The Propaganda Play

THE PROPAGANDA PLAY THE THESIS OR PROPAGANDA PUY is a play which is written for the purpose of enforcing a particular point of view. Many critics hold that the greater dramas of the world are not propagandistic. The authors of those dramas might include contemporary material but they are primarily concerned rather with the imaginative reflection of experience. Shakespeare's history plays, for example, while they may have reflected the philosophy of the English at the time of the Tudors and an experience of the period, were nevertheless not primarily concerned with presenting a thesis. The enduring theatre is educative, no doubt, but it is educative not in the manner of the reasoning lecturer or of the political orator; it is educative only in the sense that it arouses our interests and stimulates our imagination.1 In the contemporary American theater, especially the theater of the thirties, there were perhaps too many dramatists who were immatureand were sociologists rather than artists, eager to convert the masses. Their emphasis on economic motivation and upon dialectical materialism tended to become stereotyped. Nevertheless, as Gassner has noted, every young writer of any power who had lived through the thiritiesClifford Odets, Sidney Kingsley, Lillian Hellman, and William Saroyan -had been affected by the ferment of anger and hope of the times. The worker had become St. George and capitalism the dragon. The Group Theatre and the Theatre Union both emerged in the thirties. They devoted themselves primarily to plays of social criticism from the point of view of the left. As the result, the thesis play, which was almost dead in this country, was given new life. The depression years of the 1930's was a period of protest, and the thesis play became more popular on the New York stage than at any other contemporary period. Native revolutionary drama mirrored the social unrest of the country. The single purpose of the Theatre Union's production of Stevedore (ApriI1S, 1934) was to inflame the passions of its audience to a fighting hatred against the white man and his racism. Another Theatre Union production, Black Pit (March 20, 1935), concerned itself with the struggle between capital and labor. The characters in the play were not individuals but protagonists in an economic conflict. Piscator's version of Dreiser's novel, An American Tragedy (March 13, 1936), was another propaganda play. Economic justice, insisted 1. Allardyce Nicoll, World Dt"CIma (New York, 1949), p. 940. 429 430 MODERN DRAMA February Krutch, was only a contributing factor in the tragedy and not the whole tragedy. Dreiser at first objected to Piscator's interpretation, but as Mr. Wentz points out in another article in this issue, he later came to accept it. The Federal Theatre's "Living Newspaper" dealt with such problems as slum housing in New York City. It made no pretense to be an art theater; its purpose was to convey certain specific information and to enforce definite convictions. Before the thirties, the thesis play had been the favorite of the revolutionary Russian dramatists. While the thesis play, as Krutch said, had been pretty well played out in Western Europe and America, it remained a favorite with the Russians. Used for explicit didactic purposes and concerned with matter of immediate social significance, it thrived in the atmosphere which pervaded Russia. While the thesis drama of Europe had become a weary and hopeless thing, in Russia there existed an intense and hopeful preoccupation with social questions which enabled the thesis play to survive. The Russians believed in revolution. Abstract questions of social justice seemed immediately significant to them. But thesis drama under the Russians became a form of melodrama where the villain always failed and the hero always won. The Theatre Guild production of the Soviet drama Red Rust (December 17, 1929) is a case in point. The happy ending is brought about with childish simplicity, and the final curtain comes down on so much flag-waving that the average American is convinced that the author is merely attempting to persuade the censor that his play follows the party line. Krutch thought that the appeal of Red Rust to an American audience was largely due to an interest...