Stage for Action

The theater must always be a safe and special place,” president-elect Donald J. Trump declared in an angry tweet directed to the cast of the Broadway show Hamilton on November 19, 2016. The night before, vice president elect Mike Pence had been in the audience; at the end of the performance, Brandon Victor Dixon, a star of the show, had addressed him from the stage, citing “alarm and anxiety” about the coming administration and appealing to him “to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.” In June 2017, protesters interrupted performances of the Shakespeare in the Park theater company's Julius Caesar, decrying the graphic assassination of a Caesar who resembled President Trump. Delta Airlines and Bank of America withdrew their funding even as others voiced support. Chrystyna Dail's Stage for Action explores the history of a short-lived activist theater in the 1940s, raising broader questions about performance, patronage, and the politics of theater. Established in 1943, the theater group Stage for Action (SFA) took up the rallying cry of other socially engaged artists to proclaim “art as a weapon.” Members sought to craft theatrical productions that met professional standards even as they challenged audiences to support progressive causes. Initially funded by private donations, labor unions, and the National Citizens Political Action Committee (an outgrowth of the Congress of Industrial Organizations Political Action Committee), the SFA became a national organization in 1946 when it allied closely with the Progressive party and Henry A. Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign

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