The Group Theatre: Roman Bohnen, Luther Adler, Leif Erickson, Frances Farmer, Ruth Nelson, Sanford Meisner, Phoebe Brand, Eleanor Lynn, Irwin Shaw, Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman and Morris Carnovsky

Elia Kazan—Rebel with a Cause

by Norman B. Schwartz

In 1898, the director Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1838) convinced a Russian medical doctor and sometime story writer Anton Chekhov to write an original play for a new acting company, the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT), that he had founded. In 1922-1923, almost twenty-five years later, that ensemble performed Chekhov’s play, The Seagull, during their first and only tour of the United States. 

Although MAT performed in Russian, those in the American audience who saw the play for the first time thought they understood everything being said. There was not one actor, however small or big the role, who stood on stage waiting to pick up a cue and mouth the dialogue. Each night, night after night, every member of the visiting company listened to every other, listened, responded, and reacted passionately and intensely, as if what was happening on stage was happening in life and what they heard was being said for the first time. 

---

During that tour, three young people in their twenties—play reader Harold Clurman, casting director Cheryl Crawford, and the bit player and occasional stage manager Lee Strasberg—were in the audience. What they saw on stage so impressed them, they set out to study and reproduce its art in their own country. They agreed, should they be able to raise the money, that their company would be called The Group Theatre, an actors’ collective, the first in the United States, where no ensemble member would be considered better or more valuable than any other. 

Throughout the late Twenties, Clurman, their guiding spirit and proselytiser, sought to attract investors and actors. He preached once a week to the invited about plays still to be written that would confront the inequities and injustices of the time rather than escape from them. He prophesied that plays as fresh and relevant as the morning’s newspaper would restore every company member to a position of dignity. An actor who had played the humble wage slave with one line in one play the night before might be the outspoken hero or heroine commanding the stage the next night. To most who listened to him, what he proposed was Democracy and Showbiz triumphant!

---

 In 1930, one invitee to Clurman’s lectures was a beautiful young woman, the daughter of a society doctor and a feminist mother from Connecticut; she had yet to play a part in any Broadway play. When Clurman asked her if she would be interested in joining such a collective where actors not only performed together but lived together, Katherine Hepburn refused. “No,” she said, “I don’t wish to be a member of a group. I want to be a great big star.” 

For all the aspiring divas who walked away from Clurman’s lectures wondering what the hell he was talking about, there were others more than willing to take part, even pay to join the cause. By 1931, the Group triumvirate had raised enough money to mount their first plays on Broadway. In the climate of a national economic and psychological Depression, it was only natural that some of the members would look admiringly at the social revolution then occurring in Soviet Russia and wish to join its People’s Artists in solidarity. Those few joined the CPUSA, the then-legal Communist Party of the United States, which by 1939, the penultimate year of the theatre’s existence, would attract over 60,000 dues paying members. 

---

For many years, the Group Theatre had, as did so many other workers’ theatres, a communist cell within the company that included actors Clifford Odets (not yet playwright,) J. Edward Bromberg, Morris Carnovsky, Phoebe Brand, Lewis Leverett, Tony Kraber, Ted Wellman and Paula Miller who was married to director and co-founder Lee Strasberg. As her husband Lee was not an actor but a member of that dreaded triumvirate, The Management, he never joined, perhaps because none of the actors had asked him. 

In 1932, Elias Kazantzoglou, Elia Kazan, the son of an emigrant rug merchant from Anatolia in Greece, nicknamed “Gadge” because of his talent for scenery building and fixing things, joined the ensemble. In 1935, he became one of these card-carrying young communist idealists who met once a week in a dressing room in the theatre where they were performing. There, with all the fervency of their youth, they shared their dreams and discussed Marxism and its potential influence on the future of the theatre and America.

---

New member, Kazan, had only played small parts in some of the plays, but his most important role was to be co-founder Clurman’s stage manager and right-hand man. Clurman, whose most outstanding talent was “the table read”—that moment in the early days of rehearsal when the director explains what the words of the play mean—was not very interested in the “blocking” of the action. When it came time to stage the drama—moving the actors around the set—Clurman often left what he considered a minor mechanical task to his eager protégé. 

Kazan lasted only a year and a half in the Party. In his autobiography, a unique combination of kiss-and-tell confession and self-congratulation, he vividly describes his political disillusionment. His friend Odets, hitherto a mediocre actor, submitted an autobiographical play describing the tribulations of a Jewish family in the Bronx, which he hoped the ensemble would present. Cofounders, Crawford, Clurman, and Strasberg read it with little enthusiasm. The actors, knowing it had been written for them, were anxious to put it on, but the founders refused. In his usual patriarchal fashion, Strasberg spoke to Odets, the unruly child he had trained and directed for many years. He said: “You don’t seem to understand, Clifford: We don’t like your play.”

In 1934 Odets had joined the CPUSA. Keeping a close eye on The Group, the party announced to its enrolled members that their governance shouldn’t remain solely in the hands of its founding oligarchy. In the great Marxist tradition that had prepared many a labour organizer sent South to organize agricultural and factory workers, they taught J. Edward Bromberg, the leader of the theatre unit, how a fervent minority could influence the lethargic majority and assume control. 

This actors’ rebellion caused a seismic shift in the underpinnings of The Group. The workers outvoted the management, and Odets’ play, Awake and Sing, went into production and opened on Broadway on February 19, 1935. A highly original play about working-class Americans, acted by people who came from the same background, it was a triumphal success. From then on, the actors took charge.

The party summoned Kazan to its headquarters, giving him the mission of informing his comrades that the time had now come for the actors to assume full command of the theatre and choose plays that reflected its policies. Policies which – somehow – mirrored those of the distant Kremlin. Kazan disagreed. He argued that the CPUSA, however well-intentioned, had no right to interfere in the artistic decisions of the theatre, about which he said they knew nothing. He pointed out to the cultural commissar that despite his occasional clashes with the leadership trio, he still held them in respect for having mentored him in acting and directing.

Another meeting was called. This time not in a crowded backstage theatre dressing room but in the living room of the Strasberg apartment in Greenwich Village. The principal speaker was a ‘Leading Comrade’, a union organizer for the United Auto Workers in Detroit, sent by the Party with the specific task of regaining control of the wandering unit within the theatre. The party organiser told those gathered that although he had never met their fellow actor, he knew his kind very well. He called Gadge a transgressor, the foreman type, someone obsequious, eager to curry favour with his bosses at the expense of his fellow workers. That evening, his fellow actors took a vote on Kazan’s proposal to leave the theatre’s management in its founders’ hands. Only one hand went up. His. As Kazan was to describe that moment in his autobiography, his accuser had been sent to stop the most dangerous thing the party had to cope with: “people thinking for themselves.” After his humiliation, Kazan went home, wrote a letter, and resigned from the Party. 

---

Seventeen years later, in 1952, Gadge was no longer a minor actor, set builder, and director’s assistant but Broadway and Hollywood’s star director. After the dissolution of The Group in 1940, Kazan had achieved a string of triumphs in the Broadway theatre—most notably, his direction of the original stage productions of two of America’s greatest plays: Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). He had also won his Academy award for directing the first Hollywood film to deal openly with Anti-Semitism, Gentleman’s Agreement. The House Un-American Activities Committee summoned him to appear; their stated aim, they said, was to root out communists. Others claimed it was simply to publicise themselves.

To be cleansed of the tar brush of communism, those called where asked to admit the error of their youthful ways, not too onerous a task, and most important of all, to list others equally misguided. The first time he was called to testify, Kazan refused to name names; Daryl Zanuck, his boss at Twentieth Century Fox, warned him that if he did not, his film version of Streetcar, nominated for ten Oscars in 1951, would not win the award for Best Direction. When Zanuck proved to be right, Spyros Skouras, a fellow Greek American, the company’s president, also threatened him. If Kazan did not clear his name, the studio would break his contract and make certain no studio in Hollywood would ever employ him again. 

The next time Kazan was called before the committee later the same year, he acquiesced. Some argued then, and still argue, that Kazan never had a good reason to name names. Had he refused, as other theatre artists such as his friend Arthur Miller did, Hollywood would have banned him, but not the New York theatre. The last bastion of artistic freedom and expression in the United States. Broadway would have welcomed back its best and highest-paid director as a valued member of the community, supporting him and his family both spiritually and financially.

Those he named, all character actors, some of whom had migrated west when The Group disbanded, were not as certain of the same level of security. Once blacklisted, their careers in California would be over. Most frightened of them all was their old leader, the chubby, affable J. Edward “Joe” Bromberg, in whose backstage dressing room they had often met. Dreading the moment the HUAC would call upon him to testify, he had moved to England to perform in a play by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. His friends noticed that their fellow actor appeared to age unnaturally. Joe died of a heart attack in London at forty-one. Four months after his death, Kazan named him before the Committee.

What caused Kazan and others of the Left—director/choreographer Jerome Robbins, actor John Garfield, and novelist Budd Schulberg, future screenwriter of Kazan’s apologia pro vita sua, On the Waterfront, to behave in such an indefensible manner? Was it only the need for money to take care of oneself and family (as was Bromberg’s case) or, as others argued, blind ambition in Kazan’s? 

Kazan never apologized for what he did on April 12, 1952. The day after he made his second appearance before the committee, he paid for a full-page ad in The New York Times in which he asserted his belief that the Communist Party of the United States was a subversive force determined to take over his country as it had taken over the actors’ unit in the Group Theater. By naming names, so he claimed, he was protecting his country from what he called “a dangerous and alien conspiracy.” 

---

In his autobiography, published over thirty years later, Kazan stated that his love of filmmaking surpassed his passion for theatre, leading him to pursue a career in cinema. Others took a more cynical view. Actor and singer Tony Kraber, one of actors Kazan named, offered another explanation for his fellow actor’s betrayal. Kraber contended that the day after he surrendered, Kazan signed a studio contract for five hundred thousand dollars, far more money than any theater director, however much in demand on Broadway, could ever earn. It had taken him many years, but Gadge had finally found a way of revenging himself on the eight actors, fellow members of the communist unit at The Group, who had neglected or were too afraid to come to his defense that humiliating night in Greenwich Village.

In 1999, almost fifty years after his HUAC appearance, the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded Kazan an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. Many members in New York and Hollywood objected. The night of the presentation, pickets demonstrated outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion. Inside, Steven Spielberg applauded his fellow director but did not stand up when Kazan came on stage to accept his award. Others sat on their hands.

Elia Kazan, Gadge, 94 years old, died in 2003. Few have ever been able to forgive him. The consensus remains to this day that what he did to his friends and co-workers was unconscionable. Orson Welles, another man of equal talent and ambition, described Kazan as “a traitor, but a very good director.” 

Only that? To those who worked with him, such as Marlon Brando, the foremost example, Gadge was the best director he had ever worked with in either the theatre or film. Looking now, not at the man but solely at the body of his work—Streetcar, Viva Zapata, On the Waterfront, East of Eden, America America—it is hard to dispute that assertion. A great director, yes, certainly, but an inferior human being. A rebel whose greatest cause might have only been himself.

---

Norman B. Schwartz is the author of the comic novels ‘ALL THINGS small‘, Paradise Now, Don Juan in Space, True (Cinema) Confessions, Hollywood: Below and Beyond, and the DIY guide, The Art Of The Schnoorr. He spent over forty years working on films in Hollywood and Rome. Norman was the first ADR sound editor / director to be admitted to Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.

Norman B. Schwartz essays will appear in sequence monthly in each issue of the magazine with a view to Centre House Press publishing the entire collection of essays in book form in spring 2026