Abstract
When the stock marked crashed in October 1929, the professional theaters did not respond. With the fading out of the Little Theater movement of the early 1920s, Broadway had resigned itself to general musings about the metaphysical longing of man. It had no significant comment to offer on the current crisis. What is more, the typical Broadway audience, the carriage trade, had long been conditioned not to expect anything relevant from the stage. Mordecai Gorelik mockingly commented, “The playgoer is asked to check his reasoning powers at the door. […] What he sees on the stage does not, apparently, matter very much; it is important that it be a story whipped up in excitement and bathed in dreamlike nostalgia.”1 As early as 1928, with prosperity still at its height, the professional theater was largely considered dead. During the Depression, Broadway simply watched its audiences shrink away as fewer and fewer members of the middle class could afford Broadway prices and as more and more wandered off to the movie theaters.2 Moreover, it had nothing to say to the ones who stayed. As usual, it kept offering distraction and entertainment, deliberately refraining from reflecting on the national crisis. As observers of the time remarked, Broadway had become “completely superfluous” to those who were interested in what was happening all around them.3
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Notes
Mordecai Gorelik. New Theatres for Old. London: Denis Dobson, 1947 (1940), 271.
Ben Blake. The Awakening of the American Theatre. New York: Tomorrow Publishers, 1935, 7.
The “new” audience was, in fact, not entirely new to the professional theater but had once even determined its repertory, the making and unmaking of actors’ careers. During the second half of the nineteenth century, it had, however, been subjected to a series of disciplinary measures by cultural authorities, which had eventually resulted in its relegation from the “highbrow” art of drama to the “lowbrow” entertainment of vaudeville and musical theaters. See Lawrence W. Levine. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
See Manuel Gomez. “A Proletarian Play on Broadway.” New Masses January 1932 and Harold Clurman. The Fervent Years. New York: Da Capo Press, 1983 (1975), 72.
Hallie Flanagan. “A Theater Is Born.” Theatre Arts Monthly 15 (1931):908.
On the role of immigrant workers’ theaters, see Bruce McConachie and Daniel Friedman, eds. Theatre for Working Class Audiences in the United States, 1830–1980. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985
and Maxine S. Seller, ed. Ethnic Theatre in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983.
See Daniel Friedman. “A Brief Description of the Workers’ Theatre Movement of the Thirties.” In Theatre for Working Class Audiences in the United States, 1830–1980, ed. Bruce McConachie and Daniel Friedman. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985, 111–120
and Stuart Cosgrove. “From Shock Troupe to Group Theatre.” In Theatres of the Left 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America, ed. Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, 259–279.
Proletbühne was founded in 1925 as a drama circle of the German ethnic community. It became politicized with the arrival of John Bonn (Hans Bohn) from Germany in 1928. See Stuart Cosgrove. “Prolet Buehne: Agitprop in America.” In Performance and Politics in Popular Drama, ed. David Brady, Louis James, and Bernard Sharratt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, 201–212.
Hallie Flanagan. “Federal Theatre Project.” Theatre Arts 19 (November 1935):860.
See, for instance, Elmer Rice. The Living Theatre. New York: Harper, 1959.
Michael Blankfort and Nathaniel Buchwald. “Social Trends in Modern Drama.” In American Writers’ Congress 1935, ed. Henry Hart. New York: International Publishers, 1935, 132.
Ira A. Levine. Left-Wing Dramatic Theory in the American Theatre. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1980, xiv.
Albert Prentis. “Basic Principles.” Workers Theatre 1 (May 1931):2.
Jake Shapiro. “On Breaking Thro’ the Proscenium.” Workers Theatre 1:3 (June 1931):7.
John Bonn. “Situation and Tasks of the Workers Theatre in the U.S.A.” Workers Theatre 2:3 (June–July 1932):8. See also his “Constitution of the League of Workers Theatres of U.S.A.” Workers Theatre (May 1932):14.
Qtd. in Lee Baxandall. “Brecht in America, 1935.” TDR 12:1 (Fall 1967):75.
For more information on the taxi strike and the genesis of Odets’s play, see Gerald Weales. “Waiting for Lefty.” In Critical Essays on Clifford Odets, ed. Gabriel Miller. Boston, MA: G. K. Hall & Co., 1991, 147–152.
Qtd. in David Barbour and Lori Seward. “Waiting for Lefty.” TDR 28:4 (Winter 1984):40.
Odets lists the minstrel show as his immediate point of reference. But the structural similarities of his play to the minstrel show (the use of chorus, end men, specialty men, and interlocutor) are rather tenuous. Odets certainly derives the emotional drive of the play from the agitprop form, which he was familiar with, if not from the street theaters then from the Group’s production of the agitprop play Dimitroff See Clifford Odets. “Notes on Production.” In Clifford Odets. Three Plays. New York: Random House, 1935.”
Erwin Piscator. The Political Theatre, trans. Hugh Rorrison. New York: Avon Books, 1978, 82.
See Tom Gunning. “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Wide Angle 8:3–4 (1986):64.
John Gassner. “American Social Theatre in the Thirties.” In Theatre and Drama in the Making, vol. 2, ed. John Gassner and Ralph G. Allen. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1964, 1003.
See Barbour and Seward, “Waiting for Lefty,” 42 and Stuart Cosgrove, Raphael Samuel, and Ewan MacColl, eds. Theatres of the Left 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America. New York and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.
Eberhard Brüning. Das amerikanische Drama der dreißiger Jahre. Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1966, 139.
See Weales, “Waiting for Lefty,” 151. Without doubt, this episode was influenced by Odets’s short-lived affiliation with the Communist Party, which lasted a mere eight months (from late 1934 to mid-1935). It quickly disappeared from the script after Odets’s separation from CPUSA—already deleted in the 1939 edition of his play. For more details about Odets’s CPUSA membership and his later HUAC hearings, see Gerald Rabkin. Drama and Commitment: Politics in the American Theatre of the Thirties. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1964, 179.
John Gassner. “Politics and Theatre.” In Morgan Himmelstein. Drama Was a Weapon: The Left-Wing Theatre in New York, 1929–1941. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963, xv.
William Kozlenko. “Introduction.” In The Best Short Plays of the Social Theatre, ed. W. Kozlenko. New York: Random House, 1939, x.
Harold Clurman. “Introduction.” In Clifford Odets. Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays. New York: Grove Press, 1979, ix.
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© 2007 Ilka Saal
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Saal, I. (2007). Strike Songs: Working- and Middle-Class Revolutionaries. In: New Deal Theater. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230608832_4
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