Cheryl Crawford

Actress

• Born: September 24, 1902
• Birthplace: Akron, Ohio
• Died: October 7, 1986
• Place of death: New York, New York

American theater director and producer

A prizewinning producer and director with unequaled influence in American theater for more than fifty years, Crawford served as casting director for the Theatre Guild early in her career before going on to help found the Group Theatre, the Actors Studio, and the American Repertory Theatre.

Area of achievement Theater and entertainment

Early Life

Cheryl Crawford was born just after the turn of the century in the small midwestern city of Akron, Ohio. Located on the Cuyahoga River in the northeastern part of the state, Akron had a bustling economy dominated by the activities of the Quaker Oats cereal company. Cheryl’s father, Robert Kingsley Crawford, was a real estate broker known by his nickname King; her mother, Luella Elizabeth Parker Crawford, reared Cheryl and her three younger brothers. The Crawford home was a solid Victorian structure built to house a large family, and it included such amenities as a large library and space in which to hold amateur theatrical productions. As an elder sister to three brothers, Cheryl was something of a tomboy and an enthusiastic participant in climbing trees, racing bicycles, and even boxing in gloved matches. When her youngest brother, Robert, was born in 1915, Cheryl served as his surrogate mother and enjoyed regaling him with the ad-libbed stories that were her great specialty.

King Crawford served as superintendent of the Congregational Sunday School, where he taught a young men’s Bible class. A staunchly religious individual, he insisted on saying grace before every family meal. Cheryl later complained of the overly puritanical atmosphere of her childhood home, but she learned to appreciate her father’s insistence on discipline when she later took charge of unruly actors and theatrical personnel.

Cheryl’s maternal grandmother, Lavinia Lynn Parker, was an important influence during Cheryl’s early years. Lavinia Parker lived with the Crawfords and served as an unofficial babysitter, rocking Cheryl to sleep night after night to the tune of old Civil War songs and other musical favorites. Cheryl’s grandmother also told thrilling stories about the night that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated, drawing on the memories of her father, who had been a member of the posse that hunted John Wilkes Booth. Lavinia Parker particularly enjoyed watching silent pictures and often took her grandchildren with her to watch installments of The Perils of Pauline.

The Crawford family was sufficiently well off to afford a variety of lessons for Cheryl. In the area of music, she studied violin, piano, and guitar under various tutors and teachers; she also took lessons in swimming, horseback riding, and ballroom dancing. Trained at the Emerson School of Elocution in Boston, her mother taught Cheryl the basics of elocution and coached her in the use of dramatic gestures. King Crawford also coached Cheryl in acting and speech. Her dramatic training was evident in her graduation day monologue as Lady Macbeth. In Cheryl’s performance of the famous sleepwalking scene, her waist-length hair caught fire from the candle she was holding. Never once stepping out of character, she put out the fire with her hands and finished the monologue without a pause despite horrified outbursts from the audience.

Life’s Work

In 1921, Crawford left home to attend Smith College, a women’s college located in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. During her freshman year, she pursued her passion for drama by performing in a number of one-act plays. Crawford also discovered two other treasured subjects: philosophy and English literature. She made a name for herself in the role of the count in a performance of A Marriage of Convenience at the famous academy nearby. Having found her calling, Crawford improved her study habits and attained excellent grades worthy of Phi Beta Kappa membership by her sophomore year.

In her junior year, she served as president of the Dramatic Association at Smith. With the guidance of a professor who instructed her in playwriting and dramatic history, Crawford produced and directed a spectacular outdoor performance of a classic Indian play. In her staging, she constructed a long trench through the lawns and gardens surrounding the residence of the college president and commandeered the hoses of the Northampton Fire Department to create a continuous line of fountains that provided a curtain for the play. The magnificent effect of the fifteen-foot-high curtain of water, lit up by a combination of multicolored stage lights as well as smoke candles donated by the local railroad station, enhanced the Asian ambience created by burning incense cones. The play drew packed audiences and set an impossible precedent for future dramatic productions.

During the summer before her senior year, Crawford traveled to Cape Cod in the hope of performing with the famous Provincetown Players acting troupe. Driving an old car purchased by means of a bequest from her grandmother Parker, Crawford made the journey to Provincetown only to discover that the playhouse itself was no longer in existence. Undaunted, she joined the Players, built scenery for the troupe’s productions, and reveled in the bohemian life enjoyed by these summer exiles from New York’s Greenwich Village. At the end of the summer, Crawford returned to Smith College for her final year of studies and was graduated with honors in 1925.

After her graduation, Crawford announced her intention to find theater work in New York City. Back in Akron, her parents were concerned about her future and tried to dissuade her from pursuing acting. Nevertheless, with the help of the bequest from her grandmother, Crawford went ahead with her plans. She sought an interview at the Theatre Guild Company, considered to be the top acting school in Manhattan, with producer Theresa Helburn. Dressed in an outfit devised to convey a chic and sophisticated persona, Crawford persuaded Helburn to take her on as an acting student even though her actual purpose was to learn as much about the techniques of theater production as possible.

After locating an apartment on Bedford Street across from a former residence of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, Crawford began her acting studies under the tutelage of Alfred Lunt and other notable Guild actors. By graduation day, the enrollment in her class had been reduced considerably, and all were hired as part of a stock company. Crawford was awarded the position of assistant director. Many of her ideas were disregarded, and she began to encounter the type of strong prejudice directed at women who held positions in theater other than that of actor. Despite this discouragement, she continued to make the rounds of various theatrical offices in search of employment. Finally, Philip Loeb, her former dramatic coach and director at the Guild, offered her the chance to take his place as casting secretary. She agreed to take the position with the proviso that she also be hired as third assistant stage manager for the Guild’s next play.

During her career as the Guild’s casting director from 1926 to 1930, Crawford met and worked with a number of notable actors, including Edward G. Robinson, Claude Rains, and Henry Fonda. Among other young actors cast by Crawford during her early years were Katharine Hepburn, whom she advised to return to Bryn Mawr College to complete her undergraduate degree, and Bette Davis. Crawford also collaborated with playwrights such as Eugene O’Neill and Noël Coward, among others. Through her friendship with Harold Clurman, she was introduced to Lee Strasberg, who had studied in the Stanislavsky method of acting under Madame Ouspenskaya and the Polish-born stage director Richard Boleslavsky. Strasberg told Crawford that there was a definite technique that could be taught to eliminate the staged gestures, mannered posturing, and clichés that made theatrical productions stale. Intrigued by the idea of this new technique, Crawford joined Clurman and Herbert Biberman to form the new Theatre Guild Studio. Their first stage production was Red Rust, a Russian work. The threesome tried to hire a young Clark Gable to play the lead in their second play, Philip Barber’s Dead or Alive, but the company folded shortly before the production was staged.

During the early part of the Depression, Crawford and her colleagues Strasberg and Clurman broke with the Theatre Guild Company in 1931. They formed their own company, known as the Group Theatre, with twenty-eight actors, among them Franchot Tone and Clifford Odets. The new company’s first play, Paul Green’s The House of Connelly (1931), incorporated as much of method acting as Strasberg could instill in the members during one short summer in Brookfield Center, Connecticut. When the production opened in New York that autumn, the audience was so enthusiastic that they gave the cast twenty-three curtain calls. The actors were also excited about this new method of coping with individual talents and faults while also compelling performers to call on their inner resources to create fresh interpretations. Like many others, Crawford embraced “the Method” with messianic fervor.

As part of the Group Theatre from 1931 to 1937, Crawford directed and produced four plays by Odets as well as the works of Maxwell Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and Kurt Weill, among others. After a memorable transatlantic crossing aboard the Ile de France and a train trip across Europe, Crawford visited the Moscow Art Theatre in 1935 and was inspired to pursue an independent career. She eventually left the Group Theatre. Her independent theatrical productions met with a notable lack of success, however, and she was forced to take a new approach. She formed a New Jersey-based stock company known as the Maplewood Theatre that was dedicated to producing a play per week. Crawford also formed numerous road companies featuring stars such as Ethel Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Robeson. New performers, including Oona O’Neill, found that Crawford’s companies provided them with a welcome proving ground for their budding talents.

In 1942, Crawford achieved Broadway success with a revival of George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Intrigued with musical theater, Crawford cast Mary Martin in an independent production of One Touch of Venus (1943) and went on to stage Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Brigadoon (1947) and Paint Your Wagon (1951). Despite her forays into musical theater, Crawford never entirely abandoned her interest in dramatic theater. After helping found the American Repertory Theatre with Eva Le Gallienne and Margaret Webster, Crawford staged classical productions by William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, and George Bernard Shaw under the aegis of the newly formed company in 1946. She was involved in the production of four plays by Tennessee WilliamsThe Rose Tattoo (1951), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Camino Real (1953), and Period of Adjustment (1960). During this same period, she worked on an early Leonard Bernstein production as well as works by Bertolt Brecht (Mother Courage and Her Children in 1963), Sean O’Casey, James Thurber, Eugene O’Neill, and Roald Dahl. At the Actors Studio Theatre, Crawford produced James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie in 1964. During the 1970’s, she staged a theatrical adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yentl in 1975. Her final theatrical production was So Long on Lonely Street, which appeared shortly before her death in 1986 in New York City at the age of eighty-four.

Significance

Throughout her long and distinguished career as a theatrical director and producer, Crawford never limited herself to a single dramatic genre, choosing instead to produce a wide range of musicals, operas, comedies, and serious dramas. She also refused to let others use her gender to limit her advancement. Starting from the lowest ranks, Crawford mastered the details of casting, stage management, script analysis, and directing through observation and firsthand experience before progressing as a director and producer in her own right. During Crawford’s fruitful association with the Group Theatre, she worked with many of the leading playwrights and actors of the 1930’s and established a reputation as a shrewd and practical executive. Whether working as an independent producer or as an associate of the American Repertory Theatre, the American National Theatre and Academy, or the Actors Studio, Crawford continued to collaborate with leading figures in Broadway and regional theater. Convinced that artistic risk-taking was essential to the survival of meaningful theater, Crawford took the opportunity to work on many avant-garde and challenging productions instead of limiting her attention solely to theatrical works by notable and commercially successful playwrights.

Bibliography

Adams, Cindy. Lee Strasberg: The Imperfect Genius of the Actors Studio. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980. This comprehensive biography of Strasberg contains extensive references to his work with Crawford at the Actors Studio. Its coverage of the Moscow Art Theatre and Stanislavsky provide an excellent frame of reference for understanding the origins of “the Method” as used by Strasberg and Crawford.

Crawford, Cheryl. One Naked Individual. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977. Crawford’s frank and unpretentious autobiography provides an informal, humorous, and self-deprecatory account of American theatrical life as she lived it. Reviewers who expected this memoir to be filled with gossip and scandal about the lives of Crawford’s famous friends were disappointed, but Crawford stayed true to her principles and refused to demean her work with such details.

Garfield, David. A Player’s Place: The Story of the Actors Studio. New York: Macmillan, 1980. Beginning with the origins of the Actors Studio in the Group Theatre, this history traces the studio’s development through its influence on contemporary acting in film and television. The appendix contains a complete list of all performers who studied there, a selected bibliography of additional sources, and detailed notes.

Hirsch, Foster. A Method to Their Madness: The History of the Actors Studio. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Hirsch gives an alternate history of the Actors Studio, crediting its founding to Crawford, Elia Kazan, and Robert Lewis. Written from the perspective of an audience member and observer rather than a participant, this work provides a slightly different view of events at the studio.

Schanke, Robert A., and Kim Mara, eds. Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. A “queer reading” of the lives of those who made notable contributions to the American theater before the time of the gay and lesbian rights movement of the 1960’s. Includes an essay about Crawford.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: 1931-1941: The Group Theatre Flourishes.

1941-1970: October 15, 1942-1961: Kazan Brings Naturalism to the Stage and Screen; September 20, 1951: A Streetcar Named Desire Brings Method Acting to the Screen.