ABSTRACT
Contrary to popular opinion, there is activist theatre in the US today. But it looks very different than it did in the 1960s and early 1970s when there was a nationwide progressive political movement to support it. In 1959, for example, the San Francisco Mime Troupe was created in the wake of the free speech movement in Berkeley. In 1965 Luis Valdez founded El Teatro Campesino to support the Chicano farmworkers’ struggle. In 1963 John O’Neal and Gil Moses created the Free Southern Theater as a cultural wing to the civil rights movement. The Bread and Puppet Theatre, begun by Peter Schumann in 1961, reached national attention in the mid1960s as the unofficial mascot of nearly every major anti-Vietnam War march in the east. It’s All Right to Be Woman Theatre was one of the first all women’s companies in the early 1970s, reflecting the vigorous feminist movement building momentum around the country.
