In New York City: Staging a Reunion

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Tony Kraber had come dressed for the occasion: even the scarf he wore around his neck was imbued with almost 50 years of memories. Tall, lean, striding with the assurance of his 78 years, he pushed his way gently through a lobby full of adolescents to the inner room, the one with the stage. He stopped a few steps in, his eyes bright with anticipation, then soft in reverie, as he gazed at the vaguely familiar faces, the piles of photographs and clippings, the mementos of happy times a half-century ago. From across the room a bulky man offered a greeting: "Do you remember me?" For a long moment Kraber stared, searching his mental archives, but the name eluded him. Softly the other man identified himself as Mordecai Gorelik. Kraber cried out, "Max!" and they fell into a hug that, they reckoned, embraced some 40 bygone years.

They might have been classmates or barracksmates or boys from the old neighborhood. Their reunion might have been taking place in many a city or town. But the gathering last month was of a celebrated and ill-starred stage troupe, the Group Theater, which from 1931 to 1941 played a central role in the shaping of American drama. For the meeting, a dozen or so of its members, from stars to a secretary, assembled in Manhattan, the scene of their triumphs and eventual parting. Seven of them, including Actor Kraber and Set Designer Gorelik, traded reminiscences on a stage, before an audience. They spoke candidly and to one another, for the first time in decades, but they let more than 100 admirers listen in.

The evening was conceived as a tribute by New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, which credits the Group Theater with spiritual parentage, not only of its own drama program but of much of the naturalism, progressivism, bohemianism and political activism in several decades of American drama and film. Introducing the event, N.Y.U.'s chairman of undergraduate drama, Evangeline Morphos, said, "It is with the founding of the Group that the American theater finds its voice." The company's 23 productions included Clifford Odets' Golden Boy and Waiting for Lefty, William Saroyan's My Heart's in the Highlands and Sidney Kingsley's Pulitzer-prizewinning hospital drama Men in White. Its members included Actors John Garfield, Frances Farmer, Morris Carnovsky, Franchot Tone and Lee J. Cobb, Directors-to-Be Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet, Theorists and Teachers Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner.

But its concerns, and its significance, reached beyond the stage. Founded at the dawn of the Depression, the Group was avidly though not dogmatically leftist; Co-Founder Harold Clurman said, "We are not going to be restricted by Marxism." Organized and run more or less collectively, the ensemble slowly splintered as members' careers led them elsewhere; it broke up entirely by 1941. Eventually, some of the founders were barely on speaking terms, and some of those feuds continue today.

One postscript was especially painful: in 1952 Kazan testified to the House Committee on Un-American Activities that he had been a Communist and so had several other members, including his former roommate, Kraber. The accusations disrupted several careers and, worse, blasted what was left of a remembered dream. If there had been so much betrayal afterward, the Group members wondered, how real was the zealous sense of unity that had rallied them at their peak?

Before the reunion, when N.Y.U. staff members telephoned Group alumni to give them details, one question was asked repeatedly: Will Kazan be there? In the end, he was not, and his name was scarcely mentioned. Whenever his face appeared in slides of Group rehearsals or productions, the chatty Group alumni fell silent. Still, the evening was a time almost entirely of joy and confident assertion. Playwright Kingsley, natty and rakish, sat onstage with Kraber, Gorelik, Producer-Director Cheryl Crawford and Actors Margaret Barker, Eleanor Lynn and Ruth Nelson. Aiding from offstage were Strasberg's widow Anna; his son John, who was staging a revival of the Group's Paradise Lost off-Broadway (five revivals are being separately staged, with guidance by Group members, at N.Y.U.); and Joanne Woodward, who is assembling a documentary on the troupe for PBS.

As at many a reunion, the alumni found that each had crystal-clear recollections of events decades before, but when they compared memories, they clashed about the facts. Afterward they might--and did--whisper that so-and-so was getting befuddled, but in public they chose not to disagree. Many of their stories attested to the exuberance of youth. Nelson recalled that when the Group took its first production, The House of Connelly, to New York City, "Margaret Barker slept under a tree in the park because the world was too exciting for her just to go home." Barker discreetly corrected her:

"It was a bush. And the fact that you could sleep under a bush in Central Park, and survive, just shows how much times have changed." Kraber repeatedly broke into song, replaying the tunes and lyrics he had performed in several shows. Barker added, "I still sing those songs to myself in the bathroom."

There were tales too of theater bravura and derring-do: Adler so resented playing an aging character rather than an ingenue that she sometimes wore her white wig pushed up just enough to reveal the golden brown tresses underneath: Carnovsky epitomized show-must-go-on heroism one night when his nose was broken onstage and was set, between scenes and without anesthetic, by a physician who was in the house.

Not all the recollections were boastful: when someone mentioned Weep for the Virgins, Co-Founder Crawford said dismissively, "Yes, I directed that, but I do not remember a thing about it." Kraber described how the Group sought help from Financier Otto Kahn, then a prime angel of the Metropolitan Opera. Group invited him to its 1931, a tapestry of the suffering of the unemployed that had a rumbustious political fervor. Recalled Kraber: "He thought the revolution was happening right there in the theater, and that was the end of the hope of our getting any money." Kraber also remembered "how much more it meant in 1931 to be out of a job," and commented acidly on the reviewers who had denied that things were nearly so bad in the country as the Group made out. To him, 1931 "set a standard that we could not possibly ever live up to again."

The Group knew privation firsthand. A dozen members lived communally in an unheated apartment on a household budget of $7.50 a week. In that flat, with his typewriter in his lap because there was no table to put it on, Odets wrote Awake and Sing! Even after Men in White was produced for a total cost of $12,000--about 3% of what it would cost to mount the play on Broadway today--and became a hit, the company managed to provide for the alcoholism therapy of a friend only by bartering performances for inmates at the private sanatorium that was treating him.

The formal part of the evening spilled over into a party that led to more. Smaller groups met for follow-up lunches; some members called N.Y.U. for one another's addresses. The bad times that bred the Group, and the bad times that broke it up, had made it an unhappy memory for some of those who came, but they went away with pride and pleasure. Perhaps the happiest was Kraber, who had been among those who suffered the most. For him every moment was, that night at least, as yesterday, and the political grievances were secondary to the personal pleasures. Almost the first time he spoke, he fingered the gray plaid scarf at his neck and explained to his colleagues from all those years ago, "During the run of his Men in White, Sidney Kingsley gave each of the men in the company a scarf. I kept it all these years. And I wore it here tonight.

--By William A. Henry III