"1935" (play)

1935 (sometimes called Events of 1935) was a Living Newspaper, and one of the least successful of them. As I have been reading these scripts, investigating their performance history and critical and popular response, and found personal accounts of their creation, what has eluded me was exactly how the information (much of it factual, and quoted from sourced material) was collected and edited for production.

Today I discovered that these plays were not written entirely by the individuals, Arthur Arent and Morris Watson - these true stories were created by a staff of over 100 previously unemployed newspaper writers working for the Federal Theatre Project, then edited into this particular performance format by people like Arent and Watson.

The play 1935, which more than any of the other Living Newspaper creations resembles a March of Time newsreel, presents a chronological laundry list of what happened in, well, the year 1935. The Lindberg baby murder trial, the death of Huey Long, the icing of Dutch Schultz, the hanging of William DeBoe. All rather sordid stuff, and not particularly rife with larger meaning or resonance. The VOICE OF THE LIVING NEWSPAPER character leaves us with the idea that every year it is the same, we are all fascinated by grotesque scandal that we just as soon forget once we are wrapped up in the next big thing. It leaves one feel very jaded and unhappy - and unlike any of the Living Newspapers I have already read, it does not inspire one to any kind of action. It doesn't even make me want to get off of the couch.

There are two inspiring moments, one which warns that the impending 1936 Berlin Olympics will not be a politically-neutral event, and the penultimate scene of Communist Angelo Herndon, an African-American, sentenced to twenty years hard labor for specious reasons (based on an 1861 act against sedition, he was found guilty of possession Communist literature) and his inspirational example as a prisoner and excellent legal council freed him in 1937 - which of course, was not know at the time of the production.

Opening March 14, 1936, it ran for only 85 performances at the Biltmore Theatre in New York, but was innocuous enough to pave the way for the more politically charged Living Newspapers which would follow.

Power (play)

POWER
A Living Newspaper
by Arthur Arent

ag·it·prop /ˈædʒɪtˌprɒp/ –noun
1. agitation and propaganda, esp. for the cause of communism.

I am leftist, I will admit it. Not a Leftist, I do not define myself that way, that is not me as a person. But my belief system veers to the left of center. I believe in tolerance and compassion, I accept alternate points of view, and often champion them. And I believe in the obligation of our society, our civilization, our government, to see to the needs and assistance of those who need assistance.

I am not a Communist. Neither am I a Capitalist, in its purest sense. I am against slavery. I am against slave-like conditions. I oppose starvation and want. I oppose fear, fear of oppression, of domination, either through direct threatening means, or by the endorsement and reinforcement of the dominant paradigm, of the necessity of an underclass, or workers doing all they can for little while the few live lives of unspeakable luxury and waste. And yes, that might make me sound like a Socialist. Today, over 55% of Americans believe the President is a Socialist, which means they don't really know what the fuck that word even means, but if they think Barack Obama is one, then paint me red and call me Uncle Joe.

Having said that, upon reading another "Living Newspaper" by Arthur Arent, I am not so sure I feel as strongly as I once did about the House Committee on Un-American Activities efforts at pulling down the Federal Theater Project.

The majority of work created by the FTP was non-political. There were many children's plays, and when conservatives called those productions out for indoctrinating the young against the Man, well that is probably because most good, strong children's stories do have moral lessons pertaining to fairness, honesty, being kind, and all kinds of messages that leave, I dunno, British Petroleum, for example, withering under scrutiny.

But these Living Newspapers are inarguably agitprop - they are propaganda which agitates. They are not well-told stories which inspire the mind or the heart. They are also not dispassionate portrayals of fact. In the case of POWER they are quotes taken out of context (Arent himself admitted this was a technique of The Living Newspaper, though he did not use that turn of phrase) and bent in such a way as to turn the viewer in a certain direction, and keep them pointed that way until a direct appeal is made; the audience is instructed, to-wit, to rise up, take a stand, to take action against the forces which oppress them. To stand with strong government and against big business.

Are these good ideas? If you can't find work and your children are dying before your eyes, well, sure, they are the only ideas. I didn't say it was wrong, or even proper to create this work. But reading it, I can understand why there are those who would believe that plays which champion the efforts of the current administration should not be paid for with public funds.

The Political Stage

Reading The Political Stage by Malcolm Goldstein and already familiar names and titles jump out at me. Can You Hear Their Voices? is right there. The Communists among us despised it ... and for reasons which were part of an intermittent discussion I was having with Leah this weekend, wandering among the parading gayboys and girls of the Village.

Where you sit, as they say, depends on where you stand. The young person sees so much to do, making them anxious, impatient. Yearning for change, for that golden age on the distant horizon. Possibly angry, leaning towards hopelessness.

An older person looks at things and is relieved that things are as good as they are, has lived through progress in action, seen it made through incremental steps, and have hope for the future through such progress.

For example, today we watch helplessly as the Gulf of Mexico is polluted for generations ... but isn’t gay marriage a certainty within the next ten years? Are we not celebrating the World Cup in South Africa, of all places?

The next age is for bitterness or benign passive acceptance (and bitterness.)

The radical drama Melissa and I witnessed on Saturday night portrayed not some imaginary, future calamity, but a representation of the honest truth of that moment in time. People were starving, desperate. It might turn a person to collective farming.

And that is what offended the far Left. Communism shouldn’t be the last resort if Capitalism fails to work. Capitalism, they will tell you, fails to work, period. Communism is the only choice, not merely the choice for pathetic, desperate loser people.

Theater Arts Monthly, November, 1938
“The Technique of the Living Newspaper” by Arthur Arent
I wish I could have spent more time in the performing arts library at Lincoln Center. There are plays by Arent I can read which I can’t find anywhere else. Later. Soon. If necessary. This article was a helpful description of the Living Newspaper process, or at least his defense of his version of it.

Arent claims that while there is now (then) copious evidence of staging current events as reported through newspapers as drama in many world communities prior to its foothold as part of the Federal Theatre Project, he was unaware of all of them. He’d thought they’d made the idea up.

"The first thing to consider is not style, which is the manner of doing a thing, but content, which is the thing itself."

The Living Newspaper should be the dramatization of a problem, not of an event. They represented a series of events, bearing on one issue. They may begin with dry record (dramatized Congressional hearings) but then move to the ‘human element’.

I learned through this article that a number of the elements created by the Peculiar Works Project for Can You Hear Their Voices? were either authentic - as in the case of the live music playing between scenes - or offering modern examples of what they wanted to do, had they had the technology. Arent reports they wanted a teletype across the proscenium to provide factual information, but found that too distracting. Our modern audiences wouldn’t, surely, we eat that shit up, and the PWP featured text rolling as part of the videos they showed between scenes - which was something they did back in the day with still photos, between the acts to set the scene, and as the backdrop for the scene itself, keeping the set simple.

As for the ticker captions, instead they incorporated the character of the “Loud Speaker” who (in addition to speaking loud) would act as a narrator for the production, even interacting with the characters.

Arent was proud of productions like Ethiopia and Triple-A Plowed Under. One elements of these works include taking verbatim quotations from the newspaper, and dramatizing them but breaking them up into scenes where the person speaking after the fact is commenting on what they are doing, as they are doing.

For example, a woman sentence for the murder of her infant child because she couldn’t bear to see it starve made a long statement during her trial, reported in the paper, which was spoken in part by the actress playing her as she contemplated the act, performed the act, was grilled by the police officer and then in the trial. Dialogue was created for the police and lawyer, usually in the form of questions which she answers with her statements.

Injunction Granted! (which has been criticized elsewhere) was not a favorite of Arents (he didn’t write it) and uses it as an example of how not to create a Living Newspaper. The “montage” style of writing, where the action jumps back and forth repeated to numerous different places in space and time confuses the office, and is repetitious. The style he prefers builds from scene to scene, until there is an explosion of action.

Hmn. Just looked at the edge of The Political Stage. It’s from the library of Dorothy and Reuben.