Women, Workers, and Community: Working-Class Visions and Workers’ Theatre in the 1930s

Canadian Review of American Studies Volume 23, Number I, Fall 1992, pp: 15-37 Women, Workers, and Community: Working-Class Visions and Workers' Theatre in the 1930s Colette A. Hyman 15 Introduction.In the concluding scene of Paul Peters and George Sklar's play, Stevedore, one of the most powerful plays of the workers' theatre movement of the 1930s,the community of African American dockworkers is fighting off an attack by a vicious White racist mob. Suddenly, the White union organizer and his followers arrive to lend support to the African American community, and Binnie, the community's unofficial leader, who had until then remained in the background, aims a pistol at the mob's ringleader and fires. She shouts exultantly: "I got him! That red-headed son-of-a-bitch, I got him! I got him!" (123). A cry of triumph arises from the crowd, and a few moments later, the final curtain falls. The drama of pitched battle and the turbulence leading up to it made the play extremely successful with audiences, both African American and European American. This scene, as well as the play as a whole, also brings together several key themes running through the body of workers' plays created in the 1930s: community-based struggles, female leaders who both fit and transcend conventional views of women, and the unity, however belated, between African American and White workers. Such representations echo a variety of popular myths and images of working-class action that stand in an ambivalent relationship to the reality of working people's lives. While certainly modelled on working-class experiences, these images also 16 CanadianReviewof AmericanStudies reveal a great deal about the assumptions and ideals of working-class organizing. As these plays reveal, working-class models of leadership and solidarity drew heavily on ideas and ideals about gender, race, and ethnicity, and reinterpreted working-class experiences of these social identities. The imagery of gender, racial, and ethnic differences articulated a vision of activism which ultimately challenged labour unions to address more comprehensively the needs and aspirations of working people. The scripts of the workers' theatre movement allow a point of entry into working-class consciousness because of their close connection to workingclass activism.Some, like Stevedore,were written by professional playwrights for professional production, but they also circulated widely among working women and men, at workers' schools, in unions, and in local workers' theatre groups. Other scripts are barely more than outlines for sketches developed by activists interested in theatre or students at workers' schools, and were produced in parks, at rallies, or on picket lines. Finally, some of the scripts of the workers' theatre· movement were written within unions to be performed bymembers, for the entertainment and inspiration of their fellow members. For, while all these drama projects recognized the importance of bringing amusement to the embattled livesof working people, their primary motives were educating them about labour issues, and mobilizing them to support and actively work with the labour movement.1 In creating these didactic scripts, the authors entered into a dialogue with their audiences that drew on shared experiences and knowledge. The creators of workers' playsself-consciouslyappealed to their audiences on the basis of issues and concerns of interest to them, in terms that they would readily recognize. At the same time, however, the plays' creators also used that shared vocabulary to advance their own views and relay them to their audiences. The productions of the workers' theatre movement thus embody the negotiations between received notions and lived experiences, on one hand and, on the other hand, idealized conceptions and goals that constantly take place in the process of organizing within social movements. Concretely, this means that representations in these scripts derive from both the lives of working peoples writing and attending them, and an imagined world they sought to create. In other words, the plays are both descriptive and ColetteA. HymanI 17 prescriptive, reflections of working people's realities, and recipes for changing them. The iconography of labour and leftism in the 1930shas recently been the subject of several sensitive studies that have focused on the representation and conceptualization of gender. From various theoretical and historiographical perspectives, Elizabeth Faue...