Abstract
The year 1935, the year Odets’s Waiting for Lefty triumphed and Brecht’s Mother failed, marked a turning point in the politics and aesthetics of American political theater. We notice a distinctive shift from the fervent sectarian stance of the agitprop sketch to the more populist appeal of the full-length realist play. The work of Theatre Union illustrates this shift very clearly. During its first two seasons, it developed a series of full-length plays, which, on the one hand, meticulously adhered to New Theatre’s call for new scripts portraying class struggle “in terms of cash and cabbages”1 and, on the other hand, sought to infuse this demand for mimetic realism with the revolutionary energy and pathos so typical of the agitprop street theaters. The genre that seemed most useful for this endeavor was melodrama. But in the process of developing this form with plays like Peace on Earth (1933), Stevedore (1934), and Black Pit (1935), Theatre Union also increasingly shifted its aesthetic emphasis from emotive speech and action-driven plot to the photo-mimetic portrayal of character and situation. This gradual rapprochement with bourgeois realism was indicative of a general cultural reorientation of the left, which began around 1932 with the widespread resolution for professionalizing the workers’ theater and culminated in the American Writers’ Congress in April 1935, which succinctly epitomized the cultural and political transformations that took place in mid decade and set the tone for further developments in the American political theater.
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Notes
Peter Brooks. The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995 (1976), 32.
Sergey Dmitrievich Balukhatyi. “Poetika melodramy” (1927). In Sergey Dmitrievich Balukhatyi. Voprosy Poetiki. Leningrad: Isdatel’stvo Leningradskogo Universiteta, 1990.
Parts of this essay have been translated and published by Daniel Gerould in “Russian Formalist Theories of Melodrama.” In Imitations of Life, ed. Maria Landy. Detroit, MI: Wayne State Press, 1991, 118–134.
Eric Bentley. “Melodrama.” In Eric Bentley. The Life of the Drama. New York: Atheneum, 1964, 195–218.
Henry Schoenmakers and Ed Tan. “‘Good Guy Bad Guy’ Effects in Political Theater.” In Semiotics of Drama and Theater, ed. Herta Schmid and Aloysius van Kesteren. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1984, 467–508.
Christof Decker. Hollywoods kritischer Blick: Das soziale Melodrama in der amerikanischen Kultur 1840–1950. Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2003, 41.
Daniel Gerould. “Gorky, Melodrama, and the Development of Early Soviet Theatre.” Yale/Theatre 7:2 (Winter 1976):41. Gorky and Lunacharsky initiated a melodrama playwriting contest for Petrograd workers in 1919. Although this particular contest remained unsuccessful, melodrama still prospered as the dominant genre of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period from about 1917 to 1928.
See also Daniel Gerould and Julia Przybos. “Melodrama in the Soviet Theater 1917–1928: An Annotated Chronology.” New York Literary Forum 7 (1980): 75–92.
Jane Gaines. “The Melos in Marxist Theory.” In The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class, ed. D. James and R. Berg. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 60.
Thomas Elsaesser. “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama” (1972). In Imitations of Life, ed. Marcia Landy. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991
and John Cawelti. “The Evolution of Social Melodrama” (1976). In Imitations of Life, ed. Marcia Landy. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1976, 33–49.
Lothar Fietz. “On the Origins of English Melodrama in the Tradition of Bourgeois Tragedy and Sentimental Drama.” In Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, ed. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996, 83–101.
Jack Conroy. “The Worker as Writer.” In American Writers’ Congress 1935, ed. Henry Hart. New York: International Publishers, 1935, 84.
Qtd. in Ben Blake. The Awakening of the American Theatre. New York: Tomorrow Publishers, 1935, 35. Theatre Union managed to organize over 100,000 spectators through various working- and middle-class organizations.
Albert Maltz and George Sklar. Peace on Earth: An Anti-War Play in 3 Acts. New York: Samuel French, 1934, 14.
Elmer Rice. Seven Plays. New York: Viking, 1950, 253.
William Gardener. “The Theatre.” New Masses 16 January 1934. See also Sherwood Anderson. “Foreword.” In Peace on Earth. New York: Samuel French, 1934.
Paul Peters and George Sklar. Stevedore. New York: Covici Friede, 1934, 45, 24.
Stevedore ran for 111 performances in the spring and another 64 performances in the fall 1934. It went on the road to Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Detroit, and Chicago. It also played in London, starring Paul Robeson. See Malcolm Goldstein. The Political Stage: American Drama and Theater of the Great Depression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974, 67. Immediately following Stevedore was Sailors of Cattaro by German playwright Friedrich Wolf.
Albert Maltz. Black Pit. New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1935, 45.
See Thomas Postlewait. “From Melodrama to Realism: The Suspect History of American Drama.” In Melodrama: The Cultural Experience of a Literary Genre, ed. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996, 39–60.
Earl Browder. “Communism and Literature.” In American Writers’ Congress, ed. Henry Hart. New York: International Publishers, 1935, 66.
Waldo Frank. “Values of Revolutionary Writers.” In American Writers’ Congress, ed. Henry Hart. New York: International Publishers, 1935, 76.
Joseph Freeman. “The Tradition of American Revolutionary Literature.” In American Writers’ Congress, ed. Henry Hart. New York: International Publishers, 1935, 58.
Malcolm Cowley. “What the Revolutionary Movement Can Do for a Writer.” In American Writers’ Congress, ed. Henry Hart. New York: International Publishers, 1935, 65.
Granville Hicks. “The Dialectics of the Development of Marxist Criticism.” In American Writers’ Congress, ed. Henry Hart. New York: International Publishers, 1935.
William Phillips and Phillip Rahv. “Recent Problems of Revolutionary Literature.” In Proletarian Literature in the United States, ed. Granville Hicks, Michael Gold, Isidor Schneider, Joseph North, Paul Peters and Alan Calmer. New York: International Publishers, 1935, 372.
John Howard Lawson. “Technique and the Drama.” In American Writers’ Congress 1935, ed. Henry Hart. New York: International Publishers, 1935, 128.
Nathaniel Buchwald and Michael Blankfort. “Social Trends in Modern Drama.” In American Writers’ Congress 1935, ed. Henry Hart. New York: International Publishers, 1935, 133.
Ira A. Levine. Left-Wing Dramatic Theory in the American Theatre. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1980, 109.
Mordecai Gorelik. New Theatres for Old. London: Denis Dobson, 1947 (1940), 357.
William Kozlenko. “Introduction.” In The Best Short Plays of the Social Theatre, ed. William Kozlenko. New York: Random House, 1939, ix.
Kenneth Burke. “Revolutionary Symbolism in America.” In American Writers’ Congress 1935, ed. Henry Hart. New York: International Publishers, 1935, 90–92. Burke was vehemently attacked for his proposition since it seemed reminiscent of fascist demagoguery to some and of bourgeois revolutions to others. But he found himself completely vindicated only a couple of months later, when in August 1935 CPUSA officially adapted the Popular Front platform at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern. See Philip Rahv. “Two Years of Progress—From Waldo Frank to Donald Ogden Stewart.” Partisan Review (February 1938):22–30.
Granville Hicks. The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature since the Civil War. New York: Macmillan, 1933. Here Hicks postulates that the great tradition in American letters is that of social conflict and revolutionary struggle.
Raphael Samuel. “Introduction.” In Theatres of the Left 1880–1935, ed. Raphael Samuel and Ewan MacColl. New York and London: Routledge, 1985, xx.
See Sam Smiley. “Friends of the Party: The American Writers’ Congresses.” Southwest Review 54 (Summer 1969):298.
According to Mark Naison, party membership rose from 26,000 to 85,000 between 1934 and 1939. See Mark Naison. “Remaking America: Communists and Liberals in the Popular Front.” In New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, ed. Michael Brown et al. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993, 45.
Joseph Freeman. “Towards the Forties.” In The Writer in a Changing World, ed. Henry Hart. New York: Equinox Cooperative Press, 1937, 10.
Malcolm Cowley. “The Seven Years of Crisis.” In The Writer in a Changing World, ed. Henry Hart. New York: Equinox Cooperative Press, 1937, 45.
Jeffrey D. Mason. Melodrama and the Myth of America. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993;
Linda Williams. “Melodrama Revised.” In Refiguring American Film Genre: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998, 42–88.
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© 2007 Ilka Saal
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Saal, I. (2007). Plays of Cash and Cabbages: From Proletarian Melodrama to Revolutionary Realism. In: New Deal Theater. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230608832_5
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