Adler made her English-language debut on Broadway in 1922 as the Butterfly in "The World We Live In", and she spent a season in the vaudeville circuit. In 1922–23, the renowned Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavski made his only U.S. tour with his Moscow Art Theatre. Adler and many others saw these performances, which had a powerful and lasting impact on her career and the 20th-century American theatre. She joined the American Laboratory Theatre in 1925; there, she was introduced to Stanislavski's theories, from founders and Russian actor-teachers and former members of the Moscow Art Theater—Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya. In 1931, with Sanford Meisner and Elia Kazan, among others, she joined the Group Theatre, New York, founded by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford, through theater director and critic, Clurman, whom she later married in 1943. With Group Theatre, she worked in plays such as "Success Story" by John Howard Lawson, two Clifford Odets plays, "Awake and Sing!" and "Paradise Lost", and directed the touring company of Odets's "Golden Boy" and "More to Give to People". Members of Group Theatre were leading interpreters of the method acting technique based on the work and writings of Stanislavski.