Rehearsing Revolutions: The Labor Drama Experiment and Radical Activism in the Early Twentieth Century by Mary McAvoy (review)

For decades, a politically and pedagogically innovative theatrical form flourished in the United States, although far from any urban center. Thousands of actors, writers, and designers participated, although few had any training to speak of. Numerous plays, skits, scenes, and musical numbers were written, but many of these scripts and scores are now lost. Mary McAvoy’s detailed and thoughtful study, Rehearsing Revolutions, offers both an accounting and a careful assessment of the work of labor drama as it was practiced in labor colleges (adult-education institutions designed to help build the labor movement) around the country during the interwar period. All too often this theatrical tradition has fallen through the cracks, but McAvoy’s timely and important book is a bulwark against forgetting.

As she underscores, makers of labor drama often emphasized process over product; whether or not the staged works demonstrated aesthetic “merit” was beside the point. McAvoy is careful to distinguish this understudied labor drama from the “adjacent” and more robustly analyzed workers’ theatre of the same period, emphasizing the “production-oriented” quality of the latter (3). As a pedagogical activity popularized in workers’ education institutions during the interwar period, labor drama invited workers to stage the social and economic problems they faced in their lives, generating a shared sense of struggle and an opportunity for problem-solving and collective action. Courses and recreational activities in dramatics functioned alternately as entertainment, community-building exercises, political training ground, and mode of knowledge production. McAvoy adeptly demonstrates the evolution of labor drama from its union-building functions in the Progressive era to its “radically politicized projects” of the 1930s (ibid.). In its careful delineation of these transformations, Rehearsing Revolutions argues against painting all of interwar drama with one broad brush, showing how the relationships among art, activism, pedagogy, and politics were made and remade during a consequential period. Another important implication of McAvoy’s research is one for the field: labor dramatics’ cultivation of embodied knowledge (an approach informed by John Dewey’s theories of art and experiential education) prefigures the framing of “performance” as both object and method.

Following an orienting first chapter, McAvoy dedicates each subsequent chapter to the practice of labor drama at a single institution for workers’ education and along the way trains the reader’s attention on key figures and innovators of the form. Chapter 2 looks at labor drama’s beginnings under the leadership of Doris Smith at Portland Labor College. Brookwood Labor College, the focus of chapter 3, was the most prominent labor college of its time, thanks in part to its geographic location just outside of New York City. Labor drama there was led by Hazel MacKaye, who was the daughter of actor-director-impresario Steele MacKaye and who, McAvoy demonstrates, had a remarkable career as a theatre artist and suffrage activist. McAvoy next makes a regional shift, turning her attention to labor dramatics in Southern workers’ education programs, including Hollace Ransdell’s curriculum at the women’s Southern Summer School (chapter 4), Zilphia Horton at the Highlander Folk School (chapter 5), and Lee Hays at Commonwealth College (chapter 6). Because white supremacist fears of interracial contact and of communist influence were mutually reinforcing, surveillance of workers’ education in these Southern institutions was enhanced. How enthusiastically could dramatics advance a radical agenda before attracting negative attention from the conservative AFL or from the FBI? These were not hypothetical questions: both Highlander and Commonwealth were targeted by local community members as well as by FBI investigations that temporarily shuttered the former and permanently closed the latter. This intimidation continues: in March 2019, the main building of the Highlander Center (reconstituted in a new site after the original school’s 1957 closure) was destroyed by fire, with a white power symbol found amid the rubble.

The fact that most of these programs thrived under woman leaders is, McAvoy...