Cliff Notes on Clurman

I wish there was a better encapsulating title for “man (or woman) of the theatre”. There have been many such figures over the centuries, people who performed too many important functions within the art and business of playmaking to be articulated succinctly in a job description. Anyway, Harold Clurman (1901-1980) was one of these. He had been an actor, director, critic, and producer/administrator/artistic director, and had married into one of America’s great theatrical dynasties, to boot.

Clurman died just around the time I was discovering theatre as a teenager, hence he was never a contemporary fact of life for me as a person interested in the art form. I first learned about him in any depth about a decade later, when I read the first of four books that contribute to the portrait of him that I have in my head.

In the late ’80s I was hired by communications consultant Lilyan Wilder to develop a proposal for a national African-American theatre company to be funded by Oprah Winfrey. How’s that for a bombshell? Lilyan had worked for Oprah at the beginning of her career. At the time of which I write, her talk show had only been in syndication for a couple of years, and her recent performance in The Color Purple still formed a Lion’s Share of what she was known for. Nothing came of this project for all the obvious reasons you can think of, the first being that even then there were numerous African American theatre companies of national stature. But more importantly, Wilder had no more business spearheading such a thing than Spielberg had directing The Color Purple. And I was absolutely the wrong person for the task I was assigned, not just because of my lack of melanin, but also because I was interested in radical avant-garde theatre and vaudeville, not the kind of institutional not-for-profit she was proposing. I was particularly disinterested in the kind of theatrical realism that Stanislavski and the Method represented. The obsession everyone seems to have for mimicking real life onstage has always eluded me. Anyway, Lilyan gave me the assignment of reading and digesting Clurman’s 1961 book The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and The Thirties (1961) and I did so. I read it many times.

In 1994, this behemoth was published. The Collected Works of Harold Clurman was edited by Applause Books founder Glenn Young and Marjorie Loggia (ex-wife of Robert Loggia), and my friend and frequent collaborator Ian W. Hill was part of the research team. It’s an authoritative compendium of Clurman’s essays, reviews and correspondence. I dove in, I believe, sometime in the late ’90s.

The other two books of which I write were reviewed extensively here on Travalanche: Wendy Smith’s 1990 Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America 1931-1940 and Isaac Butler’s The Method. Of Clurman’s half dozen or so other books, I have certainly read at least sections of On Directing (1972) and am very much interested in reading his 1977 book on Ibsen.

I lead with this bibliography because Clurman was very much a personality, one that shines through even on the page. Nowadays you can catch video of him that confirms the picture one had in ones head when only books were readily available. He was especially known for his harangues and Jeremiads, wherein he would rant about what is wrong with American theatre and what it needs. I freely confess to you that these animated spiels drive me right straight up the wall. They are impassioned but extraordinarily vague and content free. They are no different from the ravings of a backwoods preacher. Clurman, it happens, was not a CLEARman. But his passion apparently carried people breathlessly along, as will happen in any cult movement. The effect was enhanced by his appearance. Physically, he was tall and looked kind of like Stanislavski himself. His face and voice have always reminded me something of the actor Jose Ferrer. And he went around accoutred in the traditional impresario’s outfit of fedora, cape, and walking stick. He was imposing. He acted the part.

The saving grace of Clurman’s legacy lay not in the talking but the doing. He directed the original productions of some of America’s greatest plays, he molded great playwrights and actors, he penned influential reviews (more effective than his essays and speeches because they’re pegged to specific topics). Early exposure to the Moscow Art Theatre and apprenticeship under Jacques Copeau fueled his hatred of theatrical convention for its own sake. He wanted to see genuine human behavior onstage. Unlike many of the working class people with whom he wound up collaborating, Clurman’s background was privileged. He attended Columbia and the Sorbonne, and was literally roomies in Paris with Aaron Copland. His early professional years in New York were spent at the Theatre Guild (starting just about a century ago), where he worked as a play reader, stage manager, and bit player. On the side, he studied with Stanislavski acolyte Richard Boleslawski.

We’ll treat of Clurman’s career in broad strokes. He formed the Group Theatre in 1931 with Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford (both of whom were later associated with the Actor’s Studio). The Group foundered after about a decade, but Clurman continued directing on Broadway for decades, his stature growing all the while. From 1943 to 1960 he was married to great actress and teacher Stella Adler. And he was drama critic for The New Republic (1948–1952) and The Nation (1953–1980).

Clurman was instrumental in the success of playwright Clifford Odets, directing the original productions of Awake and Sing (1934), Paradise Lost (1935), Golden Boy (1937) and Rocket to the Moon (1938). He also directed the film of Odets’ screenplay Deadline at Dawn (1945), but did not take to the medium with the same alacrity as his Group theatre cohort Elia Kazan had. He returned to Broadway in 1946 to direct Maxwell Anderson’sTruckline Cafe with early career Marlon Brando and Karl Malden. He also directed the 1950 stage adaptation of Carson McCuller’s Member of the Wedding, O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms (1952) and A Touch of the Poet (1958), and the original productions of William Inge’sBus Stop (1955), Tennessee Williams’Orpheus Descending (1957), and Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy (1964). He also directed the original production of A Shot in the Dark (1961), later adapted by Blake Edwards into a Pink Panther movie. I wonder what Clurman thought of THAT!

For many years, New York’s Theatre Row had a Harold Clurman (pictured above), but it was renamed some years ago. However, there are numerous extant companies that have named themselves in his honor, including the Harold Clurman Lab Theater, and…the Harold Clurman Lab Theatre. These seem to be two different companies, at least they have two different web sites. I’ll let them duke it out for your attention. The Clurmanian style was combative, after all.