Almost overnight, “agitprop” (agitation and propaganda) groups had blossomed in hundreds of cities, towns, and rural communities, each “advancing with true Marxist fervor toward the establishment of a Theater of the Left,” as Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times in April 1935. Though the movement was national (“a consequence partly of the voiceless unrest among the masses of employed and unemployed workers, victims of economic depression, and partly the fermented disgust of revolutionary theatrical artists with the narrowing potentialities of the commercial theatre,” in Crowther’s words), New York led by number and example.
The left-wing theater boom had begun in the late 1920s, when prominent New York stage organizations such as the New Playwrights Theatre, the Theatre Union, and the Group Theatre began to tack leftward. The best-known groups were professional, no matter how little they paid themselves, but by 1935 dozens of small amateur agitprop troupes flourished in the city. Often fly-by-night groups employing blue-collar workers, they incorporated dancers, musicians, magic acts, puppeteers, and/or children’s theater units. Some performed in German or Yiddish.
The most famous of the troupes was the Group Theatre, which had been around since 1931. It was “probably the single greatest group of theater intellectuals who ever existed together as a cohesive unit,” in the words of Martin Ritt, a young actor on the fringes of the movement who would later become a Hollywood director. The Group didn’t start out as an ideological vehicle, but its embrace of left-wing drama intensified with the Depression.
Just before Ray’s return to New York, in January 1935, the Group had set a high bar of “originality and fire,” in cofounder Harold Clurman’s words, with its production of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, a one-act agitprop play that declared revolution on old-fashioned drama. Odets’s play offered a portrait of a group of taxi drivers debating whether or not to strike as they await their leader, Lefty, who never appears. In the cast was a young aspiring actor named Elia Kazan, who was destined to become a friend to “Nik Ray” and arguably his most important mentor.
Although the names and faces varied, the Theatre of Action headquarters housed only about a dozen comrades at any given time. Among them were several actors who stuck mainly to theater and New York in their careers and a handful who would carve bigger names for themselves. Among these were Earl Robinson, a lanky songwriter from Seattle whose labor union standard “Joe Hill” and “Ballad for Americans” cantata would enter the American songbook, and Norman Lloyd, a classically trained actor who joined the collective after Ray, in 1936, and whose career would intertwine with those of Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, and Alfred Hitchcock.
One of the female converts to the cause was Jean Evans. Ray and his girlfriend were ready to resume their romance. Both were anxious to leave behind painful upbringings. Both were prone to introspection and depression, though Evans invariably offered a pleasant face to the world. The two would offer deep consolation to each other in the years ahead.
Often, Ray and Evans shared a room piled with people. Like Taliesin, the Theatre of Action was a communal tribe, sharing rent and board, cooking and chores, daily group study, discussion, rehearsal, and performance. Evans was unusual among the women for her subtle beauty, but also because she was one of the designated writers who researched and composed topical sketches for the group to perform. Women were in a minority in the collective, and most were actresses. The actresses especially tended to be “not beautiful,” according to Norman Lloyd. “It was more realistic, the directors of social theatre felt, to have people who might be right out of the subway; it was their rebellion against the idea of a beautiful ingénue, like Dorothy McGuire or Jane Wyatt.”
To be fair, the men were generally subway types too: “about five feet six inches, thin, wiry, with lightning reflexes—Jewish, street-smart, many of them brought up by left-wing parents,” recalled Elia Kazan, who moonlighted with the Theatre of Action during his time at the Group Theatre.
All the more reason “Nik Ray” stood out. He wasn’t from Brooklyn; nor was he Jewish or the product of left-wing parents. To fellow member Will Lee, Ray was more “like a fresh wind blowing” from the Midwest. He was tall and strong, with wide shoulders, a handsome, carved face, and a smile or grin much of the time—a quiet, deferential, mild-mannered lumberjack of a man.
Ray had taken to the communal lifestyle at Taliesin, and at the Theatre of Action he dove right in. “Sometimes we’d get testy over the chores,” Robinson recalled, but Ray never turned up his nose at kitchen duty or housekeeping. The “meals” they prepared included a steady diet of “apples, peanut butter, stale bread, cabbages,” according to Kazan, but Ray didn’t complain. The collective prided itself on a food budget of a few dollars per day, though one summer they even hired a left-winger who knew how to bake and cook.
The Theatre of Action also followed a Taliesin-like “orthodox” timetable. Each day began strictly at nine A.M., with a collective stretching session at a leased loft in a nearby building. A number of dancers from Martha Graham’s company—Anna Sokolow, Doris Dudley, sometimes Graham herself—led movement and exercise classes. At eleven A.M., voice specialists arrived for diction and accent training. For lunch the group often pooled their change and invested in a subway ride to a city museum.
If Taliesin was Ray’s true college, the Theatre of Action was his graduate program. Everything the members did was for the betterment of art, society, and themselves. Besides discipline and stamina, keen intelligence was one thing they all had in common. The collective was another fellowship abrim with stimulating ideas, with conversation and debate about politics, values, and beliefs all day and into the night.
Ironically, Ray’s abortive stint with Frank Lloyd Wright boosted his cachet among his fellow actors. In the group discussions, some saw him as a heartland intellectual who could hold his own with the most sophisticated New Yorkers. But others found him airy, hesitant, or tongue-tied, intimidated by the subway types. There was always that contradiction in Ray’s personality: at times talkative and coherent, even eloquent, he sometimes struggled to find the right words, as though he were muttering to himself rather than debating with others.
“He was always interesting, strange, very much like Joe Losey,” recalled Norman Lloyd, who worked with both Ray and Losey in New York in the 1930s. “Strange . . . and I would suppose inarticulate. Couldn’t quite understand what he was saying all the time. And we used to kid about that, you know, not so much to Nick because we didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but you’d go over and say to someone, ‘What the hell was he talking about?’ ”
After lunch, at one thirty P.M., the group plunged into eurhythmics, followed by the main acting and improvisation classes, with members of the Group Theatre dropping by to expound on modern Soviet stage methods and techniques. This was Ray’s first glimpse of the intense, charismatic Kazan, whom he saw instantly as a blood brother. Born in 1909, Kazan was only a few years older than Ray, but he could have been the wiser older brother Ray never had.
The Group Theatre members were celebrities compared to the nobodies of the Theatre of Action. (Both groups lived collectively, Kazan recalled, but the Theatre of Action had “crummier” digs; in comparison, the Group Theatre’s “apartment wasn’t bad.”) But Kazan himself occupied the lowest niche of the Group. Known by the “faceless nickname” of “Gadget,” or “Gadge,” for his mastery of backstage gadgets, he got few chances to act in an ensemble with so many towering performers. When Kazan rose from the audience to denounce his rat-fink brother in Waiting for Lefty, theatergoers roared with applause without recognizing the obscure player; they mistook Kazan for the character he was playing, a real man off the streets stepping out of the crowd.
Kazan was almost as faceless as the lowly Theatre of Action, and seeking wider recognition is what brought him to their doorstep. He was on fire with energy and ambition, “really burning” to make his mark, in the words of Norman Lloyd. Kazan had even started wearing the leather j
acket and worker’s cap of his Waiting for Lefty character, so that people would recognize him on the street. A homely peacock, short, with a long thin beak and frizzy black hair, Kazan posed as the ultimate subway type. Some people didn’t warm to him (“I never liked him much,” Losey said insistently years later), but most of the Theatre of Action collective did.
“They became my personal acting company,” Kazan later boasted, “and I became, for a time, their hero. In improvisation, they’d do anything I asked.” The Theatre of Action took risks, Kazan said, even beyond what the Group was willing to try. “They did something more ‘professional’ actors would not: go to the limit in improvisation. Scenes of anger had to be stopped short of bodily harm, love scenes cut off before they reached a final intimacy.”
At that time Kazan was preaching from the Group’s first publication, a translated history of Moscow’s First Studio focusing in part on the acting theories of Leopold Sulerzhitsky.* An apostle of “the theater of true feelings,” Sulerzhitsky was a luminary of the Moscow Art Theater, and a contemporary influence on Konstantin Stanislavski, the father of what became known as Method acting. Sulerzhitsky was a marker on the road to the Method; among his prize students was Yevgeny Vakhtangov, who succeeded Sulerzhitsky at the First Studio after the latter’s death.
Sulerzhitsky advised actors to deep-think their parts, finding clues to their characters within themselves. Under Kazan’s influence, Sulerzhitsky’s principles became a salient feature of Nicholas Ray’s approach to acting and directing. Sulerzhitsky’s theater of true feelings, and the Soviet emphasis on realism, complemented Thornton Wilder’s quest for the “true expression of life” and Frank Lloyd Wright’s exaltation of organic elements in the arts. Ray fell in love with the theories tripping from Kazan’s tongue, absorbing all their abstruse nuances like mother’s milk.
Vsevolod Meyerhold, a Russian theater director who sought to tear down barriers between performers and audience—a philosophy Ray first espoused at Taliesin—was another exemplar touted by Kazan. Meyerhold’s reliance on symbolism and décor, along with Vakhtangov’s stylized, highly emotional “fantastic realism,” resonated with Ray.
The director often said he never forgot Vakhtangov’s pioneering essay “The Agitation from the Essence,” which served as his “principal guideline” when directing actors (though he conceded that the same ideas were “not so fruitful” when it came to his “personal relationships”). In “The Agitation from the Essence,” Vakhtangov argued that an actor’s feelings “must not be ready-made beforehand on the shelf of his soul”; instead they should “arise spontaneously on the stage, depending upon the situations in which the actor finds himself.” The actor should transpose the psychology of the character to his own sphere, rather than trying to embody the character purely through imagination, profound empathy, or affective memory. “It is necessary to live your own temperament on the stage,” Vakhtangov wrote, “and not the supposed temperament of the character.” In other words, an actor must find something in common with his character. The actor’s—or director’s—job was to agitate, or inspire, this essence.
Of course the beauty of Kazan—even then but certainly later in his extraordinary stage and film career—was that he learned every trick in the book and never hesitated to discard one theory for another. “Whatever works, works,” he proclaimed; later, when he drifted from realism into emotionalism, he would advise his actors to “turn trauma into drama”—in other words, to channel their personal traumatic backgrounds into a characterization in order to heighten the emotionalism of a performance.
“Whatever works, works” and “Turn trauma into drama”: words of wisdom from brother Kazan that rang loud and clear to Ray. He added it all to his storehouse.
When the afternoons of practice and improvisation ended, Kazan usually flew back to his cozier Group Theatre nest. The “shock troupe,” meanwhile, plunged into its public performances, with Ray relegated to much the same journeyman status as Kazan in the Group Theatre. Never a star or leader in the collective, he tended to play the smallest parts—though Earl Robinson recalled that he was “a powerhouse on wheels” when throwing himself into a scene. Most viewed him as a valued, enthusiastic role-player who contributed in numerous ways, from singing bass on a version of “Casey Jones,” with revamped militant lyrics adapted for seven-part harmony, to “carrying the whole set” on the subway, in the words of Robinson, with those “broad, strong shoulders.”
The collective performed its sloganeering skits at “every strike, every picket line, political campaigns, the backs of trucks,” Ray recalled. It was “guerrilla theater” before the term existed, he explained in a 1970s interview. “We invented dramatic montage; we’d go to a picket line or a factory or just perform on a subway, with one five-hundred-watt lamp and a chair.” They passed the hat for rent and food and sometimes set up cots for the night right where they performed. “Our lives obeyed the slogan, ‘Theatre is a weapon in the class struggle,’ ” Robinson said. “A strike was a sacred obligation.”
Besides workers’ issues, the Theatre of Action campaigned for racial equality and justice in controversial court cases. They savagely satirized New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a liberal Republican whose policies didn’t go far enough for them. They opposed fascism at home and abroad, devoting one of their playlets, Free Thaelmann, to the Gestapo’s 1933 arrest of Ernst Thälmann, a leader of Germany’s Communist Party. “We were a Communist theatre,” said Robinson insistently years later. “Absolutely, no question about it.”*
Officially, the Theatre of Action was leaderless; that was part of its mystique. Its members viewed acting as more important than writing and directing, often construing the latter as a group effort rather than any individual’s responsibility. The two nominal leaders, however, were Stephen Karnot, its business adminstrator (and husband of an actress in the group), and Al Saxe, the creative head. Karnot, who could read and speak Russian, had personally studied with Meyerhold in Moscow; Saxe, the most experienced, competent director among them, had an intellectual’s grasp of Marxism and kept up on the latest Soviet axioms. As Ray recalled years later, it was Saxe who taught him how to “use ‘affective memory’ correctly”—that cornerstone of the Stanislavski system and later New York Method, whereby the actor conjures memories from related situations in his own past in order to impart those emotions to his character.
Karnot and Saxe were also both members of the Communist Party. Not every member of the Theatre of Action was a card-carrying Communist: Norman Lloyd, for example, never joined the party. But most were—including Earl Robinson, who could slip Thomas Jefferson into the same sentence as Karl Marx; Jean Evans, entreated by her boyfriend to join the Party; and Ray himself, who had first subscribed informally back in La Crosse. Yet in his political activities too, Ray was more a role-player than a leader, attending meetings and events but rarely speaking up with the vehemence that was fashionable among the subway types.
While rehearsing and performing their agitprop skits, Ray and the other members of the Theatre of Action dreamed of a bigger arena for their talents and beliefs. In early 1935 they were urged by Communist Party functionaries to turn professional, paying themselves small salaries in order to qualify for membership in Actors Equity and promote militancy in the stage union. They began raising money from left-wing angels for their first midtown production.
The Theatre approached two of its advisory board members—Clifford Odets and Albert Maltz, both luminaries of the radical theater movement—hoping one or the other would contribute a work-in-progress for a main stage production. This was probably the first time Ray crossed paths with Odets, a promethean figure who would supplant Thornton Wilder as his literary god. But Odets and Maltz both demurred, and it fell to the collective to scrape together a valid play.
By February they had a title, The Young Go First, and the beginnings of a script that depicted militaristic conditions in youth camps operated by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC),
a New Deal work relief program for young men, charged with improving public lands. The writers were Peter Martin, the collective’s “chief playwright,” in the words of Earl Robinson—though Martin was no Maltz or Odets—and “George Scudder,” a pseudonym “literally picked from the phone book” to protect the identity of Arthur Vogel, a friend of the collective who had survived an unpleasant stint with the highly regimented CCC. Vogel’s tales of hardship had riveted the group.
Martin and Scudder received additional help from Charles Friedman, another board member who contributed to Theatre of Action affairs, and in the end got sage advice from John Howard Lawson, a doyen of the New Playwrights Theatre. Lawson, as big a name as Odets, invited Friedman, Martin, and Vogel up to his colonial mansion on Long Island to help structure the episodes devised by the collective.
Al Saxe was the logical choice to stage The Young Go First, even though his rigorous intellectualism did not always inspire confidence. Though he was beloved within the collective, Saxe could sometimes be too forceful and intimidating. Ray “worshipped” Saxe, but also “was frightened of him,” recalled Perry Bruskin, a Theatre of Action member.
Kazan had begun to hang around late in the days, sensing an opportunity. With his subway looks, it was becoming clear that he wouldn’t have much of a future as a glamorous leading man. Yet he saw the chance to turn his love for acting into the fulcrum of a directing career. Unlike Saxe, Kazan had no intellectual pretensions; he didn’t frighten green, aspiring actors. An actor at heart, Kazan befriended and beguiled most performers, teasing miracles out of them.
Not long after the announcement that rehearsals were starting for The Young Go First, Kazan stepped in to assist Saxe, eventually becoming the play’s codirector and all but shouldering Saxe aside. In his memoir, Kazan wasn’t shy about taking the hero’s credit for the first Theatre of Action production. “The script was incomplete—there was no third act,” he wrote, “so I decided to create it by improvisation, placed a stenographer in the first row to take down what the actors said in the structure of scenes I’d arranged. I edited what she gave me into a satisfactory final act, and the play was realized. This impressed the actors, and I became even more admired.”*
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