Staged action : six plays from the American workers' theatre

Abstract

Excerpt] This collection is an attempt to restore and revitalize interest in a largely forgotten American theatrical genre, the workers' movement. Workers' theatre is a term that is used broadly to define from the working class or about working-class people. Here it refers to a unique and specific movement in the American of the 1920s and 1930s to employ the stage to address issues concerning the worker and the workers' movement. A simple definition was given by Hollace Ransdell of the Affiliated Schools for Workers in 1936: a workers' play deals truthfully with the lives and problems of the masses of the people, directly or suggestively, in a way that workers can understand and appreciate. These plays need not be written by workers themselves, and, in fact, many were written by figures sympathetic to the labor movement. The plays themselves are a series of fascinating, moving, occasionally frustrating dramas that often passionately explore the possibilities of the workers' movement. Even during the Great Depression, these plays never displayed the pessimistic images of the future as reflected in the contemporary fiction of Steinbeck and Dos Passos. Instead, the plays of the American workers' clung tightly to stirring, Utopian visions, as was hoped for in the early writings that formed a basis for the movement.

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