[On April 6th,
1947, the first Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre—or the Tony Awards for short—were
given in New York City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and
moments in American theater—share your dramatic responses and thoughts for a
crowd-sourced weekend post sure to get a standing O!]
On activist
drama, in- and outside of its approved spaces.
Among the more
unique and impressive of the Depression-era New Deal programs was the Federal Theatre
Project (FTP). Created in 1935 as part of the
Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Project included a number of
innovative and compelling initiatives: the nation-wide Negro
Theatre Project (NTP), including the famous New York
Negro Unit that featured plays by Orson
Welles, Arna Bontemps,
and Countee Cullen (among others); the experimental, political, and
controversial Living
Newspaper productions; and more. In an era when it would have been easy to
withdraw federal support for theatrical and creative works and performances,
the FTP, like the WPA more broadly, instead made a compelling case for the
communal and social value of such works.
In the same year
that the FTP was created, New
York’s innovative Group Theatre company staged the first production of Clifford Odets’
play Waiting for Lefty (1935).
Set amongst a group of New York cabdrivers taking part in a fictional strike,
and featuring multiple moments in which characters break the fourth wall and
directly address the audience, imploring them to take social and political
action, Odets’ play is a thoroughly and strikingly activist work, one described
in an
early negative review as “a very dramatic equivalent of soap-box oratory.” Many
of the FTP’s productions, especially the Living Newspaper performances, were
without question political and activist—but Odets’ play, with its endorsements
of Karl Marx’s
Communist Manifesto and other
socialist moments, to my mind went further than any FTP productions did or
(given the difference between federal and private theatre companies) likely
could.
It’d thus be
easy, and not inaccurate, to see Odets and the Group Theatre in competition
with, or at least offering a distinct alternative to, the FTP productions—and,
again, to extend that comparison to make a broader distinction between
federally supported and truly outsider theater. But at the same time, it’s
pretty amazing to think of all that took place in New York City drama in
1935-6: with Odets’ play opening, the first New York Negro Unit productions
(including both Welles’ Voodoo Macbeth and Bontemps
and Cullen’s The Conjur Man Dies)
mounted, the initial Living Newspaper performances (such as the Dust Bowl drama
Triple-A Plowed Under) ongoing, and
more. All innovative, all activist, and all artistically challenging and
engaging, these works complemented and were in conversation with each other at
least as much as they contrasted, and reveal the impressive state of
Depression-era American drama.
The drama
continues tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other dramatic works or moments you’d highlight?
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