A.B. Magil reviews the season opening of the Artef, the Yiddish-language Workers Theatre Group, with the play Trikenish (‘Drought’), adapted from a Whitaker Chambers story. Begun in 1925 as a project of Young Workers League members, Artef grew into a central institution of radical culture during its 15-year existence. Combining political commitment with the highest artistic aspirations, the theater’s influence reached far beyond the Jewish left and was the training for a generation of actors, directors, and writers.

‘Artef Theatre Opens’ by A.B. Magil from New Masses. Vol. 7 No. 7. December, 1931.

TRIKENISH (DROUGHT) by Hallie Flanagan and Margaret Ellen Clifford, Based on a’ story by Whittaker Chambers. Translated and adapted by N. Buchwald. Directed by Beno Schneider. Settings by M. Solotaroff. Dances arranged by Sophie Berensohn. Produced by the Artef (Jewish Workers Theatre) at the Hecks cher Foundation Theatre.

The opening of the third season of the Artef is a significant event in the proletarian cultural movement of this country. For the Artef is not merely the only Jewish workers’ theatre in the United States; it is technically the furthest advanced, it is the most ambitious and the most solidly organized of any of our workers’ theatres.

Six years ago a group of Jewish workers organized the Artef as a dramatic studio. They approached their problems with the utmost seriousness and for three years studied night after night before venturing to produce a play publicly. In December 1928 the Artef presented its first play, At the Gate, the work of a young Jewish writer, Beinush Steinman, who died fighting for the Russian Revolution. Since then four other plays have been put on, and now comes the sixth, Trikenish (Drought), opening the group’s third season. During this time the Artef has organized itself into three functioning groups: the Artef Players, with a membership of about 45; the Artef Studio, which is a training school for new actors and has about 25 members; and the Artef Club, consisting of some 35 non-players who look after various technical tasks and are the most active supporters of the Artef.

The Artef has established a place for itself in the Jewish revolutionary movement; it has hundreds of working-class subscribers; it has drawn large numbers of workers away from the influence of the Jewish bourgeois theatre where the twin muse of chauvinism and pornography rules the boards. This despite the fact that the Artef has not always been all that it should have been and has yet to become that sharp, aggressive weapon in the struggles of the Jewish masses which it can and must be if it is to realize all the potentialities of a workers’ theatre.

The Artef began by stumbling badly. Its fundamental error has been a tendency to compete with the bourgeois art theatre. An error not of technique, but of ideology, and so drastic that it has left its imprint on every phase of the Artef’s work. Its first director professed to have been a pupil of Max Reinhardt; he married Reinhardt to Second Avenue—and thus was born “proletarian art.” The first play was an unfortunate choice, the work of a zealous, but immature young playwright who tried to convey revolutionary ideas through religio-mystical symbolism. Throughout its existence the Artef’s greatest difficulty has been the securing of proper plays, plays dealing with the American class struggle and with the special problems of the Jewish workers in this country. Here’s where the Yiddish proletarian writers have had their chance; but while they’ve produced hundreds of poems, novels and short stories, they have been conspicuously silent in the field of the drama.

Since its first play, the Artef has made significant strides forward. The performance of Trikenish shows it. The play itself has the virtue which most of the Artef productions in the past have lacked: it deals with the American class struggle. It has important shortcomings too and is by no means equal to the story on which it is based, Whittaker Chambers’ “Can You Hear Their Voices?” which appeared in the March New Masses. What made the story so powerful was its quality of being more than a dramatic episode of the class struggle, its quality of generalizing and synthesizing the class experiences of a vast section of the American toilers: the millions of poor farmers of this country. This is missing in the play. Yet despite its shortcomings as dialectic drama, “Can You Hear Their Voices?” remains one of the few revolutionary plays in English. N. Buchwald, who is responsible for the Yiddish version, has drained off the middle-class dilutions, sharpened the characterization of the leading figure, Jim Wardell, and made other minor changes, but essentially the play is the same as in English.

The Artef production is technically accomplished and both the sets and the lighting are of a high order. But there is a good deal of the art theatre manner in the direction of Trikenish. The emphasis on the creation of individual “types,” the gaudy and somewhat vulgar ballroom scene, the misinterpretation of certain characters (Senator Bagheot and Drdla) and above all, the failure to bring out clearly the development of the class conflict in the play—all this is part of the technical and ideological baggage of the bourgeois art theatre a la Maurice Schwartz. The acting too is weak, lacking in unity and rhythm.

Yet despite these defects, the production of Trikenish is a real achievement when one takes into consideration the enormous difficulties under which a proletarian theatre works. The Artef has traveled a long way since its first performance three years ago; it has improved ideologically and artistically; it is today clearer in its aims, more conscious of its responsibilities to the revolutionary movement.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1931/v07n07-dec-1931-New-Masses.pdf