Group Theatre (New York) - Early Productions

Early Productions

The company's first production was Paul Green's The House of Connelly on September 23, 1931, at the Martin Beck Theatre. It was an immediate critical success and was recognized for the special ensemble performances which the Group would further develop. Playwright Green, however, was not happy with the more hopeful, upbeat ending that the Group had imposed on his brooding work. The Group's production of John Howard Lawson's Success Story, which chronicled the rise of a youthful idealist who sacrifices his principles as he rises to the top of the advertising business, won generally favorable reviews for its script, and enthusiastic praise for Luther Adler's starring performance. Later, during the first full season (1933–34), Men in White, written by Sidney Kingsley and directed by Lee Strasberg, became the Group's first financial success and also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The Group took on novelist Dawn Powell's dark comedy Big Night, rehearsed it for close to six months and asked for extensive revisions from the playwright. The result was a critical and box-office disaster that ran a scant nine performances. Harold Clurman, who took over the production late in the rehearsal period, later admitted the Group's role in the fiasco. "The play should have been done in four swift weeks — or not at all. We worried it and harried our actors with it for months."

On the night of January 5, 1935, some members of the Group participated in a benefit performance for New Theatre Magazine. Written by Clifford Odets and directed by Odets and Sanford Meisner, the performance of Odets' one-act play Waiting for Lefty, at the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York City, became a theatrical legend. The play reflects a kind of street poetry that brought great acclaim to the Group, and to Odets as the new voice of social drama in the 'thirties. Odets became the playwright most strongly identified with the Group, and its productions of Awake and Sing and Paradise Lost, both directed in 1935 by Harold Clurman, proved to be excellent vehicles for the Group's Stanislavskian aesthetic. The following year they produced the Paul Green-Kurt Weill anti-war musical Johnny Johnson, directed by Strasberg.

Elia Kazan directed Robert Ardrey's plays Casey Jones and Thunder Rock in 1938 and 1939-40 for the Group Theatre.

The Group gathered at different summer locations to rehearse and train intensively for six of its ten years in existence. They spent the summer of 1936 at Pine Brook Country Club, located on a natural lake in the countryside of Nichols, Connecticut. Other summer venues included Brookfield Center, Connecticut (1931); Dover Furnace in Dutchess County, New York (1932); Green Mansions in Warrensburg, New York in 1933; a large house in Ellenville, New York (1934); and Lake Grove in Smithtown, New York in 1939.