Before Movies
“The great thing about theater in the thirties was that everybody was involved. We all knew what everybody else was doing and we all cared.”
In 1934, Nick and his first wife, the writer, Jean Evans spent their nights sitting in the Greenwich Village coffee houses participating in heated discussions about changing the face of theater. They huddled close together with the participants of the downtown theater scene, and with their lips moving, arms flailing, foreheads perspiring, they raised their voices excitedly exclaiming that the theater must be used as a weapon. It could no longer be a place where only the wealthy could afford to go.
Excerpt. Ray by Ray: A Daughter’s Take on the Legend of Nicholas Ray
© All Rights Reserved.
Nick went to 42 East 12th Street, the Lower East Side headquarters of the Theater of Action that he’d heard was real, sincere.
Will Lee, a dancer and one of the group’s earliest members, remembered Nick being like a “fresh wind blowing,” and the musician Earl Robinson recalled that Nick was a “burst of energy who appeared out of nowhere and on to the scene. Nick was something more energy than art.” Perry Bruskin, the youngest member joined the group when he was thirteen, had the feeling that Nick had just popped out of thin air, like a man who had no parents, who had just come into being.
Nick and Jean moved into the five-room apartment on East 13th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues where all of the Theater of Action members lived. At night every room became a bedroom with the mattresses thrown on the floor. During the day beds were rolled up and stored. The 12th Street headquarters were in a loft partitioned into two areas where the actors rehearsed scenes based on improvisations orchestrated by Elia Kazan, who would venture downtown after a day’s work with the Group Theater on Broadway.
Elia Kazan wanted to direct. He adopted the Theater of Action as his own. He introduced them to Constantin Stanislavski and Vsevolod Meyerhold, an actor/director who’d been a member of the Moscow Art Theater under the direction of Constantin Stanislavsky before breaking away from the theater and Stanislavsky’s teachings to form a method and style of theater all his own. Both Stanislavsky and Meyerhold influenced the development of Method acting. Lee Strasberg used to quote Meyerhold all of the time. “Words are decorations on the hem of the skirt of action.’’
“The Group Theater brought Stanislavsky into cognizance in New York. The great influence that changed acting in America for all time was the Group Theater, and the Group Theater’s work, and how they approached the work. That was carried to The Theater of Action by Kazan,” Norman Lloyd said.
The Method consisted of, “recalling the circumstances, physical and personal, surrounding an intensely emotional experience in the actors past. It is the same as when we accidentally hear a tune we may have heard at a stormy or an ecstatic moment in our lives, and find, to our surprise, that we are re-experiencing the emotion we felt then, feeling ecstasy again or rage and the impulse to kill. The actor becomes aware that he had emotional resources; that he can awaken, by this self-stimulation, a great number of very intense feelings; and that these emotions are the materials of his art,” Kazan wrote.
“We believed every word he said. Nick Ray and I idolized him. If Kazan had said, Nick, Perry, jump out of that window, we’d have done it,” Perry Bruskin said.
“They did something that most professional actors could not—go the limit in improvisation. Scenes of anger had to be stopped short of bodily harm, love scenes cut off before they reached final intimacy. When the material was in their range of experience, their dialogue was absolutely true; they were the streets of New York incarnate,” Kazan wrote.
“We worked at learning our craft twenty hours a day. At 9 in the morning we would take classes in body movement with Martha Graham or Ann Sokolov. At 11 we would take voice classes. At noon we would be given a dime for lunch, which we might use for subway fare to a museum or to buy a cream cheese sandwich. At 1:30 we had Eurythmics; at 2:30 we began improvisations preliminary to rehearsals. At 4 we would rehearse until it was time to perform. We would perform on picket lines, at universities, union headquarters, in subways, wherever we could perform—because there is no actor unless there is a spectator,” Nick said.
The Theater of Action along with the other radical collectives on the Lower East Side, was intent on becoming the voice of the people. The Theater Collective founded by Mordecai Gorelick, a former set designer for the infamous Group Theater, abandoned Broadway in hopes of creating a more realistic theater where plays that reflected the times were given priority over plays that catered to entertainment. The Theater Union, a proletarian theater started by Charles Walker and his wife Adelaide, two radicals who were influenced by Leon Trotsky, were committed to using the theater to make social changes. These theater groups dubbed workers theaters were largely influenced by how people like Ann Branko, the founder of Russia’s first public theater in 1880 (until then all theaters had been State-run institutions), and Constantin Stanislavski, the principle director and lead actor of the Moscow Art Theater founded in 1888, transformed the Russian theater into a public forum. The Moscow Art Theater, especially, believed that the theater had a social responsibility to be the voice of the underprivileged. In a speech Stanislavski gave to the Moscow Art Theater company in 1898 he said, “What we are undertaking is not a simple private affair but a social task. Never forget that we are striving to brighten the dark existence of the poor classes, to afford them minutes of happiness and aesthetic uplift, to relieve the murk that envelops them. Our aim is to create the first intelligent, moral, popular theater, and to this end we are dedicating our lives.”
While theater groups in America in the 1930s weren’t fighting against state control they were fighting against the bureaucrats who ran the Theater Guild. Both the Theater Guild and the Russian State-run theaters had a governing body who decided what plays would be produced, usually works that drew big box office and had no direct link to the struggles of the people.
According to Harold Clurman, who had worked for the Theater Guild, and was one of the founders of the Group Theater along with Lee Strasburg and Cheryl Crawford, the Guild “had no blood relationship with the plays they dealt in. They set the plays out in a show window for as many customers as possible to buy. They didn’t want to say anything through plays, and plays always said nothing to them, except that they were amusing in a graceful way, or, if they were tragic plays they were art.”
The Group Theater founded in 1930 was touted in the trades as a revolutionary group whose intention according to Clurman was “to establish a theater in which our own philosophy of life might be translated into a philosophy of the theater.” Their first production The House of Connely of which Clurman said was a play about the “basic struggle between any new and old order,” premiered on September 23, 1931 to rave reviews, the same month Nick started his semester as a non-matriculating student at the University of Chicago.. During its run at the Martin Beck Theater on W. 45th Street Elia Kazan, then a student at the Yale Drama School, who was to become a Group Theater member and acclaimed director, sat in the audience with his soon-to-be first wife Molly, a playwright and editor in Chief of the Vassar Miscellany, who after hearing President Roosevelt give a speech over the radio in 1932 became involved with the Theater Union.
In the spring of 1932 when Nick was in California thinking he wanted to be a screenwriter, Elia Kazan, then twenty-two years old, interviewed with Harold Clurman and Lee Strasburg in a dimly lit room in a theater on 48th Street for an apprenticeship with the Group. Strasburg, who had a newspaper spread out on the desk in front of him kept looking at the sports page convincing Kazan that he was much more interested in finding out who won what game than in anything Kazan had to say. But then, out of the blue, Strasburg peered over his newspaper and asked Elia Kazan what he wanted to which Kazan replied, “What I want is your job. I mean, I want to be a director.” Soon Kazan received a letter of acceptance to be an apprentice at the Group Theater’s second summer camp and on June 19, 1932 he arrived at the Sterling Farms in Dover Furnace New York.
“Kazan was made of iron,” Perry Bruskin said.
“Nick had a sleepy way about him. It always seemed like he was in a half-somnambulistic state. Jean had this kind of vitality and Nick was always measured and slow,” Norman Lloyd said.
“I wasn’t sure if I liked Nick. I never knew what I felt. I didn’t trust him. He was elusive,” Perry Bruskin said.
“I found Jean very bright, energetic, not in a forceful way. She had a lovely energy. I couldn’t understand how she [eventually] married Nick.” Norman Lloyd said.
“We were all hoping Jean would fix Nick,” Bruskin said.
Elia Kazan directed the Theater of Action actors in a protest play against the Civilian Conservation Camps called The Young Go First. There wasn’t a completed script when rehearsals started. Kazan created a third act by setting up a scenario and having the actors improvise their way through it while a stenographer jotted down what was happening. From those notes he wrote a final act. The Young Go First legitimized The Theater of Action. Members received their Equity Cards.
Norman Lloyd joined the Theater of Action in the beginning of 1936 on the recommendation of Joe Losey who had directed him in Bride for the Unicorn at Harvard. The Theater of Action had moved their living quarters from East 13th Street to East 27th Street. Norman Lloyd never lived with them but he did meet his wife, Peggy, there. They were married over seventy years when she died in the mid 2000s.
Norman Lloyd was cast in The Crime, a play about industrial unionization, directed by Kazan. It was the only play Lloyd did with the Theater of Action and the last one for Kazan.
Elia Kazan became disheartened with the group when they succumbed to pressures from the New York headquarters of the American Communist Party to make changes to a play about Mayor La Guardia. Kazan felt that the first version of the play about La Guardia took a positive view of the mayor whereas the second attacked his policies.
“We were a Communist theater. Absolutely, no question about it. The quality of the material was anti-capitalist,” Earl Robinson said.
“Anybody who got deeply involved in the group was clearly leftist, clearly a strong political mind to begin with,” Bruskin said.
“I was sympathetic because the only people to take a family along to the welfare office and pound on the desk until they got something to eat were Communists. Nick himself was truly committed, like the rest of the group,” Jean Evans said.
Elia Kazan may have disassociated himself from the Theater of Action but he stayed friends with Nick until the end of Nick’s life.
“Kazan, I think, felt very older brotherly towards Nick. It’s possible Nick felt overshadowed by Kazan. Kazan had so much success. And even when he came to the crisis in his life he negotiated it so that he had even more success. Kazan had a great ability to handle himself and always come out on top.”
Sources: Will Lee:: Nick was a “fresh wind blowing.” Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, Bernard Eisenschitz, 1990Earl Robinson: Nick was a “burst of energy.” Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, Bernard Eisenschitz, 1990Earl Robinson: “We were a communist theater…” Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, Bernard Eisenschitz, 1990Perry Bruskin: “Nick popped out of thin air.” Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, Bernard Eisenschitz, 1990Perry Bruskin: “We believed every word he said…” Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, Bernard Eisenschitz, 1990 Perry Bruskin: “Kazan was made of iron.” Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, Bernard Eisenschitz, 1990All other Perry Bruskin quotes are from the interview conducted by myself and Stacey AsipAll Elia Kazan quotes: Elia Kazan: A Life, Elia Kazan, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1988Jean Evan’s quote: “I was sympathetic because the only people…” Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, Bernard Eisenschitz, 1990All Norman Lloyd quotes are from the interview conducted by myself and Stacey AsipDavid Thomson quote is from the interview conducted by myself and Stacey AsipInformation about the Theater of Action and the theater collectives on the Lower East Side as well as the information about Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theater’s influence is taken from The Fervent Years by Harold Clurman, Da Capo Press, 1975; Elia Kazan’s A Life; Meyerhold: A Revolution in the Theater by Edward Braun University of Iowa Press, 1995; The Lee Strasberg Notes by Lola Cohen, Routledge, 2010
