Erwin Piscator: New York and The Dramatic Workshop 1939–1951

ERWIN PISCATOR New York and The Dramatic Workshop 1939-1951 John Willett Farewell to the political theatre? There is a note of Piscator's, written in 1937, which says, "I can only work against bourgeois society, I can never work with it or through it." Similarly, that summer when he met Casbarra [Felix Casbarra, a German playwright] in Burgundy- their last meeting for some fifteen years- he got very angry and shouted, "But we said we'd never turn bourgeois!" To say the least, there was some self-deception involved here, for although it is true that, unlike Gasbarra, he never became an anticommunist or even openly critical of the Russians, old friends like Wolf and Brecht had commented on the grand style of his life in Paris, and working with and through bourgeois society was precisely whatt he henceforth did. Later in his American years there was good.reason for him not to expose himself politically, when the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Brecht and Eisler, to be followed by the Senate investigations under McCarthy. But there was no sudden shift in Piscator's attitude as a result of these events: he was a tactful guest from first to last, even if he never achieved the American citizenship for which he applied. Thus, in the spring of 1939, when he began trying to write a second book, he recalled the heading "Art to Politics" of the first chapter of Das politische Theater and decided to reverse this "in order to say 'From Politics to Art' . . That, finally, *finally, is what you want, I said to myself." 3 Likewise in 1942, when he wrote an article on "The Theatre of the Future," he said no word of politics, nor even of the content of the play, but treated the theatre rather as "an incomparable instrument for the expression of all human experience and thought." Certainly his Berlin achievements were known, as was his role in MORT [International Association of Workers' Theatres], and to the American left-wing theatre of the 1930s they had been important, particularly when the Federal Theatre Project's "Living Newspaper" adopted projections and the documentary technique. But even before the end of the decade that theatre was in decline and its organ New Theatre (to which Piscator in Moscow had been a contributing editor) had ceased publication. The Living Newspaper closed in October 1938, the Federal Theatre soon after Piscator's arrival. Joseph Losey, one of the former's leading directors , could say later that he knew Das politische Theater well, used it and even wished to translate it; but "the more I got to know Piscator, the less interested I became. . . In Moscow he was already half lost, in New York completely so." All that Piscator did in his twelve years in America seems small compared with what he had been able to accomplish in Berlin. Yet, he appears quite early on to have adjusted himself to this prospect in a way that he had not done in Moscow or Paris. At first he still hoped that Miller [Gilbert Miller, the New York and London impresario, hadearlier decided to produce Piscator's stage adaptation of War and Peace; the plan fell through] might relent, and while [Alfred] Neumann and he revised War and Peace, he gave readings of the script in his room at the Hotel Pierre and tried to find an American writer who would help adapt it to local requirements. However, both Sidney Howard (who was soon to be Toller's literary executor) and Clifford Odets turned it down. Clurman , on behalf of the Group Theatre, was not interested in the play, nor was any other Broadway producer; by March 1939 Miller had evidently rejected it once again. Meantime, Piscator was prepared to put up $5000 for the production of Spell Your Name, a refugee play on which Dorothy Thompson and Fritz Kortner were collaborating, and which Kortner would eventually direct under the title Another Sun. By then, however, he had learned that if he wanted to be admitted under the quota system he would not be able to settle in the United States as a director but only as a teacher...