Staging Strikes

Reviewed by: Staging Strikes: Workers’ Theatre and the American Labor Movement, and: American Labor on Stage: Dramatic Interpretations of the Steel and Textile Industries in the 1930s, and: The American Stage and the Great Depression: A Cultural History of the Grotesque Linda Kintz Staging Strikes: Workers’ Theatre and the American Labor Movement. By Colette A. Hyman. Critical Perspectives on the Past Series. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997; pp. xi + 199. $39.95 cloth. American Labor on Stage: Dramatic Interpretations of the Steel and Textile Industries in the 1930s. By Susan Duffy. Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies, no. 13. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996; pp. xii + 152. $55.00 cloth. The American Stage and the Great Depression: A Cultural History of the Grotesque. By Mark Fearnow. Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama, no. 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; pp. viii + 206. $49.95 cloth. The 1930s American theatre is attracting welcome attention, not only in the recent production of New York’s Great Small Works Theater, “Theater, Politics, and New York in the 1930s,” but also in studies such as these. Neglected in part because many of its texts are available only in archives, this period’s invisibility is also due to politics; many of the plays studied here were part of a thriving left cultural movement that has been almost erased from our collective memory by anticommunist revisionary histories that have covered over the complex relations among progressives, social democrats, liberals, communists, labor activists, and artists. In looking back, these books suggest surprisingly contemporary questions: How and when does theatre become relevant to social movements? What form does it take in those instances and why? What is the relation between activist theatre and questions of aesthetic quality? How does theatre draw on popular culture without losing a political edge? What happens when political theatre institutionalizes its structures? Because such questions haunt contemporary discussions, this remarkably innovative and dynamic period of cultural production has much to teach us. The first two books deal with workers’ theatre, the third with more commercially successful plays. Hyman follows several pedagogical and theatrical movements, seasoning her study with interviews with surviving members and emphasizing the importance of theatrical venue and audience life experience. Most of these plays were produced in conjunction with labor organizing and helped solidify communities, networks, friendships, and cultural identities. They also provided information on the national and local labor movement, lessons about movement building and organizing, and images that legitimated a certain view of reality and gave participants a sense of empowerment. In this context, quality was defined as the animation of a vision of social justice, though Hyman complicates this definition by dividing her study into two strands. The first is working-class theatre affiliated with labor colleges found in most large- and medium-sized cities, in particular Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York; the second is a more middle-class theatre, the New Playwrights Theatre in Greenwich Village. Brookwood was part of the labor education movement influenced by John Dewey’s pragmatist notions of progressive education; it integrated theatrical work into student activism and organized summer Labor chautauquas. While Brookwood retained a sense of optimism and a belief in action, the New Playwrights Theatre, though innovative and political, was nevertheless pessimistic about change. Hyman complicates the term “propaganda,” showing that while many of the participants saw the productions in almost magical ways, nevertheless, few minds were changed. Instead, workers’ theatre produced empowering changes in audiences that already agreed with it; the performances were far more effective as organizing and community-building events than they were in convincing the unconvinced, though this was no small achievement. [End Page 279] Hyman also analyzes problems, among which were the way representations of race and gender reflected ideas of the period; union solidarity among ethnic groups was represented in very different ways than was solidarity with African Americans. She argues, for instance, that presenting women characters as strong organizers sometimes shifted the terms of good leadership from a concern for the craft alone to concerns about the impact of industry on families and communities. The study provides a fine discussion of the contradictions represented by the Federal Theatre Project

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