Professional Documents
Culture Documents
DEPRESSION-ERA AMERICA
American theatre and society in the 1920s
• O’Neill’s subsequent career – the quest for spiritual unity and its defeat by
modernity:
Marco Millions (1924); Days Without End (1933); and The Iceman Cometh
(1939)
The transformation of American theatre and society in the 1930s (1)
• The example of European Agit-Prop and American worker-artist groups such as the
Theatre Union, the Labor Stage and the Prolet-Buehne:
“The agit-prop dramas so popular in the twenties and thirties are often specifically
Marxist in their attempts to create an objective correlative to political and social
problems. That is, they explicitly wed form to content, specificity to didacticism,
[and] character to situation. … They frequently use real-life events to create an
imaginatively rendered explication of the political truth as it was seen by left-wing
theorists.” Ira A. Levine, Left-Wing Dramatic Theory in American Theatre (1985)
• The importance of the Group Theatre (est. 1931) and the influence of its
founders – Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford
• Clifford Odets’ early life and career – the example of Awake and Sing!
(1933)
• Odets’ subsequent work with the Group Theatre: Paradise Lost (1936) and
Golden Boy (1937)
The Federal Theatre Project (1)
• The controversy over Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock (1937)
• The Dies Committee on Un-American Activities and the strangling of the Federal Theatre
Project:
1. “It is apparent from the startling evidence received thus far that the Federal Theatre
Project not only is serving as a branch of the communistic organization but is also one more
link in the vast and unparalleled New Deal propaganda machine.” J. Parnell Thomas, New
Jersey Republican, the House Un-American Committee, July 26, 1938
2. “Miss Huffman says, “They couldn’t get any audiences for anything except Communistic
plays.” Now, gentlemen, I have here the proof that that is an absolutely false statement. We
have, as sponsoring bodies for the Federal Theater, two hundred and sixty-three social clubs
and organizations, two hundred and sixty-four welfare and civic organizations, two hundred
and seventy-one educational organizations, ninety-five religious organizations, ninety-one
organizations from business industries, sixteen mass organizations, sixty-six trade-unions,
sixty-two professional unions, seventeen consumers' unions, twenty-five fraternal unions,
and fifteen political organizations. Note, gentlemen, that every religious shade is covered and
every political affiliation and every type of educational and civic body in the support of our
theater. It is the widest and most American base that any theater has ever built upon.” Nellie
Flanagan, Director of the Federal Theatre Project, Evidence before the House Un-American
Committee, December 1938.
The decline of left-wing drama in the late 1930s
• The passing of the Depression