Harold Clurman

His parents took him to the Yiddish theatre on the Lower East Side when he was six, and he sat through Jacob Adler in translations of Gutzkow and Lessing without understanding a word of Yiddish. It fixed something. Clurman was the son of Samuel Clurman, a doctor whose family had come from Kamenets-Podolsky, and he went from Columbia to Paris at 20, to the Sorbonne, sharing an apartment with a young composer named Aaron Copland and writing a thesis on French drama. What he found there — Jacques Copeau's company and the example of the Moscow Art Theatre's permanent troupe — convinced him that America had the wrong theatre entirely: hits assembled around stars, then struck. He came home in 1924 wanting a permanent company with a shared method.

He founded the Group Theatre in 1931 with Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg, and the new thing was the arrangement: a permanent ensemble that lived and rehearsed together through the summers, trained in one common technique, and chose plays for what they said about American life rather than for a star. It gave Clifford Odets his stage. It trained or employed Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Elia Kazan and John Garfield. It never made money, and it came apart after ten years. Almost everything in American acting for the next 50 years came out of those ten years.

Two careers ran side by side after that, and each one made the other suspect. He directed more than 40 productions on Broadway — Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding in 1950, William Inge's Bus Stop in 1955 — and drew four Tony nominations for direction in the 1950s. At the same time he reviewed plays, for The New Republic from 1948 and then for The Nation from 1953 until his death, close to 30 years of criticism from a man working the other side of the footlights that same season. It made him unusually credible and unusually resented. His 1945 book The Fervent Years is the standard account of the Group Theatre — and, as historians point out, it is his account, which is a large part of why the period is remembered the way it is.

The quarrel that outlived the Group was over what Stanislavski had actually meant. Strasberg drove actors into their own remembered emotion. Adler, after studying with Stanislavski in Paris in 1934, came back arguing that the work belonged in the imagination and in the given circumstances of the play. Clurman took her side — he married her in 1943 — and in 1937 the friction among the three founders pushed Strasberg and Crawford out of the company. He argued it in print for 40 years, from inside a fight he helped start. France gave him the Legion of Honour. He died of cancer in New York City on September 9, 1980, nine days short of his 79th birthday.

Harold Clurman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Group Theatre other
  Founded with Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg — a permanent American ensemble 1931
• Awake and Sing! other
  Clifford Odets at the Belasco — Clurman's first production as a director 1935
• The Fervent Years book
  The standard history of the Group Theatre, written by one of the three who ran it 1945
• The Member of the Wedding other
  Carson McCullers on Broadway, directed by Clurman 1950
• Bus Stop other
  William Inge — one of four Tony nominations for direction in the 1950s 1955
• On Directing book
  His working method — finding the spine of a play — set down for other directors 1972

• 1907 aged ~6 Taken to the Yiddish theatre on the Lower East Side at six Jacob Adler in Yiddish translations of Gutzkow and Lessing. Clurman did not speak Yiddish.
• 1921 aged ~20 Moves to Paris at 20 and rooms with Aaron Copland He studied at the Sorbonne and wrote a thesis on French drama from 1890 to 1914.
• 1924 aged ~23 Returns to New York and goes to work for the Theatre Guild Extra, then stage manager and play reader — and translator for Jacques Copeau.
• 1931 aged ~30 Founds the Group Theatre with Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg The first production, Paul Green's The House of Connelly, opened that September at the Martin Beck Theatre.
• February 19, 1935 aged 33 Directs Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing! at the Belasco His first production as a director, and the play that set his directing style.
• 1937 aged ~36 Strasberg and Crawford resign after the founders fall out The argument ran on what Stanislavski had meant and how far affective memory should go.
• 1941 aged ~40 The Group Theatre disbands after ten years It had never been solvent. The coming war, Hollywood salaries and internal friction finished it.
• 1953 aged ~52 Becomes drama critic of The Nation He kept the post for 27 years, until he died — after four years at The New Republic.
• September 9, 1980 aged 78 Dies of cancer in New York City Nine days short of his 79th birthday. Buried at Mt. Carmel Cemetery in Glendale, Queens.

• Stella Adler 1901–1992
  Acting teacher who trained Marlon Brando and broke with Lee Strasberg married to
• Lee Strasberg 1901–1982
  Taught the Method to two generations of American actors, and made affective memory the centre of it. co-founded with
• Sanford Meisner 1905–1997
  Acting teacher who created the Meisner technique employed
• Elia Kazan 1909–2003
  Directed A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman and On the Waterfront, and named names to HUAC. employed
• Aaron Copland 1900–1990
  Composer whose accessible modernist works created an enduring musical language associated with American landscapes and identity. roomed with in Paris
• Pauline Kael 1919–2001
  The New Yorker's film critic from 1968 to 1991, who turned reviewing into a first-person argument and picked the fights that defined the field. fellow critic