Workers' Theatre and the "War of Position" in the 1930s

Workers' Theatre and the "War of Position" in the 1930S JIM MILLER In Radical Representations: Politics and Form ill U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 192<}-I94I, Barbara Foley reminds us of how the conservative agenda of New Criticism has shaped the way left-wing writing has been received: Until quite recently, it has been almost uncontested in U.S. critical circles that leftwing partisanship - to many writers and critics of the 19305 a sine qua non of meaningful representation - is a guarantor of moral dishonesty and artistic failure. Standards of literary scholarship have been abysmally low. All that has been routinely necessary to clinch a judgement is the ritual incantation of some highly loaded binary opposition for example, 'creative judgement' versus 'party line.' In this atmosphere of chilled intellectual discourse it has become difficull ... to inquire into the value of the texts these writers generated.I Foley's point here is about the critical reception of proletarian fiction, but the same might be said about the way critics have dealt with left-wing theatre. As Paul Sporn argues in "Working-Class Theatre on the Auto picket Line," the "generally conservative aesthetic and political attitudes that have prevailed in the United States since the end of World War II [have] compounded the problem " of scholars seeking to rediscover and comment on little-known theatre.2 Indeed all three of the anthologies from which I drew to research this paper are out of print. By failing to preserve and make available the documents of the workers' theatre movement, much of academia is complicitous in the erasure of the history of working people in America. In A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama (1982), C.W.E. Bigsby chides playwright Clifford Odets for "subverting plot to ideology ,"3 and attacks workers' drama for forgetting that "[i]n a sense the language of theatre stands at another extreme from the language of action [politics].'" Both of these criticisms assume a false distinction between the Modern Drama, 39 (1996) 421 422 JIM MILLER apolitical (though richly ambiguous and full of complexity) language of an and the all-too-obvious language of the political world. What Bigsby is after here is a way to dismiss political an on aesthetic grounds rather than dismissing it on ideological grounds and thereby falling into the sordid fray. The problem with Bigsby's position is that it is based on what is an impossible separation of aesthetics and politics, one that denies the very ideological nature of his position as a critic. If we rely solely on discourses like Bigsby's, texts that challenge hegemonic ideology -that which seems "natural" to many of us ~ will always be deemed lacking. Perhaps the argument that a text is "bad" because it is ideological is either disingenuous or based on a delusion that some texts escape the social. If all texts are socially produced and hence inevitably ideological, then maybe those that we see as "good" are either those that effectively naturalize the hegemonic ideology we hold as true/real or those that successfully challenge that ideology by getting us to think and/or act differently. With this in mind, a more productive approach to workers' drama than Bigsby's would address it in its social/political/economic context and try to gauge how well it achieved what it set out to do. In what follows, I consider workers' drama in its historical context and then evaluate various works by looking at them through the frame set up by Walter Kaiaidjian in American Culture Between the Wars: Revisio1)ary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (1993). Kalaidjian claims that the reason American proletcult failed was because it did not engage in a Gramscian "war of position " within modem American consumer society. My main focus is on the four American plays included in Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuan Cosgrove's anthology, Theaters of the Left 1880-1935: Workers' Theatre Movements in Britain and America (1985). They are Art is a Weapon, 15Minute Red Revue, Newsboy, and Waiting for Lefty. In addition to these plays, I also make reference to other works from Gold et 01., Proletarian Literature in the United States (1935), and Henry Lesnick's 1973 anthology, Guerilla Street Theatre. Specifically, it is my contention that while all of the plays in the anthologies I surveyed contain some successful elements, it is Newsboy, rather than the traditionally championed Waiting for Lefty, that comes the closest to engaging in a successful "war of position" within American mass culture. THE "THEATR E BORN OF THE DEPRES SION Only in the context of immense suffering, huge class divisions, arrogant abuse of corporate power, wide-spread racism, anti-immigrant feeling, militant labor unrest, and the increasing threat of fascism can the binh, brief prospering, and demise of the workers' theatre movement be understood. The workers' theatre movement was not just a few foreign-born "others" and disaffected native Workers' Theatre and the "War of Position" in the 1930S 423 intellectuals trying to impose an alien ideology on indifferent American workers . It was a home-grown product of extraordinary socio-economic circumstances that provided, fora brief moment, fertile soil and a receptive audience. As Daniel Friedman reminds us in "A Brief Description of the Workers' Theatre Movement of the Thirties," the workers' theatre movement was "the only movement in U.S. history in which workers created theatre for their fellow workers with the express intent of building a distinct working class culture." While there had been workers' theatre among non-English-speaking workers before the thirties, the only precedent among English-speakers was the IWW's "Paterson Strike Pageant which was performed in 1913 by a cast of 1,200 striking silk workers." What created the boom in workers' theatre in the thirties was the hardship of the Depression combined with the Russian Revolution 's "living example of class culture at work."s The significance of this second impetus is only fully understood if one notes that the true nature of Stalinist repression was not yet widely known. Hence there was a promise in the Soviet example that is hard for us to imagine today. With regard to theatre, it offered an alternative model that inspired many artists. In 1929 there was only one English-speaking group, but by 1934 there were 400 workers' theatre groups, with English-speaking troupes comprising almost half of the total number.6 According to Stuart Cosgrove in "From Shock Troupe to Group Theatre," the first "mobile theatre group" in the United States was the German-speaking Prolet-Buehne, founded in 1929 and led by "Communist emigre John Bonn."7 In "The Workers' Laboratory Theatre: Archetype and Example," Douglass McDermott informs us that the first English-speaking group, the Workers' Laboratory Theatre (WLT), was formed in the same year "by the association of Alfred Saxe, Harry Elion, Jack Reines, Albert Prentiss, Will Lee, and Jack and Hiram Shapiro."s The Prolet-Buehne and the WLT were the first to develop agit-prop in the United States. Together they formed the Dramatic Bureau of the New York Cultural Federation, which came to include 150 groups by 1932. It then spawned the League ofWorkers' Theaters, a nation-wide network of troupes.9 The LOWT put out the magazine Workers' Theatre, which had a peak circulation of 18,000. The second national LOWT conference in 1934 was attended by 1,500 people representing 400 workers' theatres.10 A movement had been born. While the Prolet-Buehne certainly led the way, the WLT deserves credit for developing the Shock Troupe in t933, a mobile unit that could perform "under almost any circumstances." This meant performing in union halls, on picket lines. at evictions, and in many other non-traditional venues. The reason why this was necessary was because as McDermott points out: Most working class people were not used to going to the theatre in the 1930'S, so even if the WLT had been able to afford a regular theatre, it') audience wouldn't have come. Thus, it was necessary to go to the audience - to perfonn in locations and under JIM MILLER circumstances where working people were already gathered, usually in union halls or in the open air.] 1 Following the Shock Troupe's lead, one group in Detroit rehearsed their play, The Strike Marches On, at the strike headquartcrs, getting input from workers and including them in the playas actors." Another group in Chicago, while performing an eviction play in front of a branch of the Unemployment Council , interrupted their play to help fight off police and stop a .real eviction around the corner. After moving the furniture back into the house, they finished their play. '3 Thus, the mobility of the workers' theatre made art relevant and blurred the line between life and art. The Shock Troupe's own mobile production reached a sizable number of people. In 1933 alone the small group managed to play before [00,000 people .'4 There most popular play was Newsboy, which won the award at the National Workers' Theatre Festival in Chicago in 1934.'5 In that same year, however, the workers' theatre movement began to change. The WLT, which had initially embraced agit-prop as a rejection of bourgeois theatre, turned to friends in the Group Theatre for instruction. This meant a move toward "more polished representational production values",6 and back to the previously rejected "concept of universal culture."" Both the official embrace of socialist realism in the Soviet Union and the Popular Front strategy, which called for cooperation with the bourgeois left, encouraged this move. The high point of this new, more representational workers' theatre was the Group Theatre's 1935 production of Waiting for Lefty, which despite its use of agit-prop strategies was, as McDermott puts it, "intensely representational and was best performed in a regular theatre."" Waiting for Lefty was successful, but it did not lead to an explosion of a new kind of workers' theatre. Instead, the alliancemaking strategy of the Popular Front against fascism, combined with the appearance of the social welfare policies of Roosevelt's New Deal, discouraged the confrontational style of the workers' theatre. ' 9 In fact, in 1936 the Shock Troupe itself was absorbed into the Federal Theatre Project as One-Act Experimental Theatre, which performed one bill of plays and was disbanded, with its members joining other Federal Theatre projects.'o Although other groups struggled on until as late as 1950, the movement never again reached the heights it had in the 1930s. Despite this failure, the high point of workers' theatre is worth remembering, for, in Friedman's words. "Never, before or since, have we come so close to a truly democratic theatre,"21 In American Culture Between the Wars, Walter Kalaidjian claims that "the Old Left was clueless in dealing with America's conglomerate culture industry ."" Interestingly, he posits that the Old Left, like their counterparts on the traditional right, made the mistake of placing themselves outside and against mass culture, ceding the field to the forces of modern capitalism.'3The result of this, Kalaidjian argues, was that they failed to engage in a Gramscian "war of Workers' Theatre and the "War of Position" in the 1930S 425 position" within American consumer culture and hence lost the masses to the media and the advertising industry. What was lacking in the Old Left was a more sophisticated aesthetic that would work "within the fonnal conventions of advenising discourse to rearticulate its rhetoric and visual signs for progressive change."" Some people, like Broom editor Matthew Josephson, called for such art, Kalaidjian tells us, but the Old Left refused to listen.'5 Kalaidjian does note some exceptions (Diego Rivera, Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Fearing, etc.) and is fair enough to mention that it would have been financially impossible for the Old Left to compete "with the overflowing coffers of Hollywood media moguls and newspaper monopolists like William Randolph Hearst.", 6 However, he does generally paint the American proletarian art ofthe thirties as a total fail ure. The one great omission in Kalaidjian's extensive and insightful history of oppositional culture between the wars is drama. Besides a brief one-line mention of the Paterson Strike Pageant, workers' theatre is never dealt with. This leads one to wonder if it too utterly failed to engage in the war of position Gramsci called for. The answer, as we shall see, is not simple. While some of the plays are clearly less sophisticated than others, they all engage the question of the workers' relationship to mass culture in one way or another, and not all do it from the outside-in. Indeed, some workers' plays did altemptthe inside-out "homeopathic strategy," as Jameson calls it.'7 and did quite well, considering the limited resources available to them. ART AS A WEAPON The writers of the workers' dramas (both collective and individual) sought to set their works apart from the commercial products of Broadway. Their agitprop plays were anti-escapist. Rather than aiming to send their audience home "purged" ala Aristotle, the goal of the workers' theatre was to have the audience leave the theatre on the picket line pent/pissed/energized and ready for collective action. Agit-prop might best be summarized as a way to foster anger and convey infonnation. Why anger? Because, in the words of a song by The Clash, "anger cali be power." John Bonn, founder of the Prolet-Buehne, saw the role of agit-prot as fundamentally opposed to that of the bourgeois theatre. Workers' theatre should not borrow from bourgeois theatre because it was, in his words, "fighting against the bourgeois class." Hence "[ilts only audience are the masses of workers.",8 Here Bonn clearly seems to be positioning himself outside and against mass culture, as Kalaidjian argues the Old Left always did. But several questions arise. Was bourgeois culture synonymous with mass culture? Could Bonn have totally freed his theatre from the dominant cultural fonns that, in part at least, are inevitably involved in the fonnation of new fonns of culture, even oppositional ones? Was there an indigenous working class culture for him to draw from? JIM MILLER The IJ-Minute Red Revue, one of Bonn's plays perfonned by the ProletBuehne , is a prime example of his fonn of agit-prop. This brief play attacks "Capitalism and its servants"'· and valorizes the Soviet Union. The first section , "Agit-Prop," defines the role of agit-prop as the "theatre of revolution" against "bosses," "yellow socialists," and "Fascists," and for "the Soviet Union, the workers' fatherland!" (306-307) The second section, "Fifteen Minutes," tells the audience the length of the play and what could happen in such a shon time - "you may be hired," "you may be fired," "you may be in jail," "you may be out on bail." (307) In the third section, "What is the Soviet Union," the new communist state is described as a heroic symbol and the "death sentence of capitalism," much to the chagrin of the canoonish capitalist who objects on cue at the end of the section. (308) The founh section, "Capitalism and its servants," portrays an argument between the "servants," "radio," "art," and "science," and their opposites, a "worker" and the "Soviet Union." (3°9-15) This section serves as a kind of comedic morality play, with each of the servants of capitalism confessing their role in the oppression of the worker, or having it pointed out by the Soviet Union. The final section, "For the Soviet Union," prods the audience into the act; asking it to fight for the Soviet Union by means of a collective recitation. (314-15) All of this is driven by repetition and a rhythmic mass chant. As McDennoll points out about agit-prop in general, the action in The IJMinute Red Revue is "the arousal of the workers to a pitch of political awareness that leads them to take action by unifying and organizing on their own behalf."30 In addition to this, the play's language fits nicely into his twin categories of the "fonnal rhetoric of the slogan" and "idiomatically representational speech."3' The central vehicle for The IJ-Minute Red Revue's message was mass recitation. According to workers' theatre playwright and critic Mike Gold, the goal of the mass recitation was to sweep the audience up in the excitement around them until "they become one with the actors, a real mass."32 Sometimes mass recitation was accompanied by simple music and/or choreographed "almost dance-like movement by the actors." It was wellsuited to the limited resources of the mobile theatre and it was, interestingly, their most popular tactic.33 Of the four plays in the Theaters ofthe Left anthology, The IJ-Minute Red Revue would seem to be the most vulnerable to Kalaidjian's charge of failing to engage in a war of position from within mass culture. It is, on face. simplis-tic , dogmatic, and ardently opposed to mass culture (an, radio, press, etc.), the "servant" of capitalism. But things are not as simple as they first appear. Before we dismiss the play's simple opposition to the lies of "mass culture," we need to examine how this opposition takes shape. In the founh section of the play, there is a series of exchanges between a "worker," "the press," the "Soviet Union," a "Censor," and the "Radio." (310) While the infonnational purpose of this staged argument is to convey facts about the U.S.-supponed Workers' Theatre and the "War of Position" in the t930S 427 "white terror" and the government's censorship of "subversive literature," this information is given in a lively, humorous fashion. Consider, for example, the way in which the radio is mimicked: RADIO: Stand by. ladies and gentlemen, and hear the real treat of the evening.This is station GOLD of Wall Street Broadcasting System. Ladies and gentlemen, I have the honor to present to you Mr. Babbitt who has just returned from a trip to Soviet Russia. Hear the truth about Soviet Russia ... innocent blood flows in the streams.... (310) This kind of mimicry does make use of the Iangauge of mass culture and seeks to engage in a crude form of defamiliarization. In addition to this, the caricatured portrayals, it seems to me, borrow from other more commercial forms of art like slapstick and/or vaudeville comedy routines as Friedman argues agitprop plays often did." The mass recitation that surrounds the bits of individual dialogue in The 15Minute Red Revue seeks to break down the wall between spectator and spectacle that had been established in the modem American theatre. According to Robert Allen in Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture, by the tum of the century, the compilation of the first book on "theatre law" had transformed the previously more active audience into "consumers of a theatrical product, no longer actors in the theatrical experience."35 The impulse of mass recitation was to break the spell of the spectacle and tum spectators into actors. Some plays took this participatory impulse a step further. An example of this occurred when the workers of the National Textiles Union in New Bedford put on their own play, The Life ofa Worker, working only from an outline because they already knew their parts well enough from reallife.36 Despite the simplicity and naive optimism of the mass recitation and the Mill Workers' play, these attempts to contest the ideology of passive consumption deserve to the applauded rather than condescended to. So it seems that while The I5-Minute Red Revue does take an antibourgeois stance, it still borrows from commercial culture. Perhaps the reason for this is because, despite Bonn's proclamations to the contrary, workingclass culture cannot be completely separated from the dominant culture. My argument here is not that The I j-Minute Red Revue engages in a conscious, sophisticated war of position. Certainly it is stereotypical proletcult in its unquestioning embrace of the Soviet Union as the answer to all problems as opposed to some home-grown solution/symbol. The play also could make more sophisticated use of mimicry and other forms of satire. What The 15Minute Red Revue does do is try to negotiate its opposition to mass culture. While the play opposes the messages of the mass media, it does not, as Kalaidjian claims the Old Left did, totally ignore the cultural landscape. An interesting case to consider briefly here is that of The Middleman (from JIM MILLER Lesnick's Guerilla Street Theatre), a simple folk-story-style piece of agit-prop that tells the tale of a farmer with potatoes and no pants, and a tailor with plenty of pants and no potatoes, who are kept from trading with each other by a capitalist "middleman."" They story ends with the middleman being exposed and the audience singing along with a song about "joining a cooperative " and getting "rid of the middleman." (436) This simple play clearly doesn't deal with mass culture. It was performed mostly for farmers who'd never seen a play or a movie.)s How does The Middleman fit into Kalaidjian's view of the thirties? Clearly, it falls into a gap. The play's audience is not yet totally immersed in modernism. With this in mind, can't we assume that the folksy storytelling style and the foot-tapping number at the end of the piece are pan of a different kind of war of position? One of the earliest and most popular pieces of agit-prop done by the WLT was Art is a Weapon, which they performed frequently in 1930.39 Like The I5-Minute Red Revue, Vote Communist, and Yoo-Hooey, this play sets the capitalist up as the fall guy. It starts out with the chorus reciting the lines of" the capitalist confessing, "quite confidentially," how "art is a weapon in the fight for my interests."4· The chorus then mimics the patriotic messages of bourgeois an - "The United States is the free-est country in the world ... And so on and so forth...." (302) This is followed by a "Red Front" song that leads into an argument between the workers and the capitalist. Once confronted with the workers' use of agit-prop as a weapon, the capitalist suddenly changes his tune and starts talking like an apolitical art critic: CAPITALIST: Ladies and gentlemen ... there is a misunderstanding here. First you introduce yourselves as a theatre group ... and now you talk about political propaganda . These are two distinctly different subjects. Art has nothing to do with politics . Art is free. Art for art's sake. (303) After this two-faced proclamation, the capitalist's new argument is debunked by the workers and the.chorus ends the play with more mass recitation urging "mass action." (305) As with The I5-Minute Red Revue, this play uses mass recitation to foster collective consciousness and move the audience to action. [t a1so incorporates some of the same elements of commercial culture as that play with its use of comedy and its mimicry of the "official" language of an criticism. Unlike The I5-Minute Red Revue, however, it doesn't dogmatically valorize the Soviet Union. What is most striking about Art is a Weapon, though, is that it deals head-on with the issue of political art by seeking to unmask seemingly neutral bourgeois art/culture as interested and its defenders as disingenuous servants of capitalist ideology. This shows that the WLT was at least aware of the dilemma created forthem by the growing media monopoly, even iftheirtheatre was not yet ready with a more sophisticated or effective form of intervention. Workers' Theatre and the "War of Position" in the 1930S 429 THE AESTHETIC DILEMMA OF THE WORKERS' THEATRE In the preface to the section of drama in the 1935 edition of Proletarian Liter-·ature in the United States, the editors discuss how, in the beginning of the workers' theatre movement, "many false theories prevailed."4' They call the early years of agit-prop "the morality play stage," and claim that John Bonn and the WLT made the mistake of rejecting all "bourgeois form." The workers ' theatre eventually, the editors claim,leamed its lesson and "more competent writers" took over.42 Their first example of more "subtle" and "artistic" mass chant is Alfred Kreymborg's America, America. This play is composed of three brief, melodramatic, moralistic sketches that juxtapose the downtrodden poor with the arrogant rich. What sets the play apart from early agit-prop is that it has omitted the formal rhetoric of the slogan and moved toward a more representational strategy. In doing so, however, the play loses its sense of humor and experimentation and falls into the trap that Kalaidjian claims the Old Left did. Rather than directly engaging the discourse of the media/mass culture, America, America sets itself outside the fray with its more "realistic" version of reality. Thus, it abandons the fledgling attempts at direct intervention made by early agit-prop. As mentioned earlier, the move toward a more representational theatre was driven by several factors, from the perceived artistic failure of agit-prop to the Soviet Union's official embrace of socialist realism and the Popular Front strategy. Plays such as Black Pit by Albert Maltz, Stevedore by Paul Peters and George Sklar, and They Shall Not Die by John Wexley are representative of socialist realism in its American form. Stevedore and They Shall Not Die are noteworthy for their strong anti-racist stands. The first deals with how racism interferes with dock workers attempting to organize a union, while the second deals with the Scottsboro Boys case. Black Pit portrays the difficulty encountered by a worker who tries to remain neutral in the midst of a strike. Of these three, Stevedore was the most popular, perhaps because it portrayed a new labor militancy during a period of major strike activity43 Despite the success of plays like Stevedore, these dramas are exactly the kind of proletcult that Kalaidjian refers to. They ignore the cultural landscape and place their faith in the power of realism to cut through the glitter of mass culture. The play that the editors of Proletarian Literature in the United States point to as a "milestone" in the production of more representational drama is Waiting for Lefty.44 Fifty years later, everyone from hostile critics like Bigsby to the more sympathetic Cosgrove and McDermott agree. What makes Waiting for Lefty unique is that it is a blend of agit-prop and social realism. It seeks to bridge the gap between these two and create a hybrid form. Waiting for Lefty is composed of six scenes based on the New York City taxi drivers' strike of 1934. It begins with Fatt, the corrupt union leader, and his friend, the Gunman, suggesting that Lefty Can organizer) "took a run-out 430 JIM MILLER powder."45 Fatt is trying to talk the taxi drivers out of striking until he is interrupted by Joe, a recently radicalized driver. This is followed by an extended scene where we are shown how Joe's wife, Edna, inspired him by threatening to leave unless he fought the "boss." (328-33) In the middle of this scene, when Edna threatens to go, Odets has inserted instructions for the chorus to break in with "She will ... She wiJI ... It happens that way." These instructions also note that "the group should be used thru'out for various comments, political, emotional and as a general chorus." (332) The next scene, "The Young Hack and his Girl," shows how the poverty of one driver, Sid, leads to the end of his engagement to his girl, Flor. This scene is interrupted briefly as the couple dance to "a cheap, sad dance tune." (338) In "Labor Spy Episode," we are thrust back into the midst of the union committee, where we witness a colleague of Fatt's being exposed as a spy, confirming that Fait is corrupt. (338-4°) "The Young Actor" juxtaposes a big producer's callous rejection ofa hungry actor with that same producer's concern for his dog's health after an operation. The dejected actor is then encouraged to read The Communist Manifesto by a stenographer who works in the producer's office. "Come out in the light, Comrade " she beckons. (345) In the "Interne Episode," a promising young doctor is fired because he is Jewish and is forced to get work as a driver. This scene is interesting because it seeks to bridge the gap between the middle class and the working class. "I always supposed they'd cut from the bottom first," says the soon-to-be-radicalized doctor. (346) In the final scene, we are back with the committee and Agate is exposing the corrupt union and lobbying for a strike. His speech, which unifies the experience ofal1 the workers, is interrupted by the news that Lefty has been found with a "bullet in his head." (35 I) This news galvanizes the taxi drivers and the play ends with the actors, and in many instances the audiences that saw the play, chanting "STRIKE, STRIKE, STRIKE." Judged by popularity alone, Waitingfor Lefty was clearly the most successful piece of workers' theatre. Despite being banned in two cities, the play ran for 78 performances on Broadway and was picked up by workers' theatre groups across the country and internationally.46 Even Bigsby grudgingly admits that "its power was undeniable."47 Perhaps some of this power came from the fact that the play's combination of social realism and agit-prop interestingly mixes the personal and the political in a way that earlier agit-prop does not. Hence it would not have seemed as alien to audiences used to the realism of Broadway. Waiting for Lefty also skillfully mixes the forms of popular culture with those of the political theatre. Its quick cuts, use of commercial music, and appropriation of the "love story" al1 show a greater openness to freely using the forms of mass culture than was present in most earlier agit-prop. As for agit-prop tactics , the capitalist symbol in the play, Fatt, is mimicked a bit more skillfully than the capitalists in the early plays and the mass chant technique is more refined. Borrowing from the British play Strike Up, Clifford Odets uses voices from offstage (actors sprinkled in the audience) as wel1 as voices on-stage in order to Workers' Theatre and the "War of Position" in the 1930S 431 make it seem as ifthe whole audience is calling for a strike.4s As mentioned earlier , this often led the audience itself to join in the chant. Finally, the built-in room for improvisation in Waiting for Lefty gives the off-stage voices an opportunity to comment on the action on-stage and defarniliarize the experience of the spectator by making her aware ofthe constructed nature ofthe spectacle and inviting her to critically comment as well. All things considered, the play is clearly closer to the kind of war ofposition Gramsci called for than much ofthe earlier agit-prop. It contested the ideology of capitalism, with some success, from the Broadway stage and the workers' theatres. Despite the fact that Waiting for Lefty comes closer to engaging in a successful war of position than much of the earlier agit-prop, it is not without problems. While the realism brings in a personal element that lends some power to the play, it is clunky and unconvincing in places. The sloganspouting stenographer is perhaps the best example of this. One must also question the adoption of realism, a form that speaks the individualist ideology of bourgeois capitalism, in the first place. I am not arguing here that Odets could have completely escaped the discourse of bourgeois art as Bonn wished to, but rather that Odets' embrace of the form to tell his short stories was not sufficiently interrogated. Overt politics will always seem clunky in a form that seeks to naturalize the social and deny history or ideology. Thus without discounting the brief success of Waiting for Lefty, it is worth considering whether the move back toward a mostly unreconstructed social realism was a bit premature . Perhaps a form that directly engaged the way in which people consumed the naturalized ideology of capitalism from the inside-out would be better suited to the ends of the workers' theatre. DIALECTICAL MONTAGE In addition to the "milestone" that was Waiting for Lefty, the editors of Proletarian Literature in the United States also point to another play as an example of "more competent" workers' theatre: Out of the old agit-prop came the WLT's Newsboy: bits of the ballet. of music, song, poetry, snatches of scenes from 1931 and Mefly-Go-Round, all woven together by Alfred Saxe and his companions into a production so fluid, so tense and electric, so fresh and unforeseen, that a thousand people stood up one night and cheered in recognition of a new fonn of dramatic art. The agit-prop theatre had come of age.49 Rather than taking a step back toward a more representational theatre as Wait· ing for Lefty did, Newsboy continues the experiment with agit-prop. It does so by mixing together all of the forms mentioned above in the service of a more sophisticated critique of the mass media than that of previous agit-prop plays such as Art is a Weapon and The 15-Minute Red Revue. As Ewan MacColI 432 JIM MILLER recalls in his introduction to Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop, Newsboy presented problems for workers' theatre groups because it required more than just the memorization of mass chants. The groups now had to focus more on acting , dancing, and finding the resources for stage lights.'o Newsboy is a brief but very dense play with rapid, sometimes unexpected shifts in scene and character. The play begins with the Newsboy in the dark, reading headlines about the scandals of the rich and tales of common murderY He is then hit with a spotlight as various people - rich and poor, content and desperate - pass in front of him. These passersby eventually mix together to form a "mad ballet" as the Newsboy continues: "Read all about it! Murder ... Rape ... Scandal." (317) The crowd then begins to chant along and a voice is heard off-stage (The Black Man's) questioning the Newsboy: "How long yer gain' to keep yellin' workers should be murdered and strikes outlawed?" The Black Man's critique and the Newsboy's parroting of the lies of the media are juxtaposed throughout the play, with the crowd frequently echoing hegemonic headlines like: "We need another war." This juxtaposition is interrupted midway through the play for pro-war speeches by Long, Coughlin, and Hearst. These speeches are followed by a brief scene showing the crowd reading papers with "War Scare Headlines" and ignoring the pleas of the Black Man to "come into the light." (318-19) After his plea, the Black Man sits on a curb "head in his arms," as an Unemployed Man begging for food money is told to join the army or a CCC camp by a "Well-Dressed Man," an "Old Gentleman ," and a "Kindly Old Lady." (320) The crowd then jumps in with a chant of "Why don't you join the army," which is answered by "And get blown to bits." (32 I) This is followed by the entrance of a Second Newsboy yelling "Fight Against War and Fascism. Learn the truth about the munitions racket." The first Newsboy answers this angrily with more mass media headlines , but the Black Man and the Unemployed Man stand in his way and he "slinks away." Now the crowd has been won over and is chanting "eight and a half million killed," and so on. The first Newsboy runs back in, but he is now ignored and the play ends with the Black Man calling for the audience to "fight war" and "fight Fascism." (322) In "Newsboy: From Script to Performance," Alfred Saxe notes that what made the WLT's play unique was that it mocks "the intensity, speed, and conflict of present-day industrialized America."" Also important to Saxe is the play's "dialectical method," the way it portrays the struggle between "contradictory elements" by means of juxtaposition. He describes the plot of Newsboy as an effort "to show the truth and strength of the revolutionary press in relationship to the working class and in opposition to the hypocrisy of the capitalist controlled newspapers. Saxe also notes that the playforsakes "constant repetition" in favor of a style that encourages "growth to new ideas."53 I would add to Saxe's list the play's pointed use of mimicry with regard to the forms of the mass media and the figures of Long, Coughlin, and Hearst. Workers' Theatre and the "War of Position" in the 1930S 433 Of central importance here is what Saxe calls Newsboy's "dialectical method." This phrase borrows from Eisenstein's concept of "dialectical montage ," which rests on Marxist principles of dialectical materialism.54 With regard to drama, this means simply the presentation of contradictory elements that are resolved by the end of the play. In the case ofNewsboy, the distortions of the mass media are juxtaposed with the reality of the workers' lives and the truth of the revolutionary press, leading to a newconsciousness of the falsity of the previously naturalized ideology of the capitalist media. Just as European photomontage artists of the thirties, like John Heartfield, subversively rearranged or "detoumed" the images of the visual media, Newsboy seeks to defarniliarize the headlines of the capitalist media by putting them in anew, unfamiliar context and subjecting them to criticism. What makes the play successful is that it works from the inside-out, using the language of the headlines and the speeches of the proto-fascists against themselves. Newsboy's effective mimicry of the speed and sometimes bewildering presentation of mass cultural forms underscores and enforces the play's critique of the specific ideology of the mass media and the demagogues who use it. Consequently, both the content and the form of the dominant source of information/reality are taken to task. Also important is the way in which Newsboy makes use of the crowd to defamiliarize the effect the mass media has on the populace. As the Newsboy spouts headlines, the crowd chants along, changing their tune with each new story. By using this playful device, Newsboy shows how the people are, in a sense, spoken by the discourse of the mass media. In addition to this, the play's skillful appropriation of various forms of popular culture (newspapers, dance, song, montage, better stage lighting, etc.) allows it to smuggle in its critique of the media without it seeming like a pious denunciation of mass culture made from the outside. Indeed, that critique, with its opposition both to fascism and the American capitalists who supported it, serves as an important history lesson for us today. Before one dismisses Newsboy's anti-war stance, it is imperative to remember how complicitous many members of the American power-elite of the thirties were with the rise of fascism in Europe.55 . If any play created by the workers' theatre engaged in an effective war of position, it was Newsboy. Its use of dialectical montage effectively mocks and defamiliarizes the ideology of the mass media in a way that none of the other agit-prop or social realist plays do. While it is clearly not as nuanced as some of the postmodern media critiques that Kalaidjian points to in the last chapter of American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Pastmodern Critique, it was well-suited for its purpose. Indeed, it was the most effective weapon in the WLT's arsenal, the most popular of all the agit-prop plays. It is interesting to imagine what would have happened if the workers' theatre had not taken the turn toward more representational theatre and focused instead on refining dialectical montage. Perhaps this would have led to a more media-conscious artistic practice at a time before the mass media 434 JIM MILLER had completely saturated the culture and cornered every market. But of course that did not happen and today Newsboy stands only as an example of an aborted attempt at cultural resistance to the society of the spectacle. NOTES I Barbara Foley, Radical Representations:" Politid and Form in U.S. Proletarian FiCtion. 1929-1941 (Durham, 1993),29. 2 Paul Sporn, "Working-Class Theatre on the Auto Picket Line," in Theatre/or Working-Class Audiences in the United States, 1830-1980, ed. Bruce A. McConachie and Daniel Friedman (Westport, 1985), 156. 3 C.W.E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twelllieth Century American Drama (Cambridge, 1982), 165. 4 Ibid., 207. 5 Daniel Friedman, "A Brief Description of the Workers' Theatre Movement of the Thirties," in Theatre/or Working-Class Audiences, 118. I I I, 113. 6 Ibid., 112. 7 Stuart Cosgrove, "From Shock Troupe to Group Theatre," in Theaters ofthe Left, 1880-1935: Workers Theatre Movements in Britain and America, cd. Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove (London, 1985),266. 8 Douglass McDermott, "The Workers' Laboratory Theatre: Archetype and Example," in Theatre/or Working~Ciass Audiences, 123. 9 Friedman, 114· 10 Ibid. II McDermott, 124, 126. 12 Sporn, 159. 13 Fried!1lan, I16. 14 Cosgrove, 276. 15 Ibid., 272. 16 McDermott, 124. 17 Friedman, 116. 18 McDermott, 125. 19 Friedman, I I7. 20 McDermott. 125. 21 Friedman, I 17. 22 Walter Kaiaidjian, American Cuilllre Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (New York, 1993), I3I. 23 Ibid., 130-31. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 129. 26 Ibid., 131. 27 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism (Durham, 199 I), 409. Workers' Theatre and the "War of Position" in the 1930S 435 28 Friedman, II 5. 29 John Bonn, I 5~MjnUle Red Revue, in Theaters ofthe Left. 309. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text. 30 McDermott, 128. 31 Ibid., 229. 32 Cosgrove, 266. 33 Friedman, 116, liS. 34 Friedman, I 15· 35 Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1991 ), n 36 Cosgrove, 29<}-300. 37 The Middleman, in Guerilla Street Theatre, ed. Henry Lesnick (New York, 1973), 433-36. Subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text. 38 Ibid., 433· 39 Cosgrove, 76. 40 Art is a Weapon, in Theaters ofthe Left. 30J. Subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text. 41 Preface, Proletarian Literature in the United States, ed. Mike gold et 01. (New York, 1935),262. 42 Ibid. 43 David Bradby and John McCormick, People's Theatre (London, 1978), 101. 44 Gold et ai, 263. 45 Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty, in Theaters ofthe Left, 227. Subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text. 46 Cosgrove, 323-24. 47 Bigsby, 202. 48 Richard Stourac and Kathleen McCreery, Theatre as a Weapon: Workers' Theatre in the Soviet Union, Germany and Britain, 1917-[934 (London, 1986),203. 49 Gold et ai, 262. 50 Ewan MacColl. Introduction to Agit~Prop to Theatre workshop, eds. Howard Goomey and Ewan MacCoIl (Manchester, 1986), xxx. 51 Newsboy. in Theaters o/the Left. 316. Subsequent page references appear paren~ thelically in the text. 52 Alfred Saxe, "Newsboy: From Script to Performance," in Theaters a/the Left, 290. 53 Ibid., 291-93. 54 Cosgrove, 273· 55 For more about how Ford, Standard Oil, Chase Bank, and lIT did business with the Nazi regime, see Jerry Fresia, Toward An American Revolution: Exposing the Constitution and Other Illusions (Boslon, (988), 109. For more on how Hearst sl.I1.lck a 400,ooo-dollar~a~year deal to print pro-fascistanicles in all the Hearst papers, see Martin A. Lee and Nonnan Soloman, Unreliable Sources: A Guide To Detecting Bias in the News Media (New York, 199t), 93. ...