The Group Theatre
In the summer of 1931, three young idealists - Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg - were inspired by a
passionate dream of transforming the American theatre. They recruited 28 actors to form a permanent ensemble dedicated
to dramatizing the life of their times. They conceived The Group Theatre as a response to what they saw as the old-fashioned
light entertainment that dominated the theatre of the late 1920s. Their vision was of a new theatre that would mount original
American plays to mirror - even change - the life of their troubled times. Over ten years and 26 productions (every one of
them an American play by an American writer), The Group Theatre not only met these goals, but it altered the course of
American theatre forever.
The Group Theatre was based on an ensemble approach to acting; and it was the first acting company in American to be trained
as an ensemble. First seen in the work of the Moscow Art Theatre, the ensemble approach proposed a highly personal and
cooperative method. That individual actors played individual parts was not the point. The focus was on creating a cast that
would be familiar and believable as a whole. If the actors could have close relationships off-stage, then these relationships
onstage would not only seem real, but would actually be "real." As the members of the ensemble grew more intimate with each
other, they successfully reflected this familiarity onstage. By the time the curtain came down on their first production
("The House of Connelly"), The Group Theatre knew they had succeeded. What was important was not simply the enthusiastic
response, but that the audience and reviewers had recognized that this one performance signaled a shift in American theatre.
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