Organization, “Angels,” and Audiences

Abstract

“The Group is a Theatre—and as such is a collective,” Clurman declared in the early days. He and Strasberg had learned from Boleslavsky that true theater is an ensemble of players with a leader who, like the coxswain of a rowing team, makes it possible for them to work collectively. In the performance process, the two directors, guided by this version of the collectivist ideal, created a unique, even if imperfect, interdependence between them and their ensemble, involving their actors to an extent not found elsewhere in professional theater. For them individual self-realization could only be achieved through identification with the group they had created. But collectivism, considered a “key word” in the vocabulary of the 1930s, had many meanings. Clurman himself concluded that the issue of collectivism engendered “misunderstandings that beclouded the Group’s relation with the world and its relationship with itself.” The ongoing struggles over the needs and obligations of the individual versus the claims of the directors or the company or society raised the basic question: Is the Group as an organization a collective? (parts I & II of FY also focus on many of the issues in this chapter