Dramaturgy

Creating a Class Consciousness

Funded by the United States Government, brought to you by the American Theatre
by Kelli Marino

In 1935, in direct response to the United States’ Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched the Relief Appropriations Act—the New Deal—and what can be considered the nation’s largest employment agency, the Works Progress Administration. The WPA covered programs from highways to reforestation, but its most innovative was a collective named Federal One, which employed some 40,000 artists in the Federal Arts, Writers, Music and Theatre Projects.

Educator and playwright Hallie Flanagan was named to direct the Federal Theatre Project, by far the most controversial of the government-funded arts programs. More than 10,000 theatre professionals became associated with this effort that would take productions to the people and tackle social and economic themes of the times.

Out of the Federal Theatre Project emerged a new movement in America called the Living Newspaper. Inspired by Germany’s Bertolt Brecht and by Erwin Piscator’s Agit-Prop (agitation + propaganda) movement, and sponsored by the New York Newspaper Guild, the Living Newspaper created dramatic documentary pieces from news reports, human-interest stories, editorials and cartoons. These performances illuminated current social problems and controversial issues on the stage in an exciting and often politically charged fashion; artists inserted social commentary to both provoke and educate their audiences.

Flanagan’s argument for the importance of these projects was that “theatre was more than a private enterprise, that it was also a public interest which, properly fostered, might come to be a social and educative force.” Through the Living Newspaper, the story of the ordinary life of the ordinary man—the “little man” as he was commonly called—became art, capable of touching every American through entertainment. It was up to audience members to take what they saw on stage and in turn investigate their own existence in relation to the larger world and, it was hoped, to develop the courage to have a voice.

One of the Living Newspaper’s most notable plays was Clifford Odets’ powerful one-act Waiting for Lefty. Odets, a member of New York’s Group Theatre, an ensemble of artists disciplined in the practices of Russian theatre artist Konstantin Stanislavski, as well as of the Communist Party (1934-5), was a prolific voice of the Group Theatre. It is generally agreed that Odets found the play’s source in 1934’s forty-day New York taxicab strike of 40,000 employees (even though Odets told an interviewer “It was just something I kind of made up … I didn’t know anything about a taxicab strike … I have never been near a strike in my life.”), not to mention the many other contemporary strikes and union uprisings in the United States’ textile mills, steel factories, and other industries.

What truly set Waiting for Lefty apart from other plays of the era, and what continues to keep it relevant, is the truthfulness of the characters Odets penned. He created a language that was strong and resilient, yet moving and emotional. Harold Clurman, a founder and director of the Group Theatre, stated that “Odets’s writing is a personal creation, essentially lyric, in which vulgarity, tenderness, energy, humor and headlong idealism are commingled.” It was reported that at the end of the first performance in New York, the audience was so moved that it erupted into chants of “Strike! Strike!”

As with so many of theatre’s most critical and profound plays, Waiting for Lefty was widely performed and subsequently banned in cities throughout the United States. Though it attacked the evils of capitalism, social class and race separation, 1930s and subsequent audiences discovered their personal journey in Waiting for Lefty, with its people of many backgrounds and economic levels striving to achieve a measure of the American dream—and a shred of human dignity.

The Federal Theatre Project reenergized a nation, especially the American working class, many of whose members had believed that theatre was to be enjoyed only by the upper classes. But it also met its adversaries in government officials who thought money was being needlessly spent, and that too many of the plays were injecting communist and socialist agendas into the nation’s awareness.

By the end of the Federal Theatre Project in 1939, the project had produced more than 10,000 jobs, created 1,200 new plays, generated 100 new playwrights, and reached audiences in forty states. Most important of the many thousands of people who saw a government-funded Federal Theatre Project production, between 65 and 80 percent saw the shows free of charge.

During this four-year period, the theatrical form exposed and challenged the days’ issues. Change was happening, and the theatre was its platform.