ABSTRACT
IThe emergence of a Workers’ Theatre Movement in Britain coincided with similar developments in the USA.1 These similarities were not confined to historical trends but covered matters of theatrical form and prevailing ideology. A comparison of the two histories reveals certain similarities and numerous points of contact but ultimately gives way to two quite different approaches to political theatre which are themselves determined by the different socio-cultural characteristics of the British and American working classes.The wider historical schema of the American Workers Theatre Movement is almost identical to its British counterpart: a diffuse beginning in workers’ social clubs, a process of growth and consolidation during the 1920s, a logical zenith during the economic depression of the early years of the 1930s and an eventual resurgence during the period of ‘New Left’ activism in the late 1960s.Within this historical structure the period of activism during the 1930s reveals a number of interesting parallels between the two movements. Both turned to Germany and, of course, the Soviet Union, for formal and even ideological guidance, and as a result a similarity in style and even in the final scripts performed by the various groups can be seen.2 Both movements complied with a radical left shift in Communist International policy between 1928 and 1934 before reassessing their position to accommodate the ideas and strategies of the Popular Front. During the period 1928-34 Agit-Prop established itself as the main form for the Workers’ Theatre on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was by nö means the only form, nor did it achieve its status without considerable debate. Although the early years of the 1930s are seen in retrospect as a period of misplaced sectarianism, it was also a period of important theatrical experiment and interesting theoretical
discussion. It was a period which exposed certain contradictions within capitalism but also within the positions adopted by the revolutionary groups opposed to capitalism, not least the Communist Party. To suggest that the international experience of different Workers’ Theatre groups was uniform, and the result of workers uncritically accepting the cultural imperatives of the party and its functionaries, is a crude history to say the least. A close examination of the Workers Theatre in the USA exposes a number of these contradictions and immediately sets it apart from the British WTM. The two movements were as radically different as the cultural and sociological compositions of the countries themselves, and neither British nor American Workers’ Theatre was a pale or diluted imitation of the more active and better known movements in Russia and Germany. The working classes of all countries are at various levels of class consciousness and are influenced by separate national and ethnic cultures. This will always lead to different, but not incommensurate, workers’ cultures which in turn will produce varying approaches to Workers’ Theatre.3The American working class was, and to a lesser extent still is, composed of indigenous white workers, European immigrants and disinherited black workers whereas the British working class, during the 1920s and 1930s, was composed almost entirely of white indigenous workers. America’s multi-racial society therefore generated a workers’ culture which differed radically from that in Britain. Almost every ethnic minority in America had its own theatre group, whereas in Britain only the Jews were developed and numerous enough to create their own Workers’ Theatre. In New York, on the other hand, the Jewish Artef group, the Hungarian Dramatic Circle and Uj Elöre group, the German Prolet Buehne and Die Natur Freunde, and numerous Negro groups, including the theatrical wing of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, all mobilized to activate and entertain their own specific communities.It is understandable, therefore, that the politics of racialism concerned the American worker more directly than it did the British working class and predictably this concern is reflected in American Workers Theatre. History, ideology and extant scripts all confirm that the American worker produced a potent and effective anti-racialist theatre.4This anti-racialist stance was a reaction to two related reactionary
trends which threatened to divide the American working class. The first trend tried to set up the emancipated black as a ‘scapegoat* threat to traditional values whilst the other trend was an adaption of the perennial ‘Conspiracy Theory*. The first accused blacks of being a sexual and moral threat, whilst the second accused immigrant workers of subversive and clandestine activities designed to promote international communism. Ironically both these anxieties came to their heads in the form of political trials - one in the 1920s and one in the 1930s. The first trial was the Sacco and Vanzetti controversy involving two immigrant anarchists accused of robbery and murder, and the second was the trial of the Scottsboro Boys, wrongly accused of multiple rape. Both trials were extensive in their repercussions - the first, set against a 1920s background of ‘Red scare’ xenophobia, and the second against a 1930s background of unemployment, rural poverty and Southern lynch law mentality. The trials became crucial landmarks in American working-class history and provided the Workers Theatre with ideal political material. It is one of the major consistencies of Workers’ Theatre throughout the world that martyrdom makes good dramatic and propagandist theatre. The Workers’ Theatre, by definition, has always apotheosized the workers’ martyr.In 1930, three years after the death of Sacco and Vanzetti and ten years after their alleged crime, they were still being commemorated by workers’ groups. In Los Angeles the Rebel Players performed the play Gods of the Lightning in memory of the immigrants while in the same year, in New York, the Hungarian Workers’ Dramatic Circle staged a Hungarian-language version of the same play to remind their militant workers of the excesses of xenophobia in the USA.The Scottsboro case came at a very important time for the American Workers Theatre. It blew up against a background of violent anti-Negro activity which was being deliberately cultivated by proto-Fascist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Legion. However, it was also a period in which the Workers Theatre was being encouraged to propagate for multi-racialism by way of black themes and plays and by the creation of Negro and multi-racial troupes. The Scottsboro case provided both material and opportunity. A plethora of sketches and plays emerged including the Prolet Buehne’s Scottsboro, the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre’s Lynch Law, Langston Hughes’s Scottsboro Limited, and
the more social realist play They Shall Not Die by George Wexley, which was later produced by André van Gyseghem’s Left Theatre in London.The anti-racialist tenor of American Workers Theatre was only one strain in a whole series of differences which distinguished it from the British movement.The attitude adopted by professionals from the legitimate stage to the Workers Theatre group throws interesting light on the British and American movements. In America there seems to have been a higher level of involvement by intellectuals and theatre experts in Workers Theatre than has ever been the case in Britain. As early as 1913 New York’s intellectual élite were involved in Workers Theatre or Workers Singing Societies and by 1926 recognized professional playwrights like Mike Gold, John Howard Lawson and John Dos Passos of the New Playwrights Theatre helped form a militant amateur troupe, Workers Theater in New York.5 This short-lived collaboration was only one event in a tradition which shaped the history of American Workers Theatre. The attention and support it received from bona fide theatre professionals continually influenced the organization, techniques and even the ideological stance of proletarian theatre in America. Prominent members of college and university theatres, the Little Theatre Movement and even Broadway companies offered their assistance or advice to the workers throughout the 1920s and 1930s. This assistance was often rejected, particularly during the most sectarian years of ‘Third Period’ strategy in the early 1930s, but more often than not it was accepted and absorbed. Whereas the British Workers’ Theatre Movement appears to have been associated with professionals like W. H. Auden, who were at some distance from genuine working-class experience, the American workers were aided by individuals who shared working-class identity either by birth or by membership of workers’ organizations and parties.The campus theatres in America were particularly amenable to the workers’ groups. Hallie Flanagan, a teacher and director at Vassar College and later the national director of the Federal Theatre Project, was the most sympathetic college director. In 1931 she wrote the first recognized article on Workers Theatre under the title ‘A Theatre is Born’ for the prestigious magazine Theatre Arts Monthly,6 but more importantly she wrote and directed a Workers’
Agit-Prop for performance on Vassar’s strictly middle-class campus. In 1931, with the help of Margaret Ellen Clifford, Hallie Flanagan co-wrote and staged a piece entitled Can You Hear their Voices? The play was adapted from a story by Whittaker Chambers and dwelt on the conflict between a rich congressman and the rural working class he represented. It was an appeal to American intellectuals to support the working class, and the appeal was presented in a style which was new and experimental by American college terms. Can You Hear their Voices? was a fusion of Agit-Prop and Living Newspaper forms which were already well established in the USSR and Germany but which were almost unknown in the USA outside the perimeters of the Workers Theatre Movement.7 It is clear, therefore, that the influence professionals had on Workers Theatre was not a one-way process. The two parties certainly cross-referred and this cross-reference was just as valuable and just as advantageous to legitimate theatre as it was to the workers.The Communist cell of the professional Group Theatre were the most ardent supporters of New-York-based Workers Theatre groups. Art Smith, Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets, all Group Theatre actors, were the most vociferous and active in their support. They arranged classes in acting and directing specifically for workers’ groups and enlisted the support of less committed Group Theatre personnel, like Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman, to give practical demonstrations. The involvement of Group Theatre sympathizers increased as ‘Third Period’ sectarianism thawed around 1934. Smith and Kazan wrote an anti-Nazi Agit-Prop entitled Dimitroj j that year, and it was performed at Theatre Union’s Civic Repertory Theatre by members of the cast of the Group Theatre’s Broadway production of Men in White.8 Although Dimitrojf was never a popular play with the workers’ groups it set a precedent for a much more important collaboration between the Group Theatre radicals and Workers’ Theatre. On 6 January 1935, at a New Theatre Night, members of the Group Theatre, including Kazan and Smith, presented Clifford Odets’s one-act agitational play, Waiting For Lefty.Waiting For Lefty met with phenomenal audience reaction and soon became the most popular play in the American Workers Theatre canon. Set against a background of the 1934 taxi-drivers’ strike in New York, the play was undoubtedly the most complete
statement made by the militant Workers Theatre. It revealed the various ways in which the individual changes from apathy to commitment (a theme which fascinated the Workers Theatre) and did so within a framework which revealed corrupt unionism and violent anti-strike activity. Waiting For Lefty was therefore the most mature outcome of the collaboration of Workers Theatre and professional sympathizers and the most potent result of the fusion of Agit-Prop and social realism.It is at this point in their historical development that the American and British Workers’ Theatre Movements begin to diverge. The British movement did not receive the same support from sympathizers and never really produced a work of the vitality and importance of Waiting For Lefty. Historical events made the divergence even greater as the 1930s wore on. Roosevelt’s New Deal Administration in America provided subsidy for the unemployed actor and designer under the Federal Theatre Project and this obviously affected the Workers Theatre Movement. As their British counterparts continued unaided and often badly supported, the American worker/actor was provided with a subsidized framework in which to work. Although the Federal Theatre Project did not replace Workers Theatre, it absorbed many of its participants and gave them a new opportunity to continue their experiment. IIThe history of the USA Workers Theatre during the 1920s and 1930s follows three distinct periods of development. The years between 1925 and 1932 marked the establishment and growth of the movement; the period between 1932 and 1935 saw a consolidation of the movement and an eventual progression towards an anti-Fascist ideology, and the final phase between 1935 and the Second World War saw the decline of Workers Theatre. These three phases correspond to similar developments in Britain and thus act as a useful historical framework in which to analyze the changes and developments in political culture during the 1930s. However, it should be borne in mind that these phases were not as conveniently defined as one might imagine. Workers Theatre responded to local and national political issues more than anything, and took its directives from the particular needs of the workers. A labour dispute, an extended picket-line, a sit-down strike, or a
hunger march were likely to generate increased theatrical activity against the historical trends of development or decline.7 June 1913 is probably the first significant date in the history of twentieth-century American Workers Theatre. The day marks the performance of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) pageant at Madison Square Garden. The pageant was part of an organized campaign supporting the Paterson silk strikers and recreated important events during the extensive strike including the death of Valentino Modestino at the hands of hired detectives, the resultant funeral, a mass meeting of 20,000 strikers, a May Day parade and the pathetic scenes of children being sent to ‘strike’ mothers in neighbouring cities to keep them away from the violent conflict. The pageant involved more than 1,000 performers, all workers from the Paterson, New Jersey, silk factories. It was directed by Jack Reed and supported by the IWW, but it seems that the pageant had adverse effects on the strike. No money from the performance ever reached the strike fund, the pageant effectively divided the workers and whilst activity centred on rehearsals, the strike itself was partly neglected allowing ‘scabs’ to break an almost foolproof picket.9One positive result of the Paterson Silk Strike Pageant was the links it forged between the organized working class and New York’s intellectual ‘Bohemians’. This association of worker and intellectual became traditional and a crucial influence on subsequent Workers Theatre in America. In the early 1920s the links between workers and intellectuals were confused, primarily because the intellectuals were a strange mixture of anarchists, socialists, syndicalists and romantic idealists, and were generally unclear about their commitment to the working class. With the emergence of a Marxist vanguard within ‘Greenwich Village intellectualism’, the interaction between worker and intellectual became more clear and more productive. In 1926 Mike Gold and John Howard Lawson, both Marxist writers, formed the Workers’ Drama League, which became the first sustained attempt to promote organized Workers Theatre in New York.The Workers’ Drama League was very European in its outlook and intention. It attempted to bring American workers up-to-date with cultural progress in Russia and Germany and establish a structure within which a native political culture could function. Mike Gold had previously visited Russia in his capacity as editor
of New Masses and was keen to establish an American Proletkult along similar lines to those already mapped out in Moscow. The major work to emerge out of that short-lived experiment was a mass recitation written by Gold entitled Strike! In the Foreword to the recitation, written in 1926, he acknowledges its Soviet heritage and proposes certain approaches:10
To begin with, no tinsel stage or stage settings are necessary; the rough bare platform of any ordinary union hall or meeting hall is enough, is the most fitting stage in fact.About thirty men and women are needed in the following Mass Recitation (Strike!). As indicated they are scattered in groups or as individuals through the audience. Except for those who take the parts of Capitalists, Police, etc., they are dressed in their usual street clothes; they have no make-up on, there is nothing to distinguish them from their fellow-workers in the audience.This is what makes a Mass Recitation so thrilling and real. The action in my recitation commences on the platform, with POVERTY speaking; suddenly from the midst of the audience a group of men workers chant; then a woman stands up and shouts something; then a group of girls in another part of the house . . .The audience is swept more and more into the excitement all around them; they become one with the actors, a real mass; before the recitation is over, everyone in the hall should be shouting: ‘Strike! Strike!’ The Workers’ Drama League’s Soviet spirit paved the way for America’s first known mobile theatre group, the Prolet Buehne, who broke away from their parent Arbeiterbund in 1929. The Prolet Buehne were a German-language group, directed by a Communist émigré John Bonn,11 who specialized in a fast, visual and rhythmic style of recitation which owed much to the style of German worker’s groups. The Prolet Buehne performed at meetings throughout New York, but were mostly to be found in the German immigrant areas around Yorkville and the Bronx, and at strikes or picket-lines in industries traditionally associated with German immigrant workers, particularly the waterfront docks and breweries. The Prolet Buehne soon became part of an activist
vanguard which dictated the performance policy of American Workers Theatre until the mid-1930s. The other main group in this vanguard were the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre - the most important English-speaking group in the history of American Workers Theatre.By 1929 there were enough active workers’ groups to form the Workers’ Dramatic Council12 which was based in New York but contacted groups in other industrial cities. Workers Theatre groups had by now emerged in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles.13 The movement expanded rapidly over the next two years and in 1931 the Prolet Buehne and the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre co-edited the first official organ of the Workers Theatre. The magazine, although at first limited to a few mimeographed sheets, soon became the united voice for a National Workers Movement - naturally the magazine was entitled Workers Theatre.14As the early 1930s progressed, Workers Theatre became more organized and sought increased contact and co-operation. On 13 June 1931, a joint venture by the Marxist cultural magazine, New Masses, and the John Reed Club brought together delegates from 224 workers’ cultural societies in New York and aimed to form a federation which would unite the various groups. The 1931 conference raised two particular issues which were crucial to the development of the first phase of the Workers Theatre Movement. The first issue was more or less confined to America but the second was a problem which confronted the organizers of Workers’ Theatre throughout the world.The American problem outlined the difficulties of formulating a united workers’ culture in a country comprising numerous national cultures and ethnic minorities. The immigrant groups, of which there were many, were criticized for placing too great an emphasis on folklore and cultural nationalism, and ignoring the need for an international workers’ culture. This criticism was clearly aimed at groups like the Bronx Hungarian Dramatic Circle, the Uj Elöre Dramatic Club and the Ukrainian Dramatic Circle which normally staged plays with an overtly Slavic atmosphere. Michael Gold urged that these groups reveal the problems of Slavic workers in America and unite with the indigenous workers’ groups to form a unified political culture. The second problem was related to the first but was more international in its implications. It was a problem which was, and to some extent still is, fundamental to
working-class culture. To what extent should the Workers Theatre associate itself with, and borrow from, the bourgeois stage?The ‘class antagonism’ which characterized the first phase in the development of American Workers Theatre presupposed a rejection of bourgeois influence. John Bonn of the Prolet Buehne was adamant about the obvious antagonism between workers’ culture and bourgeois culture.15
