Stoddard, Eunice

An actress and dancer, Eunice Stoddard was an original member of the Group Theatre, a company formed in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford, and dedicated to producing Broadway plays exploring social and moral issues, and to developing acting techniques that emphasized emotional realism and psychological depth.

Stoddard came from an affluent and culturally connected New York family. After graduating from the Brearly School in 1925, she was sent to Europe for several years, where she studied acting, dancing and music, and met Stanislavsky. Stoddard considered a career in dance, and staged a number of dance pageants upon returning to the States, but soon enrolled in the American Laboratory Theatre, an innovative acting school based on the principles of the Moscow Art Theatre and led by Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskya . There Eunice met Clurman and Strasberg, who had enrolled in the directing program, and Stella Adler, who was an acting student.

The American Laboratory Theatre foundered in 1928, but Stoddard was already winning parts in Broadway productions, as a result of her solid training and her classic blonde ingenue looks. She then appeared in Red Rust, produced by the Theatre Guild Studio, which was led by Clurman and Strasberg. During the 1930 season, she was cast in a major Guild production of A Month in the Country, and appeared in the Broadway productions of Samuel Ruskin Golden 's Puppet Show and Gretchen Damrosch 's The Life Line . In the summer of 1931, she was invited to join the newly formed Group Theatre in Connecticut to rehearse and prepare their first production, Paul Green 's The House of Connelly .

Stoddard had roles in all of the Group's productions from 1931-1933, and most of them in 1934 and 1935, appearing in such seminal works as Men in White, Waiting for Lefty and Till the Day I Die . By this time she had married the architect Julian Whittlesey, and was developing a life outside the Group Theatre. She also was becoming unhappy that she was consigned to lesser parts. Yet she was devoted to the ideals of the Group, and kept an association with the Company as late as 1938, when she appeared in Casey Jones . When the Group Theatre disbanded, Stoddard left the theater, going on to work in radio and to collaborate with her husband in underwater and aerial photography. In 1972, she published her first book, Symbols and Legends in Western Art: A Museum Guide (New York: Scribner, 1972) .

In an interview with Wendy Smith for her book about the Group Theatre, Real Life Drama (New York: Knopf, 1990), Stoddard explained her devotion to the Group: "Everybody had their frustrations. I stayed because it was more interesting theatre than anywhere else. Rehearsals were always so exciting: the whole analysis of the play, of the parts, of what the play was saying in terms of our era, was just so much more stimulating than anything you'd ever get on Broadway. You didn't want to leave that for what you knew you'd be getting outside, which might satisfy your ego as an actress but not necessarily create very interesting theatre."

From the guide to the Eunice Stoddard papers, 1913-1938, (The New York Public Library. Billy Rose Theatre Division.)