Corey Fischer’s new play is about a group of idealistic young actors who came together to change American theater.
It’s not the story of the Jewish Theatre, San Francisco, the company co-founded by Fischer that is entering its final season after 30 years. It’s about the Group Theatre, which goes further back, to the dawn of the Great Depression.
The Group Theatre was the revolutionary 1930s-era New York ensemble that permanently altered the cultural landscape.
The plays the members created, including “Awake and Sing,” “Waiting for Lefty” and Golden Boy,” became staples of the American stage. Group founders — most of them Jews — included Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, Stella Adler and playwright Clifford Odets, who fascinate theater buffs to this day.
Add Fischer to that list of the enthralled. His new work, “In the Maze of Our Own Lives,” recounts the Group’s rise and eventual flameout. It opened Oct. 19 for a three-week run in San Francisco, with Fischer directing the cast of eight.
He conceived the play after reading a 2006 New Yorker article about Odets on the occasion of his centennial. From that piece, Fischer learned about his trailblazing ways.
“Odets was the first playwright in America to write about Jewish immigrants,” Fischer says, “to write about the working class, to use the language of those people, not simply verbatim realistic writing. He really made poetry out of it.”
The others made their marks as well. Director-producer Clurman endured as a Broadway powerhouse for the rest of his life, while Strasberg and Adler went on to become America’s most lionized acting teachers.
For his play, Fischer limited the scope to the glory years between 1931 and the outbreak of World War II in 1939 (though the Group hung on for a few years more).
He had a tricky assignment: to remain faithful to the Group’s historical narrative, while making sure he wasn’t simply recounting facts. He had to turn the Group’s real-life figures into characters for the stage.
“It was a balancing act between allowing them to become characters and do what they would within the play, and at the same time not violate the history in a fundamental way,” Fischer says. “We compress things, of course, but the hardest part was to edit out as much as I had to.”
Though the Group created American plays, the genesis for many of them was the Jewish immigrant experience. The Group’s Jewish members were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Strasberg, for example, was born in a shtetl and grew up speaking Yiddish on the Lower East Side.
The foment of the era, typified by urban Jews espousing socialism and working-class solidarity, filtered into the Group’s output.
“That’s why the story has importance way beyond theater,” Fischer says. “It’s about people coming together to make something they could not make alone as individuals. They also came out of a time in America when there was a very different sense in the country, when there was perhaps a majority of people questioning the premise that capitalism, that the free market economy, was the best way to go.”
After a decade together, the Group dissolved, mostly due to internal personality disputes (which Fischer dramatizes in his play). He attributes their initial success to a mutual trust that withstood the pressures of the outside world.
“Then, when that trust began to wobble, those outer circumstances became obstacles that did them in,” he says. “It’s almost like a human immune system. When healthy and strong, germs have no effect as they would when the system is compromised.”
While over its three decades TJT was never done in by internal issues, ongoing budget problems finally led the company to announce that the 2011-12 season would be its final one. That makes the experience of writing and directing this season’s opener (three more shows are on the schedule) bittersweet for Fischer. But for him, it means going out with a bang.
“The great thing about TJT is that it is still a collaborative effort,” he says. “I couldn’t imagine taking something like this on in a more conventional setting.”
“In the Maze of Our Own Lives,” through Nov. 13 at the Jewish Theatre, San Francisco, 470 Florida St., S.F. $15-$35. (415) 522-0786 or www.tjt-sf.org.