Workers Laboratory Theater/Theater of Action

WORKERS LABORATORY THEATER/THEATER OF ACTION. The leader of a workers’ theater movement during the 1930s, the Workers Laboratory Theater—later renamed the Theater of Action (TOA)—was characterized by an agitprop style intended to educate working-class audiences about left-wing issues. Founded in 1929 by several young theater enthusiasts in New York City, it was inspired by German and Soviet traveling political theater troupes and cultural efforts by the Communist Party’s John Reed Clubs and the New Masses. It performed short, original, highly stylized political sketches for political rallies, strikes, Unemployed Councils, and other organizing efforts associated with the Communist Party.

As a mobile theater able to bring social drama to working-class audiences without previous theatrical exposure, it presented skits that blended elements of symbolism, realism, vaudeville, dance, music, and mass chant into strident Marxist indictments of capitalism, racism, fascism, and the bourgeois state. Characters were portrayed as caricatures in cartoon-like renditions of politicians, factory owners, corrupt union officials, and newspaper editors.

In 1931, responding to growing interest from other workers’ theater groups and the desire to create a national network, the Workers Lab (now merged with a German workers’ theater troupe, the Prolet Bühne) put out the first issue of Workers Theater. Later that year, a national workers theater conference drew 130 organizations representing artists in theater, film, dance, and literature, including Hallie Flanagan, who several years later would direct the New Deal’s Federal Theater Project. By 1933, an estimated 250 workers’ theater groups existed as part of a national League of Workers’ Theaters. In 1934 Workers Theater was renamed New Theater, achieving a monthly circulation of ten thousand, with Jimmy Durante, Burgess Meredith, and Groucho Marx among its subscribers.

By 1932, the Workers Lab had a studio loft on the Lower East Side. Its core was a full-time “Shock Troupe” of twelve to eighteen members with an “Evening Troupe” of a hundred. Putting their socialists beliefs into practice, the Shock Troupe lived together communally, sharing the meager funds they earned from union and worker fraternal-order bookings. Daily classes were held in acting, movement, voice, current affairs, and Marxist theory. In 1933, they had a repertory of twenty sketches, performed two or three times daily, reaching an estimated 100,000 workers during that year.

Newsboy (1933) was their most successful and well-known production. Adapted from a poem by Communist Party cultural official V. J. Jerome, the twenty-minute, montage-like sketch contrasted headlines of the daily press with scenes from Great Depression life as seen through the eyes of a newsboy. Fast-paced realistic vignettes, dance movement, and mass chants were integrated into what was reviewed as the first application of Eisenstein’s film theories to American theater. Newsboy quickly became a standard of workers’ theater groups nationwide. Among theater professionals, the Workers Lab was recognized for advancing agitprop to a higher dramatic standard.

In 1934 the Workers Lab changed its name to TOA, marking a growing theatrical sophistication. TOA’s prestige was confirmed by the steady stream of artists and intellectuals visiting their loft, including Moss Hart, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Orson Welles, and John Howard Lawson. It now had a “younger brother” relationship with the Group Theater, with members Elia Kazan, Sandy Meisner, Lou Leveritt, and Bobby Lewis teaching TOA classes.

While continuing their regular performances for left-wing functions with a repertory of eighty sketches, TOA produced several full-length plays. In 1935 The Young Go First, codirected by Elia Kazan and Al Saxe, was their first and last attempt at a Broadway production. It closed after six weeks. TOA seemed unable to transform its mobile, political style into effective proscenium form. Six years of performing for next to nothing also prompted a desire to seek more established theatrical careers.
In 1936, TOA was incorporated into the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theater Project as the One-Act Experimental Theater, lasting one season. Many of its members then worked in various Federal Theater Project productions—for example, Nick Ray stage-managed the Living Newspapers, and Al Saxe was assistant director for One-Third of a Nation. On a larger level, in terms of affecting mainstream culture, the Workers Lab/TOA influenced a whole generation of young artists and intellectuals who would continue producing works of social significance in the theater, film, and television.

Goldstein, Malcolm. The Political Stage: American Drama and Theater of the Great Depression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Himelstein, Morgan. Drama Was a Weapon: The Left Wing Theater in New York, 1929–1941. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963.

McConachie, Bruce A., and Daniel Friedman, eds. Theater for Working Class Audiences in the United States, 1830–1980. Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Samuel, Raphael, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove. Theaters of the Left, 1880–1935: Workers’ Theater in Britain and America. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

Williams, Jay. Stage Left. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974.

Workers Theatre Magazine. Vol. 1, No. 4(July 1931). Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/workers-theatre/v1n04-jul-1931-Workers-Theatre-NYPL-mfilm.pdf