Founded in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg, the Group Theatre was conceived as a company dedicated to staging socially relevant plays, with a permanent ensemble of actors trained in a new, shared technique. Its legacy can be located in the contributions it made to modern American drama, particularly through the works of member-playwright Clifford Odets, and through its practice of the Stanislavsky System, which revolutionized American acting, developing into a psychologically realistic approach widely known as “the Method.”