Prior to the 1960s, there were virtually no outlets for the wealth of black theatrical talent in America. Playwrights writing realistically about the black experience could not get their work produced, and even the most successful performers, such as Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen, were confined to playing roles as servants. It was disenfranchised artists such as these who set out to create a theater concentrating primarily on themes of black life. In 1965, Playwright Douglas Turner Ward, actor Robert Hooks, and theater manager Gerald Krone came together to make these dreams a reality with the Negro Ensemble Company. The main catalyst for this project was the 1959 production of “A Raisin in the Sun.”

Written by Lorraine Hansberry, of “A Raisin in the Sun” was a gritty, realistic view of black family life. The long-running play gave many black theater people the opportunity to meet and work together. Robert Hooks and Douglas Turner Ward were castmates in the road company. Together they dreamed of starting a theater company run by and for black people. While acting in Leroi Jones’ play “The Dutchman”, Hooks began spending nights teaching to local black youth. In a public performance primarily for parents and neighbors, the kids put on a one-act play by Ward. A newspaper critic who had attended the performance recommended that Ward’s plays be produced commercially.

While Hooks raised money, Ward wrote plays. The pair recruited a theater manager, Gerald Krone, and the three men produced an evening of black-oriented, satiric one act plays. One of these short plays, “Day of Absence”, was a reverse minstrel show, with black actors in whiteface performing the roles of whites in a small Southern town on a day when all the blacks have mysteriously disappeared. The plays, performed at the St. Marks Play House in Greenwich Village, were a major success. They ran for 504 performances and won Ward an Obie Award for acting and a Drama Desk Award for writing. Impressed with his work, the NEW YORK TIMES invited Ward to write an article on the condition of black artists in American theater.

Ward’s piece in the Times became a manifesto for the establishment of a resident black theater company. With money from the Ford Foundation and a home at the St. Marks Playhouse, the Negro Ensemble Company formed officially in 1967. Though the new company succeeded in attracting audiences from all walks of life, they ran into a number of political and economic difficulties. In London a performance of the NEC’s first production, “Song of the Lucitanian Bogey” (1967) was heckled by-right wing protesters who resented its anti-colonial message. Back home in America, the group had to deal with criticism from members of the black community over their continued association with white administrators, playwrights, and funders.

Among the many plays produced by the Negro Ensemble Company were such greats as Peter Weiss’ “Song of the Lucitanian Bogey”, Lonnie Elder’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men” (1969) and Charles Fuller’s “Zooman and the Sign” (1980). These plays dealt with complex and often ignored aspects of the black experience. Creating emotionally resonant characters with depth and variety, the NEC paved the way for black Americans to present a voice that had been aggressively stifled for three hundred years. This revolution in production and writing also meant an equally important advance for black actors. With the NEC, many black actors found their first opportunity to play characters with depth and meaning.

Though critically acclaimed and presenting some of the most important theatrical work of its time, the NEC ran into a number of economic troubles. With production costs rising and an original grant from the Ford Foundation gone, the group no longer had enough money for many of its projects. Even sellout audiences in the St. Marks Theater could not generate enough revenue to meet the budget. In the 1972-73 season the resident company was disbanded, staff was cut back, training programs canceled, and salaries deferred. The decision was made to produce only one new play a year.

Fortunately, the first play chosen was “The River Niger”, by Joe Walker. “The River Niger” was a moving play about the struggles of a black family from Harlem in the ’70s. It was the first NEC production to move to Broadway, where it stayed for nine months. It won the Tony Award for Best Play, and embarked on an extensive national tour. The success of “The River Niger” helped to insure the continued work of the NEC and of its many members over the next ten years. In 1981, the NEC had what was probably its most successful production with “A Soldier’s Play”, by Charles Fuller. “A Soldier’s Play” is a gripping story of the murder of a black soldier on a Southern Army base, and the subsequent investigation by a black army captain. It was a tremendously popular play and won both the Critics Circle Best Play Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It was later made into a movie, “A Soldier’s Story”, which was nominated for three Academy Awards.

Since its founding in 1967, the NEC has produced more than two hundred new plays and provided a theatrical home for more than four thousand cast and crew members. Among its ranks have been some of the best black actors in television and film, including Louis Gossett Jr., Sherman Hemsley, and Phylicia Rashad. The NEC is respected worldwide for its commitment to excellence, and has won dozens of honors and awards. While these accolades point to the larger success of the NEC, it has created something far greater. It has been a constant source and sustenance for black actors, directors, and writers as they have worked to break down walls of racial prejudice.

“All around me the painters and composers groped for ways to express contemporary society in their work. Where, I wondered, was this parallel activity in theater?”

Harold Clurman has been called the most influential figure in the history of the American theater. Between 1935 and 1980, he directed over forty plays, including Jean Giraudoux’s TIGER AT THE GATES, Eugene O’Neill’s TOUCH OF THE POET, and Arthur Miller’s INCIDENT AT VICHY. He authored seven books, and from 1953 until his death in 1980 he was a drama critic for THE NATION. As the passionate and talented leader of the Group Theatre, Clurman invigorated American theater with his political and artistic idealism.

Born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1901, Harold Clurman had his first exposure to theater at the age of six, when his parents took him to see the great Yiddish actor Jacob Adler. Although the young boy knew no Yiddish, he later said of this first play, “…it was a transforming experience. I immediately had a passionate inclination toward the theater.” The vitality of the Yiddish Theater and the community of actors who made it up would long influence Clurman. After leaving home, he attended Columbia and later the University of Paris, where he wrote his thesis on the history of French drama from 1890 to 1914. It was then that Clurman first began to formulate his vision of a new American theater.

On his return to New York the following year, Clurman began a career that would last over half a century. Without any formal training, he made his stage debut as an extra at the Greenwich Village Theater. While acting he also worked as a play reader and involved himself in every aspect of theater. He said, “I was interested in what the theater was going to say…The theater must say something. It must relate to society. It must relate to the world we live in.” He believed that the new American theater would not simply be a place of entertainment, but an opportunity for artists to express their political and spiritual visions.

The dramatic community had reached a point of desperation after the stock market crash of 1929, with the number of new productions in decline and theaters closing by the dozens. Clurman suggested a theater with a permanent acting company. After seeing the Moscow Arts Theater, Clurman knew that if theater was going to succeed it must make radical changes in the acting process. Using Constantin Stanislavsky’s ensemble approach, the actors of the Moscow Arts Theater had presented a play more emotional and realistic than anything that had been on Broadway. Beginning in late 1930, Clurman gave weekly lectures on the benefits of a permanent acting company. He believed that once actors knew and trusted each other they could truly work together to create great theater. This new theater promised to exchange the opportunity of stardom and wealth for a lasting and meaningful community.

By 1931, together with Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford, Clurman had gathered 28 others to form the Group Theatre. Among the young troupe’s members were such greats as Stella Adler, Morris Carnovsky, Phoebe Brand, Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, and Sanford Meisner. The success of the Group Theatre prompted many other companies to embrace the ideas of Stanislavsky. The most successful of the Group Theatre’s plays were those written by Clifford Odets, such as AWAKE AND SING!, GOLDEN BOY, and WAITING FOR LEFTY. Though the Group Theatre lasted only ten years, it produced twenty plays and brought an excitement to the American stage that still remains.

After the closing of the Group Theatre, Clurman brought his vision to Broadway, where he was instrumental in teaching some of the most skilled and successful actors of the time. He worked to insure the theater’s growth by elevating its productions to the level of any other of the great arts. Working with writers such as Eugene O’Neill, Carson McCullers, and Arthur Miller, he created theater that was at once serious and popular, and uniquely American. In recognition of his great influence and commitment to the arts, he was awarded the rare honor of having a Broadway theater named after him. Today, twenty years after his death, Harold Clurman is considered one of the most respected and influential members of the American theater.

Long regarded as “the First Lady of American Theater,” Helen Hayes earned international esteem and affection during a career that spanned more than eighty years on stage and in films, radio, and television. As a screen actor she won two Oscars, as a stage actor she won a prestigious Drama League of New York award, and in 1988 President Ronald Reagan presented her with the National Medal of Arts. Deeply in love with her profession, Hayes enjoyed playing a variety of roles, from Amanda Wingfield in Tennesse Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” (1948) to a little old lady stowaway in AIRPORT (1970). Both the charm of her comic roles and the depth of her tragic ones made Hayes one of the most respected and beloved American actors.

Born in 1900 in Washington, D.C., Helen Hayes Brown spent her childhood working in the theater at her mother’s urging. She made her Broadway debut at nine in “Old Dutch”, inspiring one critic to call her “the greatest leading lady of her size we have ever seen.” Her roles grew as she did, culminating with leading parts in “Dear Brutus” (1918) and “Bab” (1920). “I was the youngest star the New York stage ever had,” said Hayes, reflecting on the triumphs and pressures, “and it darn near wrecked me.” Eager for a change from these “flapper” roles, Hayes starred in a 1928 production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Ceasar” and “Cleopatra”. Her reviews were mixed, but for one theatergoer, the playwright Charles MacArthur, Hayes was an unqualified success. They married later that year while Hayes triumphed in “Coquett “and MacArthur reigned with his play “The Front Page”. Their first child, Mary, was born a year and a half later and the couple subsequently adopted a son, James (who would follow in his mother’s footsteps, becoming a well-known actor as Danny “Danno” Williams on the television show HAWAII FIVE-O).

Hayes accompanied her husband to Hollywood in 1930 when he became a screenwriter for MGM. There she launched her film career with THE SIN OF MADELON CLAUDET (1931), for which she won an Oscar for best actress. Hayes went on to star in such major pictures as A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1932), ARROWSMITH (1931), and ANASTASIA (1956), and play opposite such screen greats as Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, James Stewert, and Fred Astaire. She felt, however, that the stage was really her home, explaining, “There is no adventure in the screen performance. It’s not yours. The director is going to take it in hand. The cutter is going to cut it.” Dividing her time between Hollywood and Broadway in the 1930s, Hayes scored theatrical triumphs in “Mary of Scotland” and “Victoria Regina”. “Victoria Regina”, probably her most famous role, ran for 969 performances. It required Hayes to play the role of Queen Victoria, effecting a remarkable sixty-year transition from hesitant young bride to wheelchair-bound empress — displaying both her skill and commitment to craft.

Throughout the 1940s, Hayes continued to tour the United States with a number of different shows, but in 1949 tragedy struck. Her young daughter, a nineteen-year-old aspiring actress, was struck with polio and died. Overwhelmed with grief, Hayes’s husband began drinking heavily and died soon after, in 1956. During the late 1950s and 1960s Hayes turned to acting for solace, and began to perform in both feature and cameo roles on television. In 1965 she published her autobiography, A GIFT OF JOY, and in 1971 won her second Oscar for her supporting comic role in AIRPORT (1970). Only a year later, Hayes returned to the stage for the final time as Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”. For the next twenty years, Hayes continued to make infrequent appearances on television and film.

In 1993, at the age of ninety-two, Helen Hayes died in her Nyack, New York home. Her career had brought her around the world and into the hearts of generations of Americans. She received the highest accolade of the theatrical community when Broadway’s Fulton Theatre was renamed the Helen Hayes Theater in her honor. By the time of her death, she was one of only a handful of actors who had achieved such a high level of public renown and respect from her peers. Downplaying decades of achievement and praise, Hayes offered a modest summation of her career, saying, “I just always wanted to do the very best I could.”

“Take it from a director: if you get an actor that Sandy Meisner has trained, you’ve been blessed.” – Elia Kazan

A leading acting teacher who trained some of the most famous performers of the stage and screen, Sanford Meisner was a founding member of the Group Theatre. The Group Theatre, a cooperative theater ensemble, became a leading force in the theater world of the 30s. Meisner performed in many of the group’s most memorable productions, including The House of Connelly, Men in White, Awake and Sing, Paradise Lost and Golden Boy. While still a member of the group, Meisner became the head of the acting department of New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater. After the Group Theatre dissolved in 1941 Meisner devoted himself to teaching, appearing only occasionally on Broadway and in films (most notably, in Clifford Odets’ 1959 The Story on Page One).

Over the course of forty-eight years at the Neighborhood Playhouse, Meisner honed his skills as an acting instructor. Growing out of the days with the Group Theatre and the Russian theater theorist Constantin Stanislavsky, Meisner created a series of exercises for actors. For Meisner, acting was about reproducing honest emotional human reactions. He felt the actor’s job was simply to prepare for an experiment that would take place on stage. The best acting, he believed, was made up of spontaneous responses to the actor’s immediate surroundings. Meisner explained that his approach was designed “to eliminate all intellectuality from the actor’s instrument and to make him a spontaneous responder to where he is, what is happening to him, what is being done to him.”

The primary tool Meisner employed in preparing his students was spontaneous repetition. Among his many exercises was one in which two actors looked directly at each other and one would described a feature of the other. After this, the two actors would simply say the phrase back and forth. Because the phrases (such as, “You have soft eyes”) came from a physical reality apparent to the actors, the statement retained meaning no matter how often they were repeated. Another example of Meisner’s method has two actors enter a room playing specific roles without specific lines. They begin to speak and the plot is formed out of nothing but the surroundings. The actor’s concern is to remain in character. Techniques such as these allow actors to move beyond the printed script and address the underlying emotional or philosophical themes of a play.

Meisner’s role within the theater community remained important throughout his long career. Among his more famous students were actors Robert Duvall, Grace Kelly, Diane Keaton, Joanne Woodward, Lee Grant, and Peter Falk. Gregory Peck said of Meisner, “What he wanted from you was truthful acting…He was able to communicate, and the proof of that is the number of people that have come out of [the Neighborhood Playhouse] over a forty-year period who’ve gone on to become people who set standards of acting.” Though troubled with a number of physical problems, including losing his larynx, Meisner continued to be an active part of the theater community for his entire life. During his final years, he split his time between the Caribbean island Bequia and New York. He died at age 91, leaving behind a legacy of commitment and enthusiasm rarely seen in any art.

From 1905, at the age of four, until her death eighty-seven years later, Stella Adler dedicated herself to understanding the theater. The child of actors Sarah and Jacob Adler, Stella began her career in the Yiddish theater. At the age of eighteen, she went to London, where she worked for a year before returning to New York. She spent the next ten years travelling throughout the United States, Europe and South America, performing in vaudeville and the Yiddish theater. She received a great deal of acclaim among Yiddish-speaking audiences as the leading lady of Maurice Schwartz, yet she longed for wider recognition and the opportunity to play more varied roles.

In 1931, she met her second husband Harold Clurman, one of the co-founders of the Group Theater. The Group Theater was a cooperative ensemble dedicated to reinvigorating the theater with plays about important contemporary topics. The Group also believed in a theater that would probe the depths of the soul. Both the politics and the cooperative energy of the company appealed to her and she joined in 1931. Leaving briefly to study with Constantin Stanislavsky, who instructed a mode of acting precursor to “method acting,” in 1934, she returned to the group with a new idea of what American theater could be. While with the Group, she did some of her best work including her role as Bessie Berger in “Awake and Sing”. Although the Group provided her with some support, she never felt comfortable there, and in 1937 left for Hollywood. After six years and a number of roles in movies such as “Love on Toast” (1937) and “The Shadow of the Thin Man” (1941), she returned to Broadway to act and direct.

By the mid-40’s Adler was teaching at the New School for Social Research and had found the role that was to make her a revered name among actors everywhere. In 1949, she started a school for acting that would last five decades and touch every part of American Theater. Combining what she had learned from the Yiddish theater, Broadway, Hollywood, and Stanislavsky, she opened the Stella Adler Theater Studio (later renamed the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting). Among those to study at the conservatory were Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, and Candice Bergen. Her belief in the supreme seriousness of her art kept many well-known members of the theater coming back for her intelligent and passionate advice.

It was Adler’s sense that “the theater exists 99% in the imagination” that informed her instruction. She proposed that one of the actor’s primary concerns must be with the emotional origins of the script. A student’s main responsibility was to search between the lines of the script for the important unsaid messages. This, she knew, took a combination of emotional availability and imagination. For her students she was both the toughest critic and the most profound inspiration, saying, “You act with your soul. That’s why you all want to be actors, because your souls are not used up by life.” To this day, nearly ten years after her death, Adler is still viewed as one of the foremost influences on contemporary acting.