Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers (14 page)

Adler would later become an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Drama and head the undergraduate drama department at New York University. Her work extended the lineage from her own early influences of Yiddish theater to that which she contributed while in Group Theater, on to her teachings and on to current and future generations of actors.

In the end, those early Yiddish theater influences were impacting performers two generations later. Clearly the Adler family would prove to have one the most significant influences on acting, and on Broadway, in the 20th century.

As noted on the Adler Studio of Acting web site, “The spirit that has animated the Adler family for over one hundred years stems from the insight that growth as an actor and growth as a human being are synonymous.”3

The Bergson Group

Stella Adler, like most of the Group Theater participants, was not only concerned about bringing social issues and injustice to the stage, but was also an activist. She would join the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, which became known simply as the Bergson Group, based on the pseudonym of its leader, Hillel Kook, who took the name to keep his identity and his family in Palestine safe.

78

4. Group Theater, Acting Teachers and Life During Wartime
The Bergson Group was dedicated to spreading the word to Americans about the atrocities taking place in Europe at the hands of the Nazis.

The winds of war were already blowing fiercely throughout much of Europe by the late 1930s, but the United States media provided few details of the horrors that were taking place. At this point, the government was editing reports of the mass murder of two million Jews. The stories were relegated to small articles, such as one found on page ten in the
New York Times
and a three-inch article on page six in the
Washington
Post
. The public was not apprised of what was going on overseas, as these atrocities were not making the headlines. Additionally, the United States president at the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, remained conspicuously unin volved in the overseas activities.4

Many celebrities joined the Bergson Group to publicize these atrocities and generate public support, urging the United States to “get involved” in saving the Jewish people. At first, most of the participants were Jewish, such as Stella Adler and her brother Luther, as well as Eddie Cantor, composer Kurt Weill, Milton Berle, Carl Reiner and both Groucho and Harpo Marx. Soon, however, many non–Jewish performers also joined the cause, such as Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Vincent Price and Count Basie. Full-page ads placed by the Bergson Group in major newspapers were designed to bring greater awareness to the plight of the European Jews. They also mentioned not only the celebrities involved but also the names of political figures and labor leaders who were supporting this important Jewish and humanitarian cause.

Determined not to sit idly by while such atrocities were taking place daily in Europe, the Bergson Group held rallies to accompany the newspaper ads, many of which were written by
Gone with the Wind
screenwriter Ben Hecht. A journalist, author of more than 30 books, award-winning screenwriter and playwright, Hecht, a Zionist, was very active in political issues in the 1930s and a strong believer in the formation of a Jewish state.

While their efforts began prior to the war, in hopes of getting America involved, the Bergson Group would get stronger during the war. In the summer of 1943, they challenged the Roosevelt administration, wanting to know why the efforts to win the war did not extend to rescuing the Jewish people in Europe. At a conference in New York City, some 1,500 delegates joined forces to try to figure out ways in which the gov-79

Jews on Broadway

ernment could help the European Jews. The presiding bishop of the Epis copal Church, the Rev. Henry St. George Tucker; former president Her bert Hoover; newspaper impresario William Randolph Hearst; New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia; and NAACP president Joel Spingarn were among the many non–Jewish participants. Clearly the messages of the Bergson Group transcended cultural and religious lines.

Also in 1943, Hecht’s original play,
We Will Never Die,
opened at Madison Square Garden in New York City and toured the nation bringing the stories of the European Jews to more than 100,000 Americans.

Hecht would later write another Broadway show in 1946, after the war, called
A Flag Is Born
to draw attention to the millions of displaced Jewish people and the need for the state of Israel
.
Many Jews had fled Germany only to be murdered in Poland or unwelcome in other European nations.

The American League for a Free Palestine, basically another name for the Bergson Group, produced the play. The three-member cast, Celia Adler (Stella and Luther’s half-sister and a star of Yiddish theater in the 1920s and ’30s), Paul Muni and Marlon Brando received praise for their work, and the group’s efforts were sponsored by many luminaries, including Leonard Bernstein and even Eleanor Roosevelt. In the end,
A Flag
Is Born
went out on tour and helped raise money for the millions of Jews displaced during and after the war.

In time, the pressure from the Bergson Group and the support of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., would finally convince FDR

to create the War Refugee Board, which was reportedly responsible for saving roughly 200,000 Jewish people. While the Bergson Group is little more than a footnote in American history, they worked tirelessly in an effort to bring awareness to the American people and the government of the plight of the Jewish people in Europe. Sadly, the loss of life during the late 1930s and through the war years grew to epic proportions. The Bergson Group members and their followers believed that earlier involvement in the war by the United States and the support of the FDR administration might have saved thousands of Jewish people.

The Dramatists

The Jewish people have long needed to be conscious of that which was taking place in the world around them. Perhaps the many oppressors 80

4. Group Theater, Acting Teachers and Life During Wartime
forcing them to flee from many parts of the world created a need to be socially and/or politically aware. Often outnumbered, many Jews of the era learned to “sleep with one eye open” as the saying goes. The dramatic writers of the 1930s and ’40s were among those who were aware of the struggles of both Jews and Americans. They absorbed as much as they could from the political and social climate and tried to express their observations on paper. Some were part of Group Theater, while others worked independently. Many took part in social and political activities, and several made a significant impact upon American literature and on Broadway. Here are a few:

CLIFFORD ODETS

Born in 1906 in Philadelphia to a middle-class Jewish family, Clifford Odets would write dramatic works featuring characters of various cultures and ethnicities. He would become widely considered the greatest dramatist of the 1930s.

After his family moved to New York during his youth, Odets continued his education into high school but then dropped out to pursue his interest in theater, performing in small repertory groups. Troubled and often alone, Odets reportedly made several suicide attempts while trying to find his own voice and struggling with his identity. In the 1930s, as mentioned above, he became a prominent member of Group Theater.

However, he was always seeking some greater sense of order, and with that in mind he was inspired to join the Communist Party while evolving from an actor to a playwright.

It was during the 1930s that Odets would write
Waiting for Lefty
about a labor union strike, along with
Awake and Sing!
, and
Paradise
Lost
, three of his most powerful works, all staged by the group and all written about struggles of the poor or downtrodden.

Odets’ works featured bold characters. The dialogue was that of the working class, gritty and real. His early writing also focused heavily on social and political concerns. However, in
Golden Boy
he dealt with inner turmoil between the desire for financial success and that of striving for personal fulfillment and love. Much of this epic drama was thought to have stemmed from Odets’ inner conflict. While Odets’ Communist ties were evident in some of his work, they came to the forefront in
Till the
81

Jews on Broadway

Day I Die
, in which he wrote about the Communists and the Nazis, and their differences.

While his works remained brooding and engaging, Odets’ plays of the 40s lost the anguish and passion of the earlier years. His stories dealt more with personal issues and human psychology. Nonetheless, Odets, who died in 1963, is best remembered for writing about social injustice and the struggles of the working class.

ELMER RICE

Born to poor second-generation Jewish immigrants in 1892, Elmer Leopold Reizenstein grew up in New York City. He took an early interest in theater as a child, reading plays, taking part in school productions and going to shows with his parents, when they could afford to take him.

Rice was a good student and went on to law school from which he graduated in 1912. However Rice did not pursue the practice of law as he was disenchanted by what he considered the hypocrisy of the profession, which had lawyers making compromises on what they believed in order to win a case. Instead, much to the displeasure of his family, he decided to try his hand at writing a play based upon that which he learned while in law school. The result was his first play called
On Trial
, which was produced on Broadway in 1914. The show was an instant success, drawing critical acclaim and running for 350 performances. It was also just the beginning for one of the most prolific dramatists of the 20th century.

After a couple less successful plays, Rice wrote a tragic/comedy called
The Adding Machine
about a bookkeeper who is replaced by an add ing machine and goes on to murder his boss. The play, staged in 1923, became a big hit, as did
Street Scene
, in 1929, which would win Rice a Pulitzer Prize. He then wrote
Counselor-at-Law
, a play that would return him to writing based on his legal training.

The work of Elmer Rice reflected rebellion and earned him a reputation as a crusader. He was always fighting for freedom of speech and reflected such challenges in his work, depicting the struggles of tenement life in
Street Scene
and addressing Nazism in America in
American Landscape.
While the critics were often harsh, claiming his work to be too avant garde, Rice was never one to conform, continuing to write some 82

4. Group Theater, Acting Teachers and Life During Wartime
50 plays on a wide range of subjects in a career that spanned 50 years.

Although he did not have the blockbuster hits nor the great American classic dramas, his works, often reflecting his Socialist beliefs, were innovative, experimental and pushed the idea of uncensored freedom of expression. As a result Rice, while not a household name, was often one whose works were discussed and debated in theater and drama classes.

LILLIAN HELLMAN

Lillian Hellman was born in New Orleans in 1905 to Jewish parents.

At the age of five, her family moved to New York City. However, she still spent part of her childhood years at a boarding house in the South run by her aunts. Like many other writers, performers and musicians of the era, Hellman attended Columbia University, and, also like many writers, performers and musicians of the era, she would not graduate.

Instead, at the age of 20, she was hired as a book reviewer for the
New
York Herald Tribune
.

After heading to Hollywood and back, her playwriting career would take off at the age of 29 with
The Children’s Hour
, about a child who accuses her teachers of being lesbians, a very controversial theme for the time. Hellman, however, made the point that the overriding theme of the play, based on a true story from Scotland, was the power of a lie to ruin the careers of these two women. The outcome for the controversial drama was a run of 700 performances on Broadway, making it one of the most successful dramas of 1935.

Although Hellman would write only 11 more plays, among them was
The Little Foxes
about the deception, mistrust and greed of a southern family, the Hubbards, at the turn of the century. The show opened on Broadway in 1939 and was a major hit, leading to the movie adaptation, the same year. Starring Bette Davis, the film was nominated for nine Academy Awards, but didn’t win any in the year of
Gone with the Wind,
The Wizard of Oz
and
Mr. Chips Goes to Washington.
She would later write about the Hubbard family again in her 1946 drama,
Another Part
of the Forest.
Hellman moved to screenwriting throughout the ’40s, and her works included
Watch on the Rhine.

Throughout her life, Lillian Hellman remained active in social causes, and although she claims she never officially joined the Communist 83

Jews on Broadway

or Socialist parties, like many of the Jewish writers and performers of the thirties and forties, she remained very much to the political left.

Hellman took part in, or supported, the activities of groups with liberal agendas. This would later catch up with her during the Communist witch-hunts of the early 1950s.

SIDNEY KINGSLEY

Another Jewish playwright from New York City, Sidney Kingsley was born in 1906 and grew up with an interest in theater. At Cornell University in the 1920s, he pursued his interest by writing for the school’s drama club.

Kingsley’s first play,
Men in White
, as noted earlier, was performed by Group Theater in 1933 and became one of their earliest hits. The show also garnered Kingsley a Pulitzer Prize. His next several plays would focus on social issues that included ghetto housing and anti-war senti-ments. His historical drama, while the United States was engaged in World War II, called
The Patriots
, opened in 1943 and was highly acclaimed. The play, chronicling the rivalry between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton at the turn of the 19th century, was well received by audiences at a time when the nation was focusing on patriotism, democracy and seeking the strength necessary to achieve victory in World War II.
The Patriots
ran on Broadway for 173 performances.