The Group Theatre: Passion, Politics, and Performance in the Depression Era by Helen Krich Chinoy (review)

Helen Krich Chinoy (1922–2010) was arguably the leading academic expert on the Group Theatre, a cultural icon of the 1930s. The Group is widely viewed as a key source for the realistic acting and playwriting that animated twentieth-century theatre, and – through Group members’ careers in Hollywood – the theatre and film of much of the world. Chinoy organized the interviews of Group members that appeared in the Educational Theatre Journal (December 1976) as Reunion: A Self-Portrait of the Group Theatre. She was also chief consultant for the PBS documentary, Broadway’s Dreamers: The Legacy of the Group Theatre, in the network’s American Masters series in 1989. Both projects were essential theatre history, capturing in the words of the participants the story of how the Group came to be, and how it lived, created, and ultimately collapsed and dispersed.

Immersed in the Group’s story and well acquainted with surviving members, Chinoy worked for decades on a manuscript about the company and its influence, while publishing articles and making presentations on the subject. Other projects and her teaching at Smith College intervened, and finally, the effects of Alzheimer’s prevented completion of the book that would have been her hallmark accomplishment. At the request of Chinoy’s children, theatre scholars Milly S. Barranger and Don B. Wilmeth accepted Chinoy’s draft chapters, as well as her notes, files, and personal library, with its marginalia, and worked that material into the book recently published as The Group Theatre: Passion, Politics, and Performance in the Depression Era. According to her editors, Chinoy’s book, though in draft form, was largely complete, with the exception of two planned chapters about the post-break-up activities and influence of Group members in theatre and film.

Most of the history presented in the book will be familiar to a student of the Group. Beginning with co-founder Harold Clurman’s riveting narrative The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the Thirties, first published in 1941 and revised in 1955 and 1975, Group members provided eloquent, book-length accounts of their experiences. Co-founder Cheryl Crawford and Group actors Robert Lewis and Elia Kazan published detailed memoirs of the Group years. (Lee Strasberg, the third co-founder, dealt only briefly with the Group, however, in his history of the Method.) In 1990, journalist Wendy Smith published Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940, an engaging history of the Group, running to nearly five-hundred pages, complete with endnotes, a comprehensive index, and sixteen pages of high-quality illustrations. Whatever Chinoy’s feelings about having been beaten to publication, Barranger and Wilmeth report that she owned a copy of Smith’s book, complete with substantial marginal notes.

Chinoy’s introduction to her own book is among its most compelling features. She recounts her activities as a teenager in the 1930s, swept up in “classes and performances organized for children by radical fraternal organizations dedicated to making culture serve the people” (8). These youthful experiences fuelled a life-long interest in the Group and its ideals:

Our crude but lively performances were the potent ideological weapon we carried in our touring truck to union halls, picket lines, and club houses in my hometown of Newark, New Jersey, where actors were arrested for staging Odets’s Waiting for Lefty. We played for our so-called progressive audiences the emerging repertory of anti-Nazi, antiwar, strike dramas … We had our group, our audience, our plays … The personal was the political and the political was personal and artistic. When the Group Theatre toured Newark with Odets’s Awake and Sing! its highly professional mix of economics, ethnic pungency, personal lyricism, and social hope convinced us that a true theater was possible in our time.

(8–9)

Chinoy acknowledges that, looking back from the 1990s, which is when she is writing...