorist, director and noted critic. Clurman wrote his
famous treatise On Directing in 1968.
Stella Adler
Actress who developed an alternate view of the system in reaction to Strasberg which
stressed attention to the text, circumstances, imagination, and action. Her book is called The
Technique of Acting.
Areas Examined
Playable Parallel action or Substitution
Elia Kazan
Director and teacher who helped, along with Robert Lewis, found the Actor’s Studio in 1947
(Strasberg began teaching at the Studio in 1951). Kazan directed Tennesse Williams’
Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, with Marlon Brando.
The origin of the Group Theatre dates from the meeting of Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg
through their work at the Theatre Guild in the 1920's. They eventually joined forces with Cheryl Crawford
and other young inexperienced actors from the New York area. Sanford Meisner and Elia Kazan were among
the personnel. Franchot Tone, Stella Adler, Luther Adler, Clifford Odets, and Robert Lewis were all among the
original members of the Group Theatre. The Group theatre was designed primarily as a truly ensemble
theater, in which the members of the theatre group were united by common goals, both aesthetically and
socially. Although Harold Clurman in his memoirs, The Fervent Years, downplays the group's social and
political role in the hard economic period of 1930's America, the Group Theatre played a large role in
establishing a socially conscious theatre at a time. One of their first major successes, Odets's Waiting For
Lefty, established both Odets and the Group Theatre while proving that the theatre could unite art and social
concerns. The group also produced plays of other well-known leftist playwrights, like John Howard Lawson.
The Group Theatre espoused to be a truly ensemble theatre and as such, modeled themselves after
the Moscow Art Theatre of Stanislavsky, an ensemble that both Clurman and Strasberg greatly admired. In
fact, the Group Theatre did much to make a name for Stanislavsky in America. The group was criticized for
having an almost mystical reverence for the Russian Master. Lee Strasberg, spiritual leader of the Group
Theatre, like Stanlislavsly wanted to unite the actors into a working ensemble and use the director's system
as a means of training his actors. Strasberg was known for placing heavy emphasis the "affective memory"
aspect of Stanislavsky's. Strasberg also admired Vahktangov, who, to Strasberg, was able to unite the vividly
theatrical with the Stanislavskian method. Although Strasberg saw his own productions as emulating those
of Vahktangov, more poetic than the more realistic Stanislavskian theatre, his productions did not evince this
quality in production.
The Group had many accomplishments, several are implied in the lines above. Their is a seemingly
endless list of gains made by the Group Theatre, Although the Group accomplished many of its goals, in
actuality the ensemble was constantly under financial pressures which proved to exacerbate the a often
divided and temperamental group. The Group obviously changed the course of actor training in this country.
Up until the time of the Group no single entity concentrated so fiercly upon the training of the individual
performer. Furthermore, the Group fostered what was to be some of the great twentieth-century theatre
artists, Elia Kazan, Clurman, Strasberg, Robert Lewis, Stella Adler and Clifford Odets. These and others would
go on to become vital teachers, directors, and actors in the American Theatre.
Interestingly enough, this talented ensemble with common aesthetic goals enjoyed very little
commercial prosperity until late in its history. Furthermore, the group lived only ten years-- the length of
time Gordon Craig said it took to build a theater. Internal divisions, personal rivalries and jealousies,
economic pressures, lack of produceable material, absence of solid leadership all contributed to the demise
of the Group Theater. Clurman constantly lived under the aesthetic shadow of Strasberg, and a friendship
became tainted by jealousy. This situation was exacerbated by the triumvirate leadership of the Group
always forced an unwilling Crawford to arbitrate and often take sides ( she eventually left with Strasberg in
the late 1930's). Stella Adler and Strasberg argued over "correct" application of the system, which severed
their relationship for decades and started a "System" Controversy which had later ramifications for the Actors
Studio and its formation, but this will be discussed further in question three. Furthermore, actors often
disagreed with Strasbergian methods of criticism and motivational strategies. He offended actors at times
with his Pull-No-Punches approach to criticism, and this was from a man who had the reputation of being
very sensitive to criticism.
Departures for Hollywood, by the likes of Tone and Odets, left the remaining Group members jealous
of the colleagues' success. The Group originally wanted to pay its members a salary, so as to insulate the its
members from the cut-throat pressures of the N.Y.C. commercial theatre scene. However, the Group had
such a tough time maintaining permanent work for the ensemble, that the pressures became too great on
the ensemble actors, who were often forced to leave the company for greener pastures. The Group Theatre
appeared to want the impossible: an ensemble company in the context of a very commercial individualized
market and nation.
Ironically, the company enjoyed its greatest commercial success after the departure of Strasberg,
with Clurman at the helm. Odets explains this was because anyone could have directed the company after
Strasberg had trained it. Apparently to Odets, the Group Theatre was the spiritual offspring of Strasberg's
teaching genius; so, too, would be the heir to the American Method and the Group Theatre Heritage: The
Actors Studio.