in with a placard reading “Strike! Strike! Strike!”]]]—we're discussing theater

in 1930s America. Don't cross any picket lines, ya boney scab.

The 1930s was a fine decade if you're into worldwide economic collapse. It was also pretty

great for theater. Go figure! We'll be looking at the Group Theater, a hugely influential

collective that tried to bring Stanislavski's theories to America.

And then we'll turn to the Federal Theater Project, a Works Progress Administration scheme

that employed thousands of out-of-work theater professionals—even Orson Welles—and created

full-length plays about...farming. And syphilis. Let's rock that cradle. Lights up!

INTRO The Group Theater was founded in New York

in 1931 by Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford, and Harold Clurman—three kids with guts,

hearts, and a pretty all-encompassing interest in creating a socially conscious, politically

motivated theater embodied in a naturalistic style of acting that felt right for modern

life. Modern in 1931, at least. Here's how Clurman put it: “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 theatre.” They wanted to form an ensemble as unified

and skilled as the one Konstantin Stanislavski had created at the Moscow Art Theater. Because

they were superfans of the Moscow Art Theater. So in 1931, they convinced the Theater Guild

to give them $1000 and permission to rehearse a new play in Connecticut. They gathered up

28 actors and got to work, calling themselves the Group.

They rehearsed Paul Green's “The House of Connelly,” a tale of a romance on a plantation.

Green was one of those white writers who won prizes for writing in black dialect, while

black theater struggled to prove its legitimacy on the world stage.

The Theater Guild said they'd fund it if the Group fired a couple of their actors and

restored the original downer murder ending. The Group said no—collectively!—and Eugene

O'Neill stepped in with a little cash. The play was a critical success, but not a

big financial success, because the Group was too idealistic to care about box office. That

would eventually become… a problem. Listen, I know that y'all wanna do it for the art–but

take it from an actual theater professional (me): sometimes you gotta do it for the money,

IN ORDER to do it for the art. I know it's tough.

Rehearsing the play meant drilling actors in the Stanislavski system. Or at least the

Stanislavski system as Strasberg understood it. This is what we now call the method or

method acting. So if you're an actor who has ever felt that you have to torture yourself

in service of a role, or access some really, really dark memories, you can thank those

guys! Affective memory or emotion memory is what Strasberg taught, and it goes a long

way to explaining intense actors like Marlon Brando, or Daniel Day Lewis.

In 1934, Clurman and his wife Stella Adler actually met and worked with Stanislavski.

And they came back to tell everyone that Strasberg had it all wrong. Stanislavski wasn't interested

in feelings; he was interested in actions and circumstances. This led to a pretty epic

fight between Adler and Strasberg—a feud that lasted sixty years—and to Strasberg

taking a reduced role within the company. The Group Theater dissolved in 1940. The company

was smart about a lot of things, but money wasn't really one of them. They produced

their non-commercial plays in big, commercial Broadway theaters, and funding was a strain.

Also, they had trouble figuring out a workable power structure.

You might be shocked to learn that there's a lot of ego in theater.

Still it's hard to overstate the influence of the Group on American playwriting, acting,

and directing. Keep in mind, as we talk about their plays, that most of the most famous

acting teachers in America—including Strasberg, Adler, Sanford Meisner, and Bobby Lewis—all

worked for the Group. Elia Kazan, Crawford, and Lewis would later go on to found the Actors

Studio, who trained pretty much everyone. Not all of the Group Theater's plays were

strictly realistic, but the company helped to further a distinctly American naturalism

that depended on big conflict and big emotion. Many of these plays were idealistic or at

least interested in questions of idealism, encouraging a yea-saying rather than a nay-saying

view of humanity. “Every good play is propaganda for a better life,” Clurman said.

An early hit was John Howard Lawson's “Success Story,” about an ad man who risks losing

his soul as he climbs the corporate ladder. And the Group had a rare financial success

with Sidney Kingsley's Pulitzer Prize winning “Men in White,” a story of heroic doctors

and their coats at a New York City hospital.

But the playwright most indelibly associated with the Group is Clifford Odets. Odets had

joined the Group as an actor, and he'd been begging them for years to stage one of his

plays. And the Group was like, ha ha—no. And Odets was like, no you guys, it's “Awake

and Sing!” Come on! And the group was like, ha ha ha—still no.

Another company staged his play “Waiting for Lefty” in a benefit performance, and

it was a huge hit. The Group was finally like, “Cliff, baby—let's do some shows!”

Odets's plays are talky, scrappy, heartbreak-y dramas of the American immigrant experience.

Conflicts typically arise from the tension between tradition and family, and what character's

feel they owe to themselves. As the grandfather in “Awake and Sing!” says to his grandson:

“Wake up! Be something! Make your life something good. For the love of an old man who sees

in your young days his new life, for such love - take the world in your two hands and

make it like new.” Odets's characters speak in contemporary,

dialect-driven speech. But this ordinary language can soar into a kind of poetry when the characters

are moved—sometimes by desire, sometimes by oppression.

“Waiting for Lefty,” had its historic premiere on January 6, 1935. Is it theater?

Or propaganda? Yes! Help us out, ThoughtBubble: The play is based on an actual forty-day strike

among New York cab drivers in 1934. They were hoping for fairer contracts. As it begins,

a corrupt union boss is trying to convince the drivers not to strike. The drivers are

waiting for their chairman, Lefty. This was before “Godot,” when you could still wait

for stuff and not have it seem derivative. The audience is positioned as other drivers

at the meeting, and often they're addressed directly.

Joe, one of the drivers, gets up to speak, and the scene shifts to Joe's apartment,

the week before.

His furniture is being repossessed, and his family doesn't have enough money for groceries.

But even though they're struggling, his wife tells him to stand up and strike.

In other vignettes, other characters resist oppression. A lab assistant refuses to spy

on his boss and punches out the company's owner. A young driver tries to hold on to

his girlfriend, though her family disapproves. A Jewish doctor is discriminated against and

then radicalized. Back at the meeting, one man, a veteran of

another strike, tries to discourage the workers, but he's outed as a company spy. Then, another

man runs in and tells everyone that Lefty has been shot dead, presumably by the taxi

bigwigs. An organizer turns to the audience and asks, “Well, what's the answer?”

On opening night, a few of the stagehands shouted, “Strike!”

The audience started shouting it, too! When the play finished, they were so moved that

they stood up and clapped and stamped for forty five minutes, through twenty six curtain

calls, until they were removed from the theater. And then they kept it up on the street outside.

—Strike! Strike! Thanks, ThoughtBubble. That was inspiring. Eventually, Odets left

New York, lured to Hollywood, where he wrote a bunch of excellent screenplays. But he eventually

returned with plays that took a dark view of corrupting Hollywood power structures,

and his new Broadway works said so. So, bite that hand, Cliff!

If the Group Theater was a small, fervent, wildly influential response to the Great Depression,

there was an even bigger one in the works—the Federal Theater Project. The FTP, which kicked

off in 1935, was a New Deal initiative meant to keep theater professionals working until

the economy improved. Eventually, it employed more than fifteen thousand people across forty

states. To head the FTP, the politicians didn't

look to famous Broadway directors and producers. Instead they chose Hallie Flanagan, a Vassar

professor. And this was a baller move—because like a lot of academics—Flanagan liked plays

that fell solidly in the weird and awesome range.

Instead of programming feel-good comedies or Shakespeare, followed by Shakespeare, with

a dollop of Shakespeare, she created a network of regional theaters and encouraged them to

make weird, awesome work. BUT ok there were some classic plays, too.

In its four years, the FTP-sponsored hundreds of distinct productions, most of them open

to the public with free admission. The FTP was not expected or required to turn a profit…

and no one had any money anway! Susan Glaspell, whom you'll maybe remember

from our episode on American moderns, headed the Midwest bureau. Not a trifle! The expressionist

playwright Elmer Rice headed up the New York office.

The FTP also created units of the Negro Theater Project in 23 cities. The New York Unit was

originally headed by two white directors, John Houseman and Orson Welles, though they

were replaced a year later by three black directors: Edward Perry, Carlton Moss, and

H. F. V. Edward. The most famous project was probably the twenty-year-old Welles's wildly

popular “voodoo” “Macbeth,” which cast entirely black actors and reset the tragedy

in the Caribbean. The FTP is probably best remembered for creating

the Living Newspapers: plays by journalists and theater makers that were drawn from the

news of the day; current events presented in a form inspired by vaudeville, pageant,

and newer, more experimental forms. As Flanagan wrote, they were designed to “dramatize

a new struggle—the search of the average American today for knowledge about his country

and his world; to dramatize his struggle to turn the great natural and economic forces

of our time toward a better life for more people.”

The first play, “Ethiopia,” wasn't allowed to open. The government issued a censorship

order saying current heads of state couldn't be imitated onstage. Man, good thing we got

over that anxiety, huh?! “Triple A Plowed Under” explored the rights

of farmers. “One-Third of a Nation” was about a housing crisis. “Spirochete” was

a fun play starring syphilis. Often these plays were narrated by a “little man.”

[[[Yorick flies in.]]] Bigger. With a body. The little man was a Joe Average, here to

learn about power, poverty, or VD.

The FTP ran until 1939, when it was canceled because it had run through all the money it

had been allotted, and because some politicians weren't too crazy about the Living Newspapers

and the leftist content they provided. Strike! Strike! Strike!

By 1940, the Group and the FTP had dissolved, but they'd left a lasting impression, both

on the style of American writing and acting, and the network of regional theaters in which

these American plays could now be performed. Next time, we're heading back to Europe

for some not-so-political theater created by the actor, essayist, playwright, genius,

and occasional madman Antonin Artaud. It's the Theater of Cruelty. Until then… curtain,

with compassion.