A young Canadian, Alan Mandell, who as a volunteer Business Manager (and de facto chief executive with Irving) helped inaugurate the first subscription season for the Actor's Workshop.

[5] Irving and Blau were insistent idealists who developed the Workshop in the tradition of the Group Theatre of the 1930s; they and key company members were dedicated to principles of social responsibility and ensemble artistry.

[6] The troupe's repertoire focused initially on Miller and other modern American writers, such as Odets, O'Neill, and Tennessee Williams, but soon expanded to the contemporary world dramas of Samuel Beckett, Brecht, Genet, John Osborne, Yukio Mishima, and Harold Pinter.

[10] The production played to the Workshop's regular audiences, then performed for inmates at San Quentin prison[11][12][13][14] and on to the 1958 Brussels World's Fair where it represented American theater under the aegis of the US State Department.

[15] The opaque State Department communications left Irving and Blau to speculate while officials would not go on record that perhaps some liberal activity had brought negative attention down on Kershaw, a respected company member.

[16] In addition to his acclaimed abilities as the director of such Workshop productions as The Entertainer, Misalliance, The Glass Menagerie, and The Caretaker, Irving proved his skills as a financial manager over many years, shrewdly learning "by necessity," according to San Francisco writer Mark Harris, "a hundred-and-one uses for the pennies of a dollar.

Of particular note is his travel to Mississippi in the early '60s to work as an advisor to the Free Southern Theater,[24] a racially integrated troupe presenting Waiting for Godot amid a "belligerent, racist" atmosphere.

[26] The Workshop and its directors rose in national prominence for thirteen years until, in 1965, Irving and Blau were appointed to the artistic leadership at the Repertory Company in the Vivian Beaumont Theater of Lincoln Center.

[32] He steadily built the repertory company for the next seven years, concentrating mainly on his responsibilities and leadership as producer after personally directing some of the strongest early productions, including the powerful 1966 Caucasian Chalk Circle.

[33][34][35] While nurturing the acting and directing corps, he embraced at times certain "star" productions of quality, such as Mike Nichols' celebrated revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes and Gordon Davidson's staging of In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

[36] He ended his regime at Lincoln Center in 1972 with Ellis Rabb's widely celebrated direction of Maxim Gorky's Enemies[37] with a cast that included several actors who had come with Irving years earlier from San Francisco.