New Deal Theater: The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater (review)

Ilka Saal begins her book New Deal Theater with a story about the 1935 Theatre Union production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother. Rather than utilizing Brecht’s art of alienation, the company chose to adapt the play into one which would invite the audience to identify with the characters. By sentimentalizing the political nature of the play, the Union, in Brecht’s opinion, destroyed his work. For the Theatre Union, however, the play had been made to fit the New Deal reformist climate of the times. When a heterogeneous audience could empathize with the human concerns at the heart of political issues, they felt, change could result. In spite of their best efforts to attract a broad audience, the play lasted only thirty-six performances.

With this example, Saal establishes the theme of her study, “that the leftist stages of the New Deal solved the dilemma of form and public by persistently vernacularizing the political issues at hand—that is, by translating them into a language commensurate with the cultural experience of a broad public steeped in mass culture”(2). Saal bases the rest of her work on her belief that during the New Deal era from 1932 to 1939, playwrights were influenced by the reformist nature of President Franklin Roosevelt’s depression politics and, in fact, became self-designated tools to enforce the president’s political agenda. She states that in order to support the liberal thrust of the New Deal, leftist theater, under the guise of cultural nationalism and the cult of the common person, tried to appeal to consumers of all classes. Because of this, the agitprop and alienist techniques used by European playwrights morphed into a more naturalistic, emotional drama that tugged at the heart strings rather than encourage viewers to lift their fists in protest and revolution.

In order to plot out her conception of the vernacular theater, Saal includes an excellent discussion of the origins of “political” theater, a term coined in the 1920s to describe the theater of the left. Meant to support a way of thinking and living, the purpose of political theater was originally to have a radical impact on the audience and then on reality itself. Saal explains how theater historians usually frame their discussions of political theater around Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and other modernist playwrights without considering how mass culture eventually impacted the form as seen through the work of several playwrights. Because what Saal terms as “vernacular” theater has had little attention paid to it, her intention in the book is to develop both a theory and terminology for it, especially as it appeared in the United States.

Saal’s building blocks for vernacular theater include the ability for plays to use the language of the established commercial culture such as melodrama, naturalism, revues, and musicals; for that language to utilize empathy, identification, and absorption, and for the entertainments to reach out to a broad, heterogeneous public who were the eager consumers of such an art form. In this way, Saal claims, “the political becomes pleasurable and that pleasure is channeled into political activism”(39).

Within the context of the 1930s, three crucial cultural developments enabled the vernacular character of New Deal theater to take shape. The first, according to Saal, was that no real avant-garde theater existed in the United States until after World War II. Audiences and artists were simply not interested in rebelling against the existing bourgeois art institutions. The second was that U.S. theater, even the leftist groups, wanted to make money and were, therefore, always commercially oriented. The third development was that of the great expansion of consumer culture in the 1920s that attracted hordes of middle class audience members. During the Great Depression, numbers of these citizens were thrown into the working class. Their change in status did not dampen their fervor for entertainment, so, according to Saal, in response, leftist theater moved to a more...