Harold Clurman: Author of the Stage Production

Abstract

“I was a late developer,” Harold Clurman remembered his friend Aaron Copland saying of him. The retiring young man who went off to Paris with the studious composer in 1921 was a precocious but timid doctor’s son from the Lower East Side. He was so shy with strangers that he trembled when he talked, hardly able to get his words out. In the years between his adventures in the continental art capital in the early 1920s and his charismatic lectures at Steinway Hall in 1930–31, Clurman remained withdrawn although persistent, not, as he himself quipped in later years, “this loudmouth blowhard you see before you.” But conviction carried him away. Once he started talking to his eager listeners about the idea of theater that he, Strasberg, and Crawford had in mind, he became a new man. Although he transformed himself into a spell-binder, something of the emotional bumbler was always there. He was both the sophisticated, elegant, fedora-hatted Maecenas of young artists and the awkward, intuitive, suffering Prince Myshkin out of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. In short, he became the fascinating Harold Clurman many remember and revere.