Note on Sources

Note on Sources elen Chinoy made the decision early in her writing of the Group’s story to minimize scholarly apparatus. Her objective was to follow a scheme H“that avoid[s] footnotes in the text.” Her intention was to have “notes for each chapter take the form of a running commentary which picks up topics and quotes.” She then would expect the reader to locate specific sources for all references in the bibliography. Unfortunately, she only left behind one example of this strategy, while from time to time including in her narrative allusions or direct references to sources. Her one full example actually added several pages to the one sample chapter. The length of her manuscript precluded the editors from following this prescription and adding more words to the total or trying to retrace all of Chinoy’s more-than-three-decade research efforts in order to locate all her sources. Still, the editors felt that readers of Chinoy’s version of the Group Theatre’s history needed some suggestion of sources used and the inclusion of signpost references were most helpful in having some grasp of Chinoy’s extensive research of both published and archival sources. Our decision is a compromise of Chinoy’s wishes. We’ve tried not to jeopardize or disrupt her narrative, and we’ve operated on our shared assumption that Helen Chinoy was the major scholarly authority on the Group; over decades, she had assimilated a vast amount of knowledge on all aspects of the Group (as her archival notes confirm). Thus we urge the reader to trust Chinoy’s own unique role as a principal authority on this subject—and American theater in general. We have fact-checked when we felt this was needed and have confirmed (or corrected), when possible, quotations from participants in the Group’s history. Chinoy did not leave behind a clear sense of sources used for each chapter, therefore our major chore as editors, other than cutting, or otherwise shortening, each chapter in order to adhere to contractual require- ments, has been to cite, briefly, selective sources as deemed possible (“redoing” Helen’s extensive research was not our objective). Whenever possible we have gone to published and accessible sources, with limited citation of unpublished, archival sources. We are aware that not all significant quotes have sources cited. We welcome corrections and/or additions so that these can be inserted in sub- sequent editions. In the text the following abbreviations are frequently used: FY (Clurman, The Fervent Years); S&A (Lewis, Slings and Arrows); TisR (Odets, The Time Is Ripe); NYT (The New York Times); NYPL [New York Public Library (for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center)]. The bibliography that follows reflects in almost all instances sources we know were used by Helen Chinoy. 264 Note on Sources In regard to the above, we include here some written comments left by Helen, which help to focus the reader on what she felt most important as sources of authority. She states: The essential document of the Group Theatre is Harold Clurman’s The Fervent Years, originally published in 1945 by Alfred Knopf. The basic information about the people, the chronology, and the history of the theatre comes from this invaluable theatrical and cultural history. Central as Clurman’s book is to any study, it is one man’s view of what was a group endeavor. In my research, I have undertaken to find out what the experience meant in the lives of the other members. Reunion: A Self-Portrait of the Group Theatre, a special issue of the Educational Theatre Journal, 1976 [now out of print], is a collection of interviews I have published from my researches. As the major consultant for the 1989 “American Masters” on The Group Theatre on PBS, Chinoy was also centrally involved with interviews, most undertaken by actress/narrator Joanne Woodward, with many of the original members and associ- ates of the Group, and drew on these in her writing. In Chinoy’s version of the Group’s history and especially in allowing participants in this endeavor to speak for themselves, some of the quotations attributed to Clurman come from The Fervent Years . quotations from other participants and many from Clurman are in Reunion or come from unpublished interviews and sources [selectively noted in the text]. The main papers of the Group Theatre (including its scrapbooks) are in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, Library of the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, New York. The Manuscript Collection at Columbia University Library, New York, has important papers of Clurman and the Columbia Oral History Project Collection has interviews with several Group members. Since completing her research, the Library of Congress has acquired relevant papers of Lee Strasberg (still in the possession of Anna Strasberg during the years of Chinoy’s research) and the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas, Austin, has recently added papers of Stella Adler and Harold Clurman to its collection, some seen by Chinoy while still possessed by Adler and Clurman. In our compiled bibliography, which focuses primarily on published sources used most extensively by Chinoy (and indicated by an asterisk preceding the refer- ence), we include Wendy Smith’s Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940 (1990), an extensive history not used directly by Chinoy but clearly read by her and consulted often to confirm facts, chronology, and the like (her copy of the book with extensive notes survives). But it should be underscored that Chinoy’s objective in her history is quite different from that of Smith, who undeni- ably sought to be as complete as possible, approaching the Group’s history as a well- versed outsider. Chinoy, who was born in 1922, lived through the Depression years and admits, as she does in the introduction, that in her late teens she had what some considered radical ideas, especially in her perception of the American theater of the day. Though too young to know the Group intimately, she was aware of it, grew up in nearby Newark, and earned degrees at New York University and Columbia, thus experiencing intimately the theater of the 1930s and 1940s in New York City. Note on Sources 265 Chinoy’s aim was to tell the Group’s story as personally and authoritatively as she could, drawing on the words of the participants, providing the reader the context for the decade of the Group’s life, offering glimpses of the excitement in the theater of the Group, and finally providing the complex history in broad strokes, warts and all, rather than in a detailed blow-by-blow account, useful though that is. Chinoy’s extensive notes, relevant books, and drafts of most chapters can be consulted in her files in the Smith College Archives, Northampton, Massachusetts. Select Bibliography n asterisk (*) indicates sources used most extensively by Chinoy; these are from her personal library and include extensive notes inserted plus margina- A lia. A few titles published since Chinoy’s illness in the mid-1990s are cited here, helpful to the editors in various ways. Aaron, Daniel, and Robert Bendiner. The Strenuous Decade: A Social and Intellectual Record of the Nineteen-Thirties. NY: Anchor Books, 1970. *Adams, Cindy. Lee Strasberg: The Imperfect Genius of the Actors Studio. NY: Doubleday, 1980. Adler, Stella. The Art of Acting. NY: Applause Books, 2000. ———. A Technique of Acting. NY: Bantam Books, 1988. Allen, Frederick Lewis. The Big Change: America Transforms Itself 1900–1950. NY: Harper & Row, 1952. ———. Since Yesterday: 1929–1939. NY: Harper & Row, 1940. “The American Actor.” Yale/Theatre. Vol. 9, nos 2&3, spring 1977. Includes essays/interviews with Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Lee Strasberg, et al. Ardrey, Robert. Plays of Three Decades. NY: Collins, 1968. Ashby, Clifford Charles. “Realistic Acting and the Advent of the Group in America: 1889–1922.” PhD diss., Stanford University, 1963. Barranger, Milly S. A Gambler’s Instinct: The Story of Broadway Producer Cheryl Crawford. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. Baxandall, Lee. Radical Perspective in the Arts. Harmondworth: Penguin Books, 1972. Benedetti, Jean. Stanislavski. London: Methuen & Co., 1988. Bentley, Eric. The Theatre of Commitment. NY: Atheneum, 1967. ———. Thirty Years of Treason. NY: Viking Press, 1978. Bentley, Joanne. Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the American Theatre. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Berkson, Michael A. “Morris Carnovsky: Actor and Theatre.” PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1975. Boleslavsky, Richard. Acting: The First Six Lessons. NY: Theatre Arts Books, 1933. Boris Aronson: From His Theatre Work. Exhibition Catalogue. NY: NYPL at Lincoln Center, 1981. *Brenman-Gibson, Margaret. Clifford Odets: American Playwright: The Years from 1906 to 1940. NY: Atheneum, 1981. Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. NY: Prentice-Hall, 1952. ———. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1941. Carnovsky, Morris. The Actor’s Eye. NY: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984 ———. Theatre Arts Magazine (June–July 1948). *Carrington, Hardy Michael. “The Theatre Art of Richard Boleslavsky.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1971. Chinoy, Helen Krich. “The Impact of the Stage Director on American Plays, Playwrights, and Theatres: 1860–1930.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1963. 268 Select Bibliography *Chinoy, Helen Krich, ed. “The Chosen Ones: The Founding of the Group Theatre.” In Theatrical Touring and Founding in North America. Edited by L. W. Conolly. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982. 135–52. ———. “The Poetics of Politics: Some Notes on Style and Craft in the Theatre of the Thirties.” The Theatre Journal, vol. 35, no. 4 (December 1983): 475–98. ———. Reunion: A Self-Portrait of the Group Theatre. Reprinted from the Educational Theatre Journal, vol. 28, no. 4 (December 1976): 443–552. Chinoy, Helen Krich, and Linda Walsh Jenkins.

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