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

Rehearsing Revolutions is a welcome addition to the neglected history of young worker-actors on the left. It serves, for one thing, as a companion text to Colette A. Hyman's Staging Strikes: Workers' Theater and the American Labor Movement (1997). In her examination, McAvoy mines numerous archives of the key residential colleges that boldly experimented with performance art. To that end, she provides chapters on storied programs such as Brookwood's in upstate New York (1928–37). The author balances that inquiry both pedagogically and demographically by examining the theater arts at Commonwealth College (1923–40) in Mena, Arkansas, and the Highlander School in Knox, Tennessee, founded in 1934 and active to this day. Many of these institutions were supported by left-wing philanthropists and trade unions' Worker Education Bureaus (WEB). In her typically nuanced way, the author distinguishes between organizations with a craft emphasis such as the American Federation of Labor and more controversial sponsors such as the Committee on Industrial Organizations, with its mass industrial focus.

The gem of the monograph, though, is the section on Shades of Passaic, written in large part by the fledgling actors. It was the product of Brookwood College students, who had kept abreast of the 1926 textile strikes in that fraught New Jersey town. The students even traveled there to New Jersey, using their meager funds to put up at a nearby hotel. McAvoy foregrounds their courage in entering "a near-war zone" of people harmed by police tear gas and firearms (84). Ironically, this unequal conflict prefigured the multiple meanings of the performance itself. Not since the famous 1919 Madison Square Garden "Paterson [Strike] Pageant," a worker-driven phenomenon, did labor drama have such a direct effect on the packed hall. McAvoy in any case retells a long-forgotten story: a cohort of exhausted but outraged strikers comprised the vast majority of the anti-mill-owner audience. Ironically—or predictably—the onstage aesthetics inspired the angry silk workers to shout at the police stationed in the theater to "prevent" subversion.

The true importance of the play, which McAvoy cleverly teases out of that year's May issue of the school newspaper, is intertexuality. Both the amateur actors and the hardened machine proletarians created the play's meaning. Notably, this situation was as close as McAvoy's figures came to counternarratives of solidarity, with "members of the … Labor Players experiencing the possibility of … activating … real workers in real-life situations" (85). The shared views implicit in the exchange between prolabor residential college students and the rank and file created the possibility of a mobilized audience. Yet while the volume sustains a metanarrative of student involvement in the lifeworlds of toilers, the mill town's ethnic upheaval was more likely to consist of "real-life" dramatics such as a walkout, a rally, and workers' funerals. In all of these radical actions, the cast, whether from Brookwood or not, was likely absent.

In a more convincing way, Rehearsing Revolutions argues for ideological links between college activity and professionalizing productions such as those of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). Perhaps some veterans of the schools were, in the next decade, inspired by the reputations of FTP directors such as Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg. Too, they might have known of the well-advertised exemplar of cultural work, the era's garment trades musical, the 1937 Pins and Needles. Strongly supported by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, both locally and nationally, the cast found its theatrical gift. Initially nonprofessional, it soon engaged in a reverse trajectory: light industry to the stage. Rather than schooled in a militant philosophy about the evils of capitalism, tailors simply left their jobs to appear in many performances a week—on Broadway, no less. Too, in an oft-told New Deal success story, the members performed at the Roosevelt White House. In doing so, they...