Wonderful look at the work of a radical Chicago theater collective in the early years of the Great Depression.

‘A Theatre of Action: The Story of the Chicago Workers’ Laboratory Theatre’ by Alive Evans from New Theatre. Vol. 3 No. 6. May, 1934.

The scene was the stage of a settlement house where the Chicago Workers’ Laboratory Theatre was born. The time: one year ago. The characters: six members of the new dramatic group, fifteen members of a neighborhood Unemployed Council, and one director recruited from the little theatre movement, and come “down” to help the “struggling young artists” as she put it. Wearing a thousand-dollar mink coat and a directorial air of superiority, she was telling us what to do. The previous week we had begun work on a revolutionary mass chant. Having too few actors, we had invited Unemployed Council members to take part. Copies of the play were handed out and a reading rehearsal began. As the unemployed workers got into the swing of the chant, the angry refrain “Revolt” grew stronger and stronger. At the end, when the entire group marched forward, saying: “We’ll take the world! It’s ours,” they gave a stirring performance.

Greatly agitated, our bourgeois director called me over to one side and said: “We’ve got to stop this at once. My God, do you realize what you are doing? These people take it seriously. They’re not play-acting. They mean it. You don’t know what you’re starting. This is dangerous!”

We have not seen the bourgeois director since that night, but I feel indebted to her for expressing the purpose of our workers’ theatre: A theatre which the working class takes seriously. A theatre which expresses the interests, the strength and the rebellion of the workers. A theatre which is dangerous to bourgeois society.

This incident clarified the role of the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre to its members. We had begun dramatic activities at the settlement house a few months before as “A Theatre With Its Footlights Facing the New Social Order” an attempt by young collegians and bohemians to make a splash in the mild waters of liberalism with a new kind of amateur theatricals. “The social problem play’s the thing” was our only guiding idea. The group couldn’t stay agreed long enough ideologically to achieve any expertness technically. After two productions, “Can You Hear Their Voices?” by Hallie Flanagan and “Loud Speaker” by John Howard Lawson, the group split. The liberals broke off from those who felt the world economic crisis was SO imperative that we must give only plays of the class struggle. The small group of revolutionaries began again as the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre. In the course of a year, since that time, we have made every mistake that a workers’ theatre can make. We have learned a great deal from these mistakes. It is with the hope that they may be of help to other groups in the same position that I am telling them.

WE started as an indefinite cross between the stationary theatre and the theatre of action. At the time both terms were unknown to us. We knew that we wanted a theatre composed of young workers giving plays about the class struggle. That was all. Our first play was “The Hand of God,” an adaptation by one of our members of Whitaker Chambers’ story, “Comrade Munn.” It was a good little play, aside from its unrealistic presentation of a strike situation, but our first performance was a flop. It was presented from the settlement house stage with a combination of bad acting and elaborate scenery to an audience of thirty or thirty or forty polite relatives and friends. We realized then it was not our function to be a stationary theatre. Our members were not well-trained actors, nor were they patient enough to work at becoming so before producing any plays. Our group was too small to stand the financial drain of elaborate scenery, or the organizational drain of promotion and publicity in order to get audiences. We re-cast our ideas of what the Workers Laboratory Theatre should be. We got three engagements to give “The Hand of God” before workers groups in the city. We rehearsed every night for one week; we improved the tempo, interpretation and power of the play. Finally, we had the thrill of presenting it to a responsive audience of one thousand workers at a Lithuanian Workers Celebration. From that time on the Workers Laboratory Theatre became a theatre of action.

A violent dramatic experience which strongly affected the composition of our group came shortly after this. We were in the midst of producing one act of “Gods of the Lightning.” The personnel of the group was still confused: a few workers had strayed in and a nucleus of radical students had remained. We were, however, greedy for members with professional experience or little theatre training. Such a one was our leading actor in “Gods of the Lightning.” A fellow of obvious personal wealth, he nevertheless seemed interested in the revolutionary movement, and he was an excellent actor. Three days after we performed “Gods of the Lightning” to an enthusiastic workers’ audience at an I.W.W. hall, the Sopkins’ strike broke out. Twelve hundred Negro girls, employed in four dress-manufacturing sweat shops on Chicago’s South Side, walked out under the leadership of the Needle Trades Workers’ Industrial Union. The largest Sopkins’ shop was six blocks from the settlement house where we rehearsed. Three of us from the theatre group were on the picket line. The second morning, turning a corner with two of the strikers, I came upon the star actor of the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre, standing outside the dress shop adjoining Sopkins’ (also on strike), talking to a cop. He greeted me with a forced smile and apologized for the fact that his father-in-law owned the picketed shop.

“But-can’t you do anything for the strikers?” I asked.

“You see,” he answered, “we really can’t. If we grant their demands, we’ll have to close up couldn’t make any profit. We’re losing money every minute this strike is on. We’ve got to break it. I’m still sympathetic, you know-but I’ve got to make a living.”

I walked on, with two of the girls who also had to “make a living,” and who being were paid from $1.50 to $7.00 a week.

After the strike was over, we invited this “comrade” to attend a meeting of the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre at which he would have a chance to defend himself. He refused to defend himself. He refused to come. At the meeting when we expelled him, discussion took place on the necessary close tie-up between a workers’ theatre which gave plays about struggles and the struggles themselves. We lost a few members after this meeting, for they felt the judgment of the renegade too severe. Those of us who remained knew a greater clarity, a feeling of closeness to the striking workers, a determination to build a theatre which would express their spirit and be of use in their struggles.

THE author of our next play, however, was neither a worker nor a Communist, but a young intellectual whose father is the well-to-do leader of a strong union in Chicago. Experience with him has shown us that there is value in involving people not interested workers struggles in the group. We realize now that the Theatre of Action has an important function as a mass organization, because it draws into its activities members who cannot be brought into the movement any other way. It serves in a sense the function of a workers’ sport group, offering young people something they care about doing, and through participation they become acquainted with and attached to the revolutionary movement. The young intellectual in question wanted to write plays, to see them performed, to get criticisms. He found opportunities in the Workers Laboratory Theatre that he could find nowhere else. After reading several plays to us which we discussed seriously, praised for their good dialogue and criticized for their bourgeois approach, he wrote “The Big Shot,” an excellent short play in which the hero joins the Unemployed Council, and the final line is: “If I can’t work for a living, by God I’ll fight for it.” We have given this play about forty times to date, with five different casts, at forums, picnics, strike meetings, and Unemployed Council halls. The author is one of our most active and valuable members. He just finished a new play about a struggle in the South, where an organization of Negro and white sharecroppers prevents the lynching of their Communist leader.

We have discovered a second function of the Theatre of Action as a mass organization: the political education and personal development of its members. We have one young worker who, when he joined, refused to submit to group discipline of any kind. He was irresponsible about coming to rehearsals and unmanageable when he attended them. He had had an excellent voice though, and our director gave him a good part and worked patiently with him. Gradually, through the chance to “let loose” which he got on the stage, the excitement of performances, and participation in orderly rehearsals, he became a quieter, more reliable and effective comrade. There are other cases of workers who have overcome self-consciousness, learned to speak understandably, developed poise and leadership abilities through participation in workers’ theatre activities. As for political education, we bring our membership into direct contact with the organized revolutionary movement in many ways. Last week we were on the program of Anti-War mass meeting. Another time, the teacher of our playwrighting class made attendance at the Second Farmers National Convention Mass Meeting an assignment to the students. This experience proved not only valuable in giving the students playwrighting material, but also in showing them a stirring phase of the American revolutionary movement.

A member of the Jewish Workers Clubs tells an amusing story of how their members were catapulted into participation in struggle. The group was booked to present an eviction play written by one of its members before an Unemployed Council branch. Arriving at the hall, they heard news of an eviction taking place around the corner. They accompanied the Unemployed Council members to the scene of action, helped put the furniture back in the house, fought off the cops, and then proceeded to present the play. Thus reality and make-believe were merged into a decisive educational experience for actors and audience.

Through these services involving non-revolutionary workers, giving political education and aiding personal development of members, we have found the workers’ theatre to be a valuable mass organization. The building of a successful mass organization, however, does not guarantee an effective Theatre of Action. In fact, often one development works against the other. The problem of building out of such a group as I have described-untrained, inexperienced students and workers a skilled and disciplined acting company whose performances have a real politicalizing effect on audiences,- that is the most difficult and most important problem to solve. For the propaganda value of a Theatre of Action to the revolutionary movement stands or falls with its artistic merit.

The New Theater continued Workers Theater. Workers Theater began in New York City in 1931 as the publication of The Workers Laboratory Theater collective, an agitprop group associated with Workers International Relief, becoming the League of Workers Theaters, section of the International Union of Revolutionary Theater of the Comintern. The rough production values of the first years were replaced by a color magazine as it became primarily associated with the New Theater. It contains a wealth of left cultural history and ideas. Published roughly monthly were Workers Theater from April 1931-July/Aug 1933, New Theater from Sept/Oct 1933-November 1937, New Theater and Film from April and March of 1937, (only two issues).

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/workers-theatre/v1n06-may-1934-New-Theatre-NYPL-mfilm.pdf