"Agit-Prop"

"AgitProp"

In the lush 1920's there mushroomed in the U. S. the Little Theatre Movement in which strictly art-for-art's-sake productions were presented by serious amateurs, earnest dilettantes. Far more serious, far more earnest is the Depression-born movement of workers' theatres which are currently putting on "agitprop" (agitational propaganda) plays in 300 U. S. cities.

Theatres of protest arose in Manhattan as early as 1927, earliest organizations being the New Playwrights Theatre, the Workers Laboratory (recently rechristened the Theatre of Action), the Artef Players, Theatre Collective, the German Prolit-Buehne. This was the nucleus of the New Theatre League, which in 1932 began publishing a monthly magazine now supported by 15,000 readers. Editor Herbert Kline explained that the League aimed to serve "the needs of working-class audiences for plays unlike the theatrical marshmallows served up on Broadway which deal with problems quite as remote from the workers' lives as peculiar Park Avenue triangles and Hollywood infidelities." While officially professing no political creed, most League member theatres leaned inevitably toward Socialism. Membership was usually composed of unemployed or partly employed industrial workers not only in big centres like Chicago and Cleveland but in smaller manufacturing cities like Moline, Ill. and Gary, Ind. Not infrequently the shirt-sleeved amateurs went to the theatre after work, rehearsed and played there, ate there and slept on cots pitched on the stage. Through the League's play service, such "agitprop" pieces as Comrade, Mr. Morgan's Nightmare, Who's Who in the Berlin Zoo were supplied to workers' theatres up & down the land. Acceptable and exciting as they may have been to Marxist audiences, the general theatre public did not get very excited about proletarian drama until Clifford Odets wrote Waiting for Lefty.

First presented at a benefit for the New Theatre League in Manhattan, Waiting for Lefty got to Broadway by way of the Group Theatre (TIME, April 8). With lines as pointed as a stiletto, with a unique technical trick which used the theatre audience as spectators at a taxi union's mass meeting, Waiting for Lefty turned out to be a crashing success in tolerant Manhattan.* Thereupon, one by one, 32 League groups produced the show in the country at large and the trouble began. Plays of the calibre of Mr. Morgan's Nightmare had evidently been beneath the notice of the American Legion, Friends of New Germany and other illiberal groups. But Waiting for Lefty, aside from forcefully presenting the case of capitalist labor racketeering, was such a whacking good show that it became the target of a suppression campaign unequaled since the great Red Scare of 1920.

By last week Waiting for Lefty had been banned in seven cities on one ambiguous pretext or another. In Boston the police ran the New Theatre Players out of two houses, finally locked up four actors on charges of "profanity and blasphemy." After winning the George Pierce Baker Cup at the Yale Drama School for its performance of the play, the Unity Players were forbidden in future to act Waiting for Lefty anywhere in New Haven. It took a concerted move by University liberals to smash the ban. When the Collective Theatre tried to put on Waiting for Lefty in Newark, the troupe was ousted from a school building, then moved to a hall which was promptly condemned by the Building Department, finally went to another hall where nine introductory speakers were successively arrested. In Hollywood the New Theatre Group was presenting Waiting for Lefty together with Odets' anti-Nazi Till the Day I Die when the director was kidnapped, badly beaten by thugs.

This systematic campaign against a play acknowledged as high art regardless of its political significance reached such nation-wide proportions last week that the strictly nonradical Authors' League of America was moved to come to the defense of the harassed New Theatre League. Declared Vice President Elmer Davis (History of the New York Times, Friends of Mr. Sweeney) of the Authors' League: "The tactics employed to suppress presentation of Waiting for Lefty are familiar and timeworn. Technicalities of the fire laws, obsolete statutes from the old 'blue laws' period, red tape in connection with licenses --all of these are used to bar the play from theatres or to stop performances. But the real issue of freedom of opinion and the right to express it is clearly the crux of the matter. Not only those who are concerned with the theatre but everyone who wants to preserve the American heritage of civil liberties will bitterly resent this arbitrary suppression of a play which has been widely acclaimed."

*The Manhattan theatre season just ending produced an unparalleled number of social justice dramas, including: Odets' Awake and Sing!, Elmer Rice's Judgment Day and Between Two Worlds, the Theatre Guild's Rain From Heaven, the Theatre Union's Stevedore, Sailors of Cattaro, Black Pit.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.