Political Theater

POLITICAL THEATER, 1960s–1980s. The 1960s counterculture inspired a political theater that was considerably different from that of the 1930s. Rather than preparing plays, actors, and playwrights to more or less “conquer” Broadway, the new theater, greatly influenced by Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht, generally had disdain for conventional theatrical forms and physical settings. The new works were often revues and open-ended skits performed in other than theatrical settings. Many of the companies became communal troupes that traveled extensively. Scores of these companies existed throughout the United States and a few, such as the Living Theater, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and Bread and Puppet Theater, had national and even international impact.

The single most influential of the new theater companies was the Living Theater, conceived in 1946 by anarchists Julian Beck and Judith Malina. Originally presenting plays by well-known writers such as Racine, Auden, Cocteau, and Pirandello, the Living Theater slowly moved to introducing plays by new American playwrights, the most notable success being Jack Gelber’s The Connection. Both Beck and Malina were regular participants in anti-war demonstrations and were occasionally fined and jailed. In the 1960s the Living Theater became a commune that created collective works designed to stimulate audiences to direct action. While remaining highly political in content, the collective’s work was increasingly abstract in form. The Living Theater toured for long periods in Europe and Latin America, and members of the collective often split away to form their own groups. The Living Theater’s most ambitious later works were Paradise Now and Frankenstein.

One of the most distinctive groups in the mass demonstrations of the 1960s was the Bread and Puppet Theater. Using puppets and masks ranging in size from hand-held objects to giant twenty-footers, the group, begun by Peter Schumann, specialized in outdoor events. First appearing at rallies protesting the war in Vietnam, the company was still active in the 1980s in events protesting the nuclear arms race and American interventions in Latin America.

Another 1960s group with staying power was the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which was started by Ronnie Davis in 1959 as a subdivision of the San Francisco Actors Workshop. The group originally played only in public parks. Through the years the troupe created works that could be played indoors and at other special settings. The style favored broad comedy: loud voices, stereotypical characters, exaggerated gestures, audacious costumes, bold makeup, and easily followed stories. The troupe found comic hyperbole ideal for the conditions it satirized for a mass audience.

The Pageant Players of New York also chose to perform in public places in the 1960s, mainly in streets and laundromats. Their first play, Paper Tiger, was performed at an anti-war rally in 1965. It featured live music, exaggerated costumes, and no speaking roles. The group continued to perform on street corners, in parks, in lofts, inside laundromats, and occasionally in theaters throughout the New Left period. One of the group’s hallmarks was its inclusion of live rock-and-roll music whenever possible.

Although New York generated the most theatrical activity, there were production groups in many cities. In Detroit, socialist Edith Carroll Cantor launched the Unstabled Coffeehouse, which presented plays on weekends, launched comedian Lily Tomlin on a career that would take her to national stardom, and spun off the Concept East, a black theater company run by Woodie King. One of the Unstabled productions was Sitdown ‘37, an original play presented to a United Auto Workers audience in Flint on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the sit-down strikes that unionized General Motors. Groups in other cities include the Firehouse Theater, set up in Minneapolis in 1965; the Caravan Theater of Boston, begun in 1965 under the sponsorship of the American Friends Service Committee; the Performance Group of Chicago, founded by Richard Schechner in 1967; and the Om Theater of Boston, begun by Julie Portman in 1966.

All of the groups were racially integrated, but there were also companies set up to showcase the writing, directing, and acting talents of nonwhites. While somewhat more conventional in their choice of plays and settings, these theaters remained innovative in comparison to the nonpolitical theater. Among the most important of the groups was the New York extension of Detroit’s Concept East. Director Woodie King eventually became head of the Franklin Street Theater and was responsible for a number of Broadway productions. LeRoi Jones (soon to be Amiri Baraka) and Larry Neal set up black theater groups in Harlem and later in Newark, New Jersey. Playwright Ed Bullins, then minister of culture for the Black Panther Party, set up the Black Troupe in New York City in 1968. The company was short-lived, as had been Theater Black, formed in Cleveland in 1966.

The major non-English language theater of the period was El Teatro Campesino (the Farm Workers’ Theater), a traveling company established in 1965 by Luis Miguel Valdez in Delano, California, as part of the lettuce boycott campaign orchestrated by the United Farm Workers union led by César Chávez. The productions were primarily aimed at recruiting farm workers in labor camps and in small towns. Plays were also produced for supporters of the union who lived in major cities.

A Spanish connection was also integral to the Gut Theater of East Harlem, which grew out of Enrique Vargas’s 1967 work with street gangs. The teenagers created plays based on their own life experiences and in opposition to the war in Vietnam. Much of the work was slapstick in style. One thirty-minute production, The Bench, dealt with a Puerto Rican family freshly arrived in New York. The Drama Group of Mobilization for Youth on New York’s Lower East Side dealt with similar themes in a like manner.

The single most performed play of the time was Barbara Garson’s MacBird, a satire on the war in Vietnam. Garson first comprehended the power of public performance during massive rallies in San Francisco. Like many 1960s authors, Garson pursued various forms of writing. In addition to subsequent plays for adults and children, she also wrote nonfiction about office workers.

Among those who practiced more traditional forms of political theater was Buffalo-based Emmuel J. Fried. In the 1930s he had worked in New York with Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, and other militants in a subsection of the Group Theater. He had also taken dancing lessons from Martha Graham. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Fried was a labor organizer, an activity that brought him to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He then turned to writing a series of labor plays that have been performed by alternative theaters in most major U.S. cities. His best-known works are The Dodo Bird and Drop Hammer.

As the radical movement began to wane in the 1970s, many theatrical groups collapsed or began to perform indoors. New groups sprang up to attempt the establishment of permanent radical theaters in major cities. One of the most successful for a time was the Labor Theater, created by Chuck Portz and Bette Craig. The group staged plays about the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Jack London, black outlaws, and labor education programs. The theater also shaped a feminist revue, I Just Wanted Someone to Know, written by Bette Craig and IWW historian Joyce Kornbluh.

A trend that accelerated in the 1980s was that radical directors, actors, and writers began to find employment in conventional radio, film, and television. They did not see this as a retreat from their old ideals so much as an accommodation to a new political climate and another means of trying to reach a mass audience. A handful of groups continued in the nontraditional vein. In addition to groups already cited, Heart of the Beast, a theatrical company in Minneapolis, became the focal point of the May Day parades revived in the Twin Cities in 1974. Combining socialist, environmental, and pagan themes, the parades wind through residential areas before culminating at a public park for a day of outdoor festivities. Until her death in 1996, radical author Meridel Le Sueur acted as grand marshal. Upwards of ten thousand people participated annually.

Hardly any of the companies formed in the 1960s and 1970s survived beyond the 1990s. The major exception was the Bread and Puppet group, which continued to appear at political events of all kinds. More commonly, individuals who had been involved in the movement became associated with more conventional theater and media projects. For example, a number of actors who had performed in the Labor Theater productions became prominent in television or film, the most famous being Bruce Willis.

Craig, Bette, and Joyce Kornbluh. I Just Wanted Someone to Know. Introduction by Barbara Mayer Wertheimer. New York: Smyrna Press, 1981.

El Teatro Campesino. Website. http://elteatrocampesino.com

Lazare, Donald. American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987.

Radical Theatre Repertory, 1968–1969. New York: Radical Theater Repertory, 1970.