ABSTRACT
In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, Western artists and entertainers engaged directly in a contest among theatricalized actualities that included popular, high-brow, and subversive performances. Documentary theatre emerged from a melange of crude collages, stupid photographs, amateur actors, looky-loos, bohemians, and potboiler Naturalism. The term living newspaper carries a close association with workers' theatres of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the Soviet Blue Blouse troupes and their many western imitators, such as the UK's Theatre Union and the US Federal Theater Project's (FTP) Living Newspaper Bureau. Any discussion of journalistic theatre or newspaper plays can benefit from some historical awareness regarding how journalism has evolved and what the word journalism has connoted in different cultural contexts. Avant-garde painters published cartoons about contemporary politics in anarchist journals. To be sure, not all avant-garde movements at the time were invested in realism in any sense.
