https://www.amazon.com/Directing-Harold-Clurman/dp/0684826224?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0684826224
( The Group Theatre was perhaps the most significant expe...)
The Group Theatre was perhaps the most significant experiment in the history of American theater. Producing plays that reflected topical issues of the decade and giving a creative chance to actors, directors, and playwrights who were either fed up with or shut out of commercial theater, the "Group" remains a permanent influence on American drama despite its brief ten-year life. It was here that method acting, native realism, and political language had their tryouts in front of audiences who anticipated--indeed demanded--a departure from the Broadway "show-biz" tradition. In this now classic account, Harold Clurman, founder of the Group Theatre and a dynamic force as producer-director-critic for fifty years, here re-creates history he helped make with Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Irwin Shaw, Clifford Odets, Cheryl Crawford, Morris Carnovsky, and William Saroyan. Stella Adler contributed a new introduction to this edition which remembers Clurman, the thirties, and the heady atmosphere of a tumultuous decade.
https://www.amazon.com/Fervent-Years-Theatre-Thirties-paperback/dp/0306801868?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0306801868
(For six decades Harold Clurman illuminated our artistic s...)
For six decades Harold Clurman illuminated our artistic social and political awareness in thousands of reviews essays and lectures. His work appeared indefatigably in ÊThe Nation The New Republic The London Observer The New York Times Harper's Esquire New York MagazineÊ and more. ÊThe Collected Works of Harold ClurmanÊ captures over six hundred of Clurman's encounters with the most significant events in American theatre ä as well as his regular passionate embraces of dance music art and film. This chronological epic offers the most comprehensive view of American theatre seen through the eyes of our most extraordinary critic. 1102 pages hardcover.
https://www.amazon.com/Collected-Works-Harold-Clurman-Applause/dp/1557831327?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1557831327
Harold Edgar Clurman was born on September 18, 1901 in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Samuel M. Clurman, a physician, and Bertha Saphir. He dated his "passionate inclination toward the theater" to his childhood, when his father took him, at the age of six, to see the great Yiddish actor Jacob P. Adler in Uriel Acosta.
He briefly attended Columbia University and in 1921 went to Paris, where he shared an apartment with the composer Aaron Copland, who became a lifelong friend. He attended lectures and productions at Jacques Copeau's Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, saw the Moscow Art Theater on tour, and met Konstantin Stanislavsky, among other current and future arts notables of the Parisian avant-garde. In 1923 he graduated from the Sorbonne with a degree in letters, having written his thesis on French drama from 1890 to 1914.
Returning to New York in 1924, he began his fifty-six-year theatrical career as an extra in Stark Young's The Saint, produced by Kenneth MacGowan, Robert Edmond Jones, James Light, and Eugene O'Neill's new company at the Greenwich Village Playhouse. After playing small parts for the Theatre Guild, he advanced to stage manager of the Guild's Garrick Gaieties of 1925 and then to a position as play reader. At the Guild, he met Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford, Sanford Meisner, and others who were soon to become his colleagues. Clurman, as the actress Aline MacMahon said later, literally "talked the Group [Theatre] into existence" by fervent, evangelical "torrents" of talk at twenty-five weekly late-night meetings between November 1930 and May 1931, describing his vision of a permanent acting ensemble studying their craft together to produce creative expressions that would convey the life of the times through theater. Although the Group Theatre never achieved its central aim of establishing an institutional theater, its decade of creative achievement on Broadway was of seminal importance. The first plays of members Clifford Odets, Irwin Shaw, and William Saroyan were staged by the Group. The actors Bobby Lewis and Elia Kazan directed for the Group before becoming Broadway directors. Cheryl Crawford, who along with Clurman and Strasberg was one of the Group's three founding directors, became a Broadway producer when the Group dissolved in 1941. With Lewis and Kazan, Crawford founded the Actors Studio in 1947, carrying forward the Group's most lasting contribution: they had introduced Stanislavsky's approach to acting and directing to Broadway, permanently changing American production methods. Later generations of actors and acting teachers, taught by Strasberg at the Actors Studio and by Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, and other Group members at rival studios, passionately debated and reshaped Stanislavsky's system into the "Method" that dominates actors' training throughout the United States. For the Group Theatre, Clurman directed Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing! (1935), Paradise Lost (1935), Golden Boy (1937), Rocket to the Moon (1938), and Night Music (1940) and Irwin Shaw's The Gentle People (1939) and Retreat to Pleasure (1940), the Group's last production. He was the Group's managing director from 1937, when Crawford and Strasberg resigned, until the end. Depressed by the Group's dissolution after ten years of struggle, Clurman went to Hollywood in 1941, working as a producer and directing a film written by Odets, Deadline at Dawn (1946). He also wrote The Fervent Years (1945), his memoir-history of the Group. During the 1940's he directed four plays on Broadway, none a success, and coproduced Arthur Miller's All My Sons (1947). For Clurman, whom Stella Adler once described as "all mind, which accelerates into passion, " women were a lifelong complication. He and Adler finally married in 1943 and were divorced in 1960 (there was vagueness on both their parts about precise dates). His directing career revived in 1950 when Robert Whitehead asked him to direct Carson McCullers's Member of the Wedding, the tremendous popular success of which surprised Clurman and made a star of Julie Harris. He then directed, among others, Lillian Hellman's The Autumn Garden (1951), a revival of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms (1952), Jean Anouilh's Mademoiselle Colombe (1954), William Inge's Bus Stop (1955), Jean Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates (1955), Anouilh's The Waltz of the Toreadors (1957), and Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending (1957). In the 1960's he directed two O'Neill plays in Tokyo, Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in Los Angeles, and several New York productions, including Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy (1965). Clurman wrote theater criticism for the New Republic (1949 - 1952), the Nation (1953 - 1980), and the London Observer (1955 - 1963). He lectured widely and was a professor at Hunter College from 1964 until his death, publishing three collections of his essays and two more books. He died in New York. In this, he epitomized the ideals of the mentors of his youth, Jacques Copeau and Konstantin Stanislavsky, and like them, he created a theater company that profoundly changed his country's theatrical culture.
He was one of the creators of the modern American theater, yet gloried in the classics and in his heritage of European culture: of many honors, he most proudly wore the lapel ribbon of a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. He decried the tendency of younger artists and academics to dismiss the great classics as irrelevant to modern life. As a critic "he did not so much judge a play as put it into context, " relating each experience to a larger world of culture and history. To fellow critic Walter Kerr, he was "Broadway's best invisible director because he permitted the author's work to absorb his powers and his personality so entirely. Lost not in the clouds, but in another man's creation. "
(For six decades Harold Clurman illuminated our artistic s...)
( The Group Theatre was perhaps the most significant expe...)
Quotations: "I can handle Stanislavsky. I can handle criticism. I can handle the Group Theatre. But I can't handle my women. "
Quotes from others about the person
The New York Times writer John Corry called Clurman "a dapper gallant whose profound love of the stage manifested itself in a single-minded and scholarly intensity that both inspired and amused his colleagues and friends. "
In 1940 Clurman married Stella Adler, a charismatic theatre actress and later a renowned New York acting coach. A member of the Group Theatre since its founding, Adler was the daughter of the notable Yiddish actor Jacob Adler. Clurman was her second husband. They divorced in 1960. Clurman's second marriage was to the independent filmmaker Juleen Compton.
