Theater in 1930s America – Group Theater & Federal Theater Project

The 1930s: simultaneous era of worldwide economic collapse (Great Depression) and a surprisingly fertile moment for U.S. theater.
Overall mood: scarcity, unemployment, strike activity, rising labor consciousness → theater artists react with socially-minded work.

Founders:
- Leigh Strasberg
- Cheryl Crawford
- Harold Clurman
Mission:
- Create a socially-conscious, politically-engaged ensemble modeled on Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre.
- Clurman’s credo: “Our interest in the life of our times must lead us to the discovery of those methods that would most truly convey this life through the theater.”
Early Logistics & Funding:
- Convinced Theater Guild to give \$1000 + rehearsal space in Connecticut.
- Started with 28 actors; named themselves “The Group.”
First Production: Paul Green’s The House of Connelly
- Plantation romance; Green (white playwright) famous for writing in Black dialect.
- Theater Guild demanded actor cuts + restoration of tragic ending; Group refused → Eugene O’Neill supplied extra funds.
- Result: critical praise, weak box-office → foreshadows financial woes.
Structural Weaknesses:
- Idealism > commercial savvy; staged non-commercial scripts in expensive Broadway houses.
- Persistent power-struggles; high actor/director egos.
Artistic Legacy:
- Incubator for almost every major American acting teacher: Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Bobby Lewis.
- Clurman, Crawford, Lewis later co-found the Actors Studio (home of Brando, De Niro, etc.).
- Championed American naturalism: vivid conflicts, big feelings, belief in human potential (“yay-saying”).

Strasberg’s Take: Affective (Emotion/Memory) Recall
- Actors mine personal memories, even trauma, to achieve truthful emotion.
- Influences later “intense” performers: Marlon Brando, Daniel Day-Lewis.
1934: Stella Adler & Clurman study directly with Stanislavsky in Paris.
- Discover: Stanislavsky had shifted emphasis to objective, action, circumstance (not raw feeling).
- Sparks a 60-year Adler–Strasberg feud; Strasberg’s role in Group diminishes.

John Howard Lawson – Success Story (corporate-ladder soul loss).
Sidney Kingsley – Men in White
- Pulitzer Prize; heroic NYC doctors in spotless coats; rare financial success.
Clifford Odets (actor-turned-playwright; quintessential Group voice)
- Hallmarks: immigrant struggle, family vs. self, street-poetic dialect.
- Quote (grandfather in Awake and Sing!):
  > “Wake up! Be something! … take the world in your two hands and make it like new.”

Premiered 01/06/1935; based on 40-day 1934 NYC taxi strike.
Structure: episodic vignettes, direct address → audience = fellow cabbies.
Plot Beats:
- Corrupt union boss stalls strike; drivers await missing chairman Lefty.
- Scenes portray repossession, poverty, lab spying, anti-Semitism, young love under economic stress.
- Climax: news of Lefty’s murder; organizer asks audience, “Well, what’s the answer?” → shouts of “Strike!”
Opening-night reaction: 45-minute ovation, 26 curtain calls; crowd continued chanting outside.
Dual nature: art and propaganda.

Part of FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) – “New Deal” relief.
Scale & Reach:
- Employed >15{,}000 theater workers across 40 states.
- Not required to make profit; many shows free to public.
Leadership: Hallie Flanagan (Vassar professor) – champion of experimental, socially-relevant theater.
- Avoided Broadway commercialism; seeded regional theaters nationwide.
Administration Heads:
- Midwest Bureau: Susan Glaspell
- NYC Office: Elmer Rice
Negro Theater Project: units in 23 cities; NYC initially led by John Houseman & 20-year-old Orson Welles, later by Edward Perry, Carlton Moss, H. F. V. Edward.
- Signature hit: Welles’s “Voodoo Macbeth” – all-Black cast, Caribbean setting.

Genre: journalist-dramatist hybrids melding vaudeville, pageant, montage.
Aim: present up-to-the-minute civic issues, empower “average American.”
Recurring device: “The Little Man” – ordinary citizen who asks questions & reacts on audience’s behalf.
Notable Titles & Topics:
- Ethiopia (Italian invasion) – blocked due to ban on depicting current heads of state.
- Triple-A Plowed Under – farmers’ rights & agricultural policy.
- One-Third of a Nation – urban housing crisis.
- Spirochete – personified Syphilis; public-health education.
Political backlash: left-leaning content unnerved Congress → funding cut; FTP dissolved 1939 after exhausting appropriation.

Art vs. Commerce:
- Group’s collapse illustrates necessity of financial planning even for idealistic ensembles.
Actor Training Ethics:
- Affective-memory method raises questions about psychological safety; Adler’s action-based approach offers alternative.
Government & Censorship:
- FTP’s Living Newspapers highlight tension between taxpayer funding and political content.
Representation:
- Negro Theater Project demonstrates early federal commitment to Black artists yet begins with white leadership → later replaced by Black directors for autonomy.
Labor Solidarity:
- Waiting for Lefty provides template for agit-prop theater that blurs spectator/performer divide to inspire direct action.

Technique: Method Acting becomes dominant U.S. training paradigm; Actors Studio cements legacy.
Playwriting: Odets’s mix of realism & lyrical street talk influences Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky, etc.
Regional Theater Network: FTP infrastructure lays groundwork for today’s LORT (League of Resident Theatres).
Political Theater Blueprint: Living Newspaper model resurfaces in 1960s agit-prop & contemporary documentary theater (e.g., The Laramie Project).
Cultural Memory: Ideal that “every good play is propaganda for a better life” persists in socially-engaged art.