Group Theatre

Group Theatre may refer to:

Group Theatre (London)

The Group Theatre (London, no connection with the New York company with the same name) was an experimental theatre company founded in 1932 by Rupert Doone and Robert Medley. It evolved from a play-reading group in Cambridge that Doone had been involved with during his years studying with the Festival Theatre there. The Group Theatre was active from 1932 to 1939 and reformed as The Group Theatre Ltd. in the early 1950s.

The Group performed plays written for it in the 1930s by W. H. Auden, both alone and in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender. It also produced plays by T. S. Eliot and other contemporary writers, and Elizabethan and medieval English plays.

Among the artists and musicians who worked with the Group were Henry Moore, Benjamin Britten and Rupert Shephard.

References

Group Theatre (New York)

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The Group Theater was a New York City theater collective formed in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg. It was intended as a base for the kind of theatre they and their colleagues believed in—a forceful, naturalistic and highly disciplined artistry. They were pioneers of what would become an "American acting technique", derived from the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavski, but pushed beyond them as well. The company included actors, directors, playwrights, and producers. The name "Group" came from the idea of the actors as a pure ensemble; there were to be no "stars".

The New York-based Group Theater had no connection with the identically-named London-based Group Theatre founded in 1932.

In the ten years of its existence, the Group Theater produced works by many important American playwrights, most notably Clifford Odets and Irwin Shaw. Its most successful production was the 1937-38 Broadway hit Golden Boy, starring Luther Adler and Frances Farmer.