by Chris Hedges
And we love Art for Art’s sake,
It’s smart, for Art’s sake,
To Part, for Art’s sake,
With your heart, for Art’s sake,
And your mind, for Art’s sake,
Be Blind, for Art’s sake,
And Deaf for Art’s sake,
And dumb, for Art’s sake,
They kill, for Art’s sake,
All the Art for Art’s Sake28
Mr. Mister and Reverend Salvation, who preached peace and love before World War I was declared and blessed the war once it began, sang a duet:
War! War! Kill all the dirty Huns!
And those Austro-Hungarians
War! War! We’re entering the war!
The Lusitania’s an unpaid debt!
Remember Troy! Remember Lafayette!
Remember the Alamo! Remember our womanhood!
Remember those innocent unborn babies!
Don’t let George do it, you do it,
Make the world safe for democracy!
Make the world safe for liberty!
Make the world safe for steel and the Mister family!29
“Of course it’s peace we’re for,” Reverend Salvation added. “This is the war to end all war.”
“Amen,” sang the chorus.
“I can see the market rising like a beautiful bird,” Mister shouted.
“Collection!” Reverend Salvation announced to the congregation.
The show was scheduled to open June 17, 1937, at the Maxine Elliott Theatre on Broadway, with an elaborate set and a twenty-eight-piece orchestra. But at the last minute, Washington, bowing to complaints, announced that no new shows would be funded until after the beginning of the new fiscal year. The Maxine Elliott Theatre was surrounded by WPA security guards on June 14, since, the government argued, props and costumes inside were government property. Welles, Houseman, and Blitzstein rented the Venice Theatre and a piano. They met the audience outside the shuttered theater and marched the audience and the cast twenty blocks to the Venice. The procession invited onlookers to join them, and by 9 p.m., the Venice’s 1,742 seats were filled. Actor’s Equity had forbidden the cast to perform the piece “onstage.” Blitzstein, who sat alone at the piano, was prepared to play and perform all the roles. Olive Stanton, a little-known relief actress who depended on her small WPA check to support her mother and herself, stood up from her seat when Blitzstein began and sang her opening number. It was an act of singular courage. The rest of the cast, scattered throughout the audience, stood and took over their parts. The poet Archibald MacLeish, who attended, thought it was one of the most moving theatrical experiences of his life. Houseman was promptly fired by the project and Welles quit. The two men would go on to found the Mercury Theater.
“This was obviously censorship under a different guise,” Flanagan noted at the time.30
The Cradle Will Rock, like much of the popular work that came out of the Federal Theatre Project, addressed the concerns of the working class rather than those of the power elite. It excoriated greed, corruption, the folly of war, the complicity of liberal institutions in protecting the power elite, and the abuses of capitalism. Mr. Mister ran the town like a private plantation. “I believe newspapers are great mental shapers,” he said. “My steel industry is dependent on them really.”
“Just you call the News,” Editor Daily responded. “And we’ll print all the news. From coast to coast, and from border to border.”
“O the press, the press, the freedom of the press,” Editor Daily and Mr. Mister sang. “They’ll never take away the freedom of the press. We must be free to say whatever’s on our chest—with a hey-diddle-dee and ho-nanny-no for whichever side will pay the best.”
“I should like a series on young Larry Foreman,” Mr. Mister told Editor Daily, “who goes around stormin’ and organizin’ unions.”
“Yes, we’ve heard of him,” Editor Daily informed Mr. Mister. “In fact, good word of him. He seems quite popular with workingmen.”
“Find out who he drinks with and talks with and sleeps with, And look up his past till at last you’ve got it on him.”
“But the man is so full of fight, he’s simply dynamite, Why it would take an army to tame him,” Editor Daily said.
“Then it shouldn’t be too hard to tame him,” Mr. Mister answered.
“O the press, the press, the freedom of the press,” the two sang. “You’ve only got to hint whatever’s fit to print; If something’s wrong with it, why then we’ll print to fit. With a he-diddly-dee and a hononny-no. For whichever side will pay the best.”31
The kind of commercial censorship imposed on The Cradle Will Rock has been the favored tool, briefly disrupted by the Federal Theatre Project, used to dominate the theater and the arts since the era of World War I and the rise of the corporate state. Money, as in the rest of the liberal establishment, rewarded those who behaved and did not write or speak from the bottom up. For its four years, the Federal Theatre Project drew huge segments of the population, for whom the arts were often seen as elitist and inaccessible, into new and empowering forms of self-expression. But the power of art to shape and explain reality was something the power elite did not intend to extend to the working class.
“The most unique achievement of Federal Theatre, and the one that paradoxically was most responsible for its demise, was the creation of the Living Newspaper,” said playwright and director Karen Malpede,
an indigenous form of documentary drama dramatizing hot-button subjects of national debate. Triple-A Plowed Under, Power, One-Third of a Nation, Spirochete, were researched by journalists, written by dramatists, acted by huge casts with full orchestras and explored the struggle of farmers, the debate over the Tennessee Valley Association’s plan to bring subsidized electricity to the rural South; the reasons behind the housing crisis—“One-third of the nation is ill-housed, ill-fed,” President Roosevelt had said—the race for the cure for syphilis. Labor intensive, provocative, using and inventing all sorts of non-realistic acting and staging techniques, the Living Newspapers, a new form of theater, were precursors of American 1960s experimentalism, documentary and collectively created political theater.32
The Living Newspapers were wildly popular. Sixty thousand people bought tickets to Power while the play was still being created. The Nation said it was a modern morality play: “Its theme is the search of Everyman for cheap electric power with which to make a better life.” Harry Hopkins called it “a great show.” It made him laugh and feel: “It’s propaganda to educate the consumer who’s paying for power. It’s about time someone had some propaganda for him.” The bolder and more popular the Federal Theatre Project became, the more it was accused of being a breeding ground for communism. In a popular children’s play, The Revolt of the Beavers, actors dressed as beavers, rushing around on roller skates, overthrew an evil beaver king so all the beavers could eat ice cream, play, and be nine years old. Congressional critics attacked the beaver actors for disseminating communism.
The opponents of the New Deal, backed and funded by the business elite, announced that President Roosevelt had permitted communists to infiltrate the government and government-funded programs, such as the Federal Theatre Project. And that project was the first target of the Dies Committee, led by Texas democrat Martin Dies. The theater project was denounced in a series of hearings in August and November 1938. The Dies committee eventually became HUAC. Flanagan was asked about an article she had written titled “A Theatre Is Born,” in which she described the enthusiasm of the federal theaters as having “a certain Marlowesque madness.”
“You are quoting from this Marlowe,” observed Alabama representative Joseph Starnes from the committee. “Is he a Communist?”
“The room rocked with laughter, but I did not laugh,” Flanagan remembered. “Eight thousand people might lose their jobs because a Congressional Committee had so prejudged us that even the classics were ‘communistic.’ I said, ‘I was quoting from Christopher Marlo
we.’”
“Tell us who Marlowe is, so we can get the proper references, because that is all we want to do,” Starnes said.
“Put in the record that he was the greatest dramatist in the period of Shakespeare, immediately preceding Shakespeare,” Flanagan answered.
By 1939 the theater project was killed. The final performances of the Federal Theatre around the country were often poignant. The Ritz Theater in New York provided a new ending for Pinocchio. “Pinocchio, having conquered selfishness and greed, did not become a living boy,” Flanagan wrote. “Instead he was turned back into a puppet.” “So let the bells proclaim our grief,” intoned the company at the finish, “that his small life was all too brief.” The stagehands knocked down the sets in front of the audience, and the company laid Pinocchio in a pine box with the legend “Born December 23, 1938; Killed by Act of Congress, June 30, 1939.”33 At the Adelphi Theatre in New York, the play Sing for Your Supper reached its final climax with the “Ballad of Uncle Sam.” The chorus sang:
Out of the cheating, out of the shouting . . .
Out of the windbags, the patriotic spouting,
Out of uncertainty and doubting . . .
Out of the carpet-bag and the brass spittoon
It will come again
Our marching song will come again34
The Federal Theater Project was the first of the WPA projects to go, “a reminder,” Malpede said, “of the power of the theater.” As Flanagan remembered:
If this first government theater in our country had been less alive it might have lived longer. But I do not believe anyone who worked on it regrets that it stood from first to last against reaction, against prejudice, against racial, religious, and political intolerance. It strove for a more dramatic statement and a better understanding of the great forces of our life today; it fought for a free theater as one of the many expressions of a civilized, informed, and vigorous life. Anyone who thinks those things do not need fighting for today is out of touch with reality.35
As for HUAC, it “terrorized and split the artistic community, and, worse, it led to the self-imposed censorship among American theater workers who, for the sake of their careers, largely fostered and accepted the notion that politics and art don’t mix, that ipso facto, any play that was politically relevant had to be bad art,” Malpede said. “The exceptions to the rule, of course, were Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman, both defenders in their well-made plays of the earlier commitment to social justice as a necessary artistic theme. But the majority of American theater neutered itself, becoming prey to the basest commercial and escapist interests.”
It was not until the civil-rights movement that theater regained its energy. African American artists and playwrights cut their ties with the commercial theater, along with many white artists, to speak out of their own experience. Barbara Ann Teer, a successful actress, moved uptown to Harlem and in 1968 began the National Black Theatre, mixing African ritual performance techniques with American Method acting. LeRoi Jones in 1964 wrote Dutchman and The Slave and changed his name to Amiri Baraka. He mounted a searing production called Slave Ship. Ntozake Shange in 1976 wrote For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.
Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s The Living Theatre, which had begun in 1947, produced Kenneth Brown’s The Brig, set in a Marine prison during the Korean War. The Open Theater, founded by Joseph Chaikin, who had been an actor in the Living Theatre, created a series of plays like Jean-Claude van Itallie’s America Hurrah, which denounced the sterility of American suburban life. The Living and the Open theaters harbored many pacifists. The founders of these theaters often spent time in jail for nonviolent civil disobedience against the Vietnam War. The turmoil of the 1960s, like the turmoil that roiled the country during the Depression, unleashed the energies of artists who took over café spaces of the Lower East Side. Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornés, as well as inventive producers such as Ellen Stewart of La MaMa, pushed back against the rigid constraints of commercial theater. The Bread and Puppet Theatre led antiwar marches. Peter Schumann’s tragic Vietnamese puppet-women, their mourning faces painted on papier mâché masks, walked under the spreading wings of huge white birds—all the puppets being inhabited and animated by artist-activists. Crystal Field and George Bartenieff co-founded Theater for the New City, which became the producing home for many socially conscious artists. They hosted Angry Arts, a festival of opposition to the war by artists, and in 1991 they hosted a weekend of theater expressions against the Gulf War.
There was never much money behind these productions. But for most of this time it was still relatively inexpensive to live in New York. Space could be rented without huge deposits. These new productions began to attract wider audiences, and eventually they attracted grant money from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Kaplan Foundations. Richard Nixon, who remained frightened enough of the counterculture to attempt to placate its demands, encouraged the National Endowment for the Arts, which had been founded in 1965 during the Lyndon Johnson administration. The NEA, at the start, funded the radical theater movements. Ticket prices were kept low, and, as in the 1930s, the productions attracted a wide and varied audience.
“What happened?” Malpede asked.
The Vietnam War finally ended, but the Peace Movement persisted in large numbers through the dirty wars in South America and the growing antinuclear movement. Yet, it became more and more difficult to produce socially conscious, poetic theater. The old dogma of the 1950s reasserted itself: art and politics don’t mix. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, he immediately ordered that NEA grants to small - read leftist - theaters be abolished. Reaganism eroded the public perception that a great democracy deserves great art.
“Without government support for funding innovation and the non-commercial, the theater began to institutionalize and to censor itself,” Malpede went on.
The growing network of regional theaters became ever more reliant upon planning subscription seasons which would not offend any of their local donors, and the institutional theaters began to function more and more as social clubs for the wealthy and philanthropic. Sometimes, there was a breakthrough. Angels in America was one—the result, too, of an aggressive gay activist movement. But to a large degree, the theater no longer wanted to shake people up. The institutional theaters began to “develop” plays—a process geared to securing grants from the few foundations which still, in our age of austerity, fund the arts. Development means that most new plays receive a series of readings and workshops during which all sorts of dramaturges, literary managers, directors, and artistic directors give their “input,” most often thoroughly confusing, especially to young playwrights, and frequently damaging whatever was authentic to begin with. Fewer and fewer of these plays ever reach production. As the economy worsens, fewer and fewer risks are taken. Some subjects are out of bounds altogether, including strong critiques of capitalism or American foreign policy, in other words, anything that might cause individual donors to stop donating.
Theater, once again unplugged from what gave it vitality, became increasingly mediocre and was produced as spectacle or celebrity-driven entertainment. Audiences dwindled and aged. Critical debate onstage was largely banished. Entertainment has become, as Macdonald wrote of his age, directed toward the mass, a set of statistics, what he called the “non-man.” Mass art denies the existence of individual taste or experience, of an individual conscience, of anything that differentiates people from one another. Art is an individual experience. It forces us to examine ourselves. It broadens perspective. Entertainment masquerading as art, by contrast, herds viewers and audiences into the collective. It limits perspective to that experienced by the mass. “With the effective disempowering of artists, and with artists’ collusion in their own disempowerment, the theater now serves no meaningful function,” said Malpede. “It seldom startles, enlivens, enrages, or encourages its audience to become more fiercely aware of their own or of others’ humanity.”
&
nbsp; Malpede’s 2009 play Prophecy, which centers on the tragic effect of wars on individual lives from Vietnam, to the Israeli attacks in Lebanon and Gaza, to the war in Iraq, was not one a corporate sponsor would touch. It opened in London, where it won four stars in Time Out London and two Critics’ Choice citations in 2008. But Malpede struggled to find a theater in New York. Her portrayal of Muslims as victims of indiscriminate Israeli and American violence, and its unrelenting condemnation of war, put it far outside the liberal spectrum.
