This last section of Blankfort’s compelling working essay on the new theater answers criticism of previous installments and looks at different genres of revolutionary plays so far developed and their limitations. Two plays in particular, Stevedore and Peace on Earth, are analyzed.

‘Sketches Toward An Aesthetic for the Revolutionary Theatre: The Revolutionary Play’ by Michael Blankfort from New Theatre. Vol. 1 No. 10. November, 1934.

Part III

THE first two articles of this series appeared in the June and July-August issues of NEW THEATRE. Owing to the necessity of condensing the remaining articles into a single one, the points described in the first two articles could not be utilized fully in the remaining space. I have incorporated only what seemed to me essential to a healthy working class theatre.

Some readers have objected to the psychological aspect of these articles. It is interesting to note what Serge M. Eisenstein said in this connection. “At present I am working on the psychology of audience reactions, trying to measure the effects of a film on the audience. These laws, I believe, can be found by pure physics, not intuition, and so I am working on the principles of Pavlov and Freud.”

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THE bourgeois theatre satisfies the wishes of its audience either by sublimating them, by inflating them, or by flattering them. The audience is led, and often willingly, by these analgesics through a fake and feverish reality (Grand Hotel genre), or through an ocean of sentimental whipped-cream (Ah, Wilderness, etc.), or through an equally sentimental pastiche of history (Mary, Queen of Scots, etc.), onto the plains of a sort of thumb-sucking, pleasurable Nirvana.

But for our audiences, war is more than dirt and terror (What Price Glory) and more than an eternal and inevitable phenomenon (Men Must Fight); it is profit-imperialism which can be overthrown for good (Peace On Earth); “what are soldiers and sailors but workers with guns?” (Sailors of Catarro by Friedrich Wolf). Negroes are not fishfry fanatics with a paradise weltanschaung (Green Pastures), nor god-struck gamblers and lechers (Porgy); they are workers with honor (Stevedore).

Though our audiences do and must consist of workers, sympathetic intellectuals and petty bourgeoisie, they are not united in their understanding of contemporary forces. Thus our plays must not only appeal to the militant and class-conscious vanguard, but must also attract the mass of less advanced workers. Our plays must not only inspirit their audiences, they must organize them as well.

Our plays must hew to this line: To present the working class point of view and revolutionary ideology most effectively and most dramatically.

The revolutionary theatre in America is still breaking ground. The half dozen or so plays which give promise of a great theatre. These have uncovered many problems, concern themselves chiefly with the technique of creating effective working class propaganda. They arise not so much from the sheer mechanics of playwriting as from the lack of a full understanding of what our audiences are, and how to present our new material to them in the most dramatic way.

Pendulum Plays

Revolutionary plays, with few exceptions, have been “pendulum plays.” These are plays which show a worker or an intellectual swing from a conservative position in the first act to a militant, class-conscious position by the final curtain, e.g., 1931, Peace On Earth, Steel and Stevedore.

There are two reasons why pendulum plays have been most popular. First, in the early discussions concerning audiences for revolutionary plays, it appeared that the only audience which could be counted on was a thoroughly militant and class-conscious one. This audience, it was thought, would prefer plays which ended on a corroboration of their own position.

The second reason came later when this analysis of the potential audience was broadened, and our theatre, as organizers, conceived of drawing unclass-conscious as well as militant workers to our plays. The pendulum play was and still is considered the most effective means of interesting and proselytizing this audience. The reasoning goes something like this: The unclass-conscious worker identifies himself with the hero. The hero turns left; therefore the worker turns left. Q.E.D.

That the pendulum play will exist for some time to come is a certainty. I am afraid it will exist to the exclusion of many other possibilities. Playwrights who notice how successful such play can be are prone to accept the formula This formula has dangerous tendencies. It tends to adopt a special case, and generalize from it, giving the false impression that the whole working class is turning left at the same rate. Also, it may lull its audience into a kind of false security by approaching the class struggle in too mechanical a fashion (i.e., everybody who goes through a strike is a class-conscious worker). Thus it may give rise to a fictitious kind of wish-fulfillment, an instance where “escape”1 in our plays comes closest to the escape in the bourgeois theatre.

THE pendulum play arising from a conception of the identification of the audience with the hero makes it essential for us to look into what this term identification really is.

Identification is a projection of the audience upon and in some character or characters. For the time being the audience places its bets on some person in the play. Identification is more than sympathy with that character; it is a “living in the character” what writers on esthetics call “empathy,”2 and may be achieved with characters that are ordinarily unsympathetic. Unless there is some common experience between the characters represented and the audience viewing them, the characters appear unreal and identification is impossible. The audience does not need complete recognition of all the experiences of the characters but there has to be some common ground. In our plays, this common experience may be in the realm of ideas expressed for the more advanced section of our audiences, or it may be in the field of day-to-day class struggle situations, strikes, etc. If, however, our plays are to be most effective, the common experience must always include universal and immediate wishes (for a home, for a woman, for children, for security, for love, happiness, etc.).

If our playwrights kept this factor in mind, very important flaws in their plays would be filled in. The bosses would not be out and out dark villains. Such characters are not entirely convincing on the stage; they are unreal and being unreal our audience will not understand what they stand for. And from the mouths of villains, as in Peace On Earth and Stevedore, an important part of the play’s ideology comes forth. It should be obvious that it is as important to unmask the capitalist villains as it is to advance the ideology of the proletarian heroes. But, in order to unmask them effectively, it is necessary to understand them. It follows that sympathetic characters would not be symbols, and as symbols, unreal, but would have immediate and personal problems which may grow out of or stimulate their activity in the class struggle. For instance, contrast Peace On Earth, in which a hero was dramatized by an idea, with Stevedore in which an idea was dramatized by the hero. In Peace On Earth3 Peter Owens fought against war. In Stevedore, Lonnie Thompson fought for his home. Both are class struggle issues, but the latter is a more successful way of involving the audience.

If our playwrights keep these points in mind, they will not be guilty of bad pendulum plays. A bad pendulum play is one in which the hero is distorted in order to get him militant by the final curtain. “1931” is such a play. There is no indication in the character of Adam that makes his final gesture plausible. Such distortion could not occur if the playwright realizes that where he distorts identification is destroyed, and his “point” nullified. “1931” becomes, therefore, a good play about unemployed misery but a bad play about a worker turning left.

But it isn’t as simple as that. I can hear the playwrights protesting, “Hold on you! Do you want them to leave the theatre without knowing what they can do about unemployed misery? Do you want us to paint a dark picture and let it go at that?”

And I answer: Make your character turn left in a way that is consistent with his past, in a way that is convincing, or let it go at that, for his turning left by rote, by distortion, will never win an adherent to our cause. And yet, I feel it would be wrong to write a play about the jobless without indicating “a call to action.”

There are two real problems harassing the revolutionary playwright. One, the problem of “the call to action” which I. have suggested above, and the other is “last scene trouble.”

The Two Furies

THE two furies they are! One scene in Stevedore which contained the explicit “call to action” was rewritten thirteen times. And a different last scene for Peace On Earth was tried out at each of three dress rehearsals. The one used opening night and afterwards was never tried out before the opening night. The two furies they are, more with our theatre than with the bourgeois theatre, because of the nature of the subject matter of our plays and the class character of our audiences.

The difference between “a call to action” and the “revolutionary last scene” is the difference between what should be done and the promise that it will be done. In Peace On Earth the call to action was for workers to unite against war; the last scene showed them uniting against war even under the terrific pressure of capitalist terror. In Stevedore, the audience was called to unite, black and white, and the last scene ended on a dual note: Blacksnake’s cry of victory, “They’re running. They’re running,” and Ruby’s cry of sorrow at Lonnie’s death. The total impression that Peters and Sklar wanted to give was though the leader may die, his comrades would carry on toward the promise of victory.

Although these two elements, a call to action and the last scene, are dissimilar, they may often take place at the same time. The promise of a victorious future that the last scene gives usually emerges out of the call to action that is proposed in the play.

Why are these two elements so difficult? “Last scene troubles” arise because the playwright as we have indicated above, doesn’t want to let his audience go away depressed. He wants to suggest, if he can, the revolutionary future. However, unless the playwright constructs his characters so that the promise of the future arises convincingly out of the struggles of the present, all within the framework of the play, his good intentions are wasted. This can be achieved by creating situations and characters which allow for identifications and the fulfillment of the audience.

Piscator⁴ worried about the last scenes of his productions. He solved the difficulty by spectacular uses of the stage. This led him to abstractions. We have to solve this by the human conflicts in the play. This leads us to a concrete, personalized and emotional appeal which dramatizes our ideology. The problem is more the playwright’s than the director’s.

In “1931,” in The Third Parade, in We, the People, in The Belt and in Amaco, the call to action occurs in the last scene.⁵ This is also partially true of Wexley’s Steel. Of course, this means that the most sympathetic character took a long time to become conscious of what had happened to him and what to do about it. The trouble with plays of this nature is that too many revelations within a short time is exceedingly difficult to make real to an audience. Confusion often results from having the call to action in the last scene. But the fact that the two elements can occur at the same time must not mislead us into thinking that both are necessary in every revolutionary play.

The Call to Action

IT is clear, that the more specific the call to action the narrower the appeal. Marion Models, Inc., a Theatre Collective production, called upon its audiences to join the Needle Trades Industrial Union. This can appeal therefore primarily to workers in this trade. Most agit-prop plays have very specific calls to action, often to their disadvantage.

When the subject matter of a play demands a call to action the call must be there. (Attention protesting playwrights.)

The call to action usually, if not always, arises in the play alongside the ideology of the bosses. In Peace On Earth, for example, the call to action comes only after students have been arrested, strikers killed, and war-making been effected. This is the way it should be. You can’t have a protest in a play unless you have shown what there is to protest against. But in this play as in many of the others, there are too many calls to action. A play about war cannot successfully include every aspect of imperialist war. The authors not only attempted to encompass too much but, at the same time, they overestimated the capacity of their audience to receive.

The call to action is an effective call only when it is a dramatic call–a call which comes out of a conflict between two convincingly human forces in the play. The call to action usually holds the ideological kernel of the play. Frequently these kernels come forth in long speeches, and in scenes whose conflict is irrelevant to or not entirely integrated with the rest of the play. In an earlier article I described the close relation between integrated conflicts and the wish fulfillment imperative for an audience.

A call to action need not be specific. There are plays which have an implied call to action–Precedent, They Shall Not Die, Gods of the Lightning, etc. These plays have the following in common: (1) There is a working class hero who struggles against the bosses and their tools; (2) The situations arise out of working class experience; (3) They are based on historical events, the implications of which are well known.⁶

These plays may, lose some of their organizing ability by not having a specific call to action, but they have many advantages especially for the less advanced part of our audiences. The situations are recognizable and thus may be avoided in real life. (e.g. attempts to bribe union leaders, stool pigeons, scabs, legal frame-ups, etc.) These plays commemorate great working class heroes (Tom Mooney, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro nine, the bonus marchers). They are wholesome examples of militant action and by this virtue imply a similar action for the worker audiences.

Must our plays have a call to action at all? What about plays which concern themselves with the upper class their decay and degeneration? Or with political corruption like Merry-Go-Round? What about plays like American Dream, Gentlewoman, and Charles Walker’s Crazy American?

WE must attack the bourgeoisie on every front. If we can weaken their hold on the working class by exposing corruption in high places, or by illuminating the dark and unhealthy lives of its society, we must do so. But there must be an indication in such plays that the whole of society does not consist of the decadents on the stage; that there is another world. Of course this may be done without introducing a Communist, if by introducing that character, the play appears distorted.

Throughout this article I have constantly stressed the fact that only through the characters we create in our plays can we hope to write effective propaganda plays. I have stressed the human and personalized side of what our plays should be. I have done so because it seems to me that only by this means will our plays fulfill the wishes of its audiences. The bourgeois theatre fulfills the wishes of its audiences and in doing so fuses that fulfillment with the interests of the oppressor class. We, too, must satisfy audience wishes, psychological and economic, but our task is to fuse that satisfaction with the interests of the working class.

The outlook of our theatre is a brilliant one. We are pioneering. In a sense we are just emerging from the morality drama. We await our Shakespeare.

NOTES

1. In a review of my second article, John Howard Lawson in the Daily Worker pointed out that the word “escape” used to describe a certain aspect of our plays was a bad choice. Although Lawson seemed to have skipped those paragraphs in which I clearly made the distinction between bourgeois and proletarian “escape,” the fact that the word has so universal a connotation has convinced me that on this point Lawson was right. The following may be a better formulation: plays which end on a note of future victory for the working class represent an idealistic approach whenever the victory does not grow immediately and convincingly out of the class and character conflicts in the play. This idealism often satisfies the audience wish for alleviation from the painful present. Revolutionary idealism, however, differs from other kinds in that it is a stimulant toward the achievement of the projected victory by means of very concrete steps, i.e., demonstrations, strikes, revolution.

2. Bourgeois estheticians have misused the concept of empathy to create a theory of “psychic distance” in which the audience is said not to be esthetically appreciating a play when it gets involved in it. Bill Robinson, who jumped on the stage and took part in a scene of Stevedore, would be described as having a non-esthetic experience. There is no place for “psychic distance” in a revolutionary esthetic. If it were possible, the whole audience ought to be aroused enough to jump on the stage.

3. In this play although there were worker characters, it was the intellectual, Owen, who attracted the audience’s sympathy, and with whom it identified itself.

4. In an article on Piscator by Anna Latsis (International Theatre No. 5) the stress is always put on the spectacle and the spectator. There are, of course, many differences between spectators and audience, spectacle and play. Both are useful. For less advanced workers, however, plays are more successful because they are simpler to participate in and easier to understand.

5. I violently differ with the call to action as expressed in some of these plays, but as examples, they are worth looking into.

6. Newsboy is an example of what the agit-prop play has in store for us. It is a superlative creation, and the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre and Alfred Saxe deserve great praise. Agit-prop plays, however, demand special critical treatment inasmuch as their purposes and audiences are not typical.

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/v1n10-nov-1934-New-Theatre-NYPL-mfilm.pdf