Download The Comintern and the Canon: Workers` Theatre, Eight Men Speak

The Comintern and the Canon: Workers' Theatre, Eight Men Speak and the Genealogy of Miseen-Scène
Alan Filewod, University of Guelph
Published in Australasian Drama Studies 29 (Oct. 1996): 17-32.
In the commonly understood sense of the term, the canon of Canadian drama is little more than a
necessary academic fiction. Few Canadian plays are anthologized, few end up on school
curricula, even fewer go into second editions. In fact, few plays receive second productions. By
the traditional indexes of canon-making, most Canadian plays are decanonized the moment the
house lights come up.
But the canon is also a common set of assumptions; it is what it would be if it did exist,
and in that sense the canon resides in the material configuration of the theatre as an institution in
ideological space, and in the tastes, assumptions and practices of individual disposition through
which ideology is expressed -- or, to follow from Bourdieu, field of production and habitus. The
canon is embodied in the theatre, is lived in the habitus, materialized by discourse, production
and even publication.
The canon is also an historical construct that explains the development of Canadian
theatre as a conceptual space, and which is contingent upon the ideology -- the narrative -- of
nationhood that it reinforces. The material history of the canon is identified with the history of
the theatre as a profession and public endeavour in Canada, and its appropriation as a site for the
ongoing negotiation of the symbolic values of the nation.
These readings of the canon are congruent: the one is the inverse of the other, and they
mark themselves through an order of shared texts that declares this history as a contest of
opposing forces, of dominant and resistant textual strategies, of centred and marginalized
subjectivities, all organized on the defining ground of the nation as a productive force.
It follows from this that discussions of canonization in Canadian drama tend to focus on
excluded texts because exclusion and erasure are the normal conditions of most Canadian plays;
they may even be said to be typifying conditions. But the reasons for such exclusion are varied,
often elusive, intangible and contradictory. My focus is on a particular example of canonical
erasure which introduces a new problem: the relation of historical reception to the political
imperatives of the day, and their subsequent reinscription in the canonical narratives of Canadian
theatre studies. My example is Eight Men Speak, the 1933 agitprop production by the Workers'
Theatre in Toronto.1 I propose to place the reception of the play in terms of shifting artistic
policies on the left in the 1930s, and to question the narrative of canonization that has followed
from them.
To do this I must establish my beginning point, that Eight Men Speak has been relegated
to the canonical margins because of its origins in revolutionary Marxism. To the extent that it has
been recognized as the major dramatic work of the workers theatre movement in Canada, we
might say with some complacency that it has been accorded a place. But it has been reprinted
only once since its original publication in 1934 (in a 1976 anthology that is itself now out of
print), it has never been anthologized in any survey collection of Canadian plays, it has been
performed only once since 1933 (in a 1982 production by a popular theatre group in Halifax),
and it is invariably excluded from analyses of the development of Canadian theatre and drama.
This despite the fact that in its performance forms, collage structure and dramaturgical technique
it was a model of modernist staging, of documentary actuality and the postmodern conditions of
the decentred speaker and the exposure of dramatic representation as an ideological contingency.
There are several intersecting reasons for the diminished reception of Eight Men Speak,
all deriving from its politics, but for different reasons. In fact, Eight Men Speak offers a useful
case study of the ways in which artifacts of cultural resistance are regulated in the fields of
production they oppose.
In the first instance, Eight Men Speak has been excluded from the canonical narrative
because it repudiated the very principles on which that narrative has been constructed. Without
exception, every historical survey of Canadian drama has narrated it as the development of the
literary product that proceeds from and reflexively enables a viable theatre profession: as I have
written elsewhere, the dominant argument of Canadian theatre studies has been that the nation is
the condition of the drama, and the drama the proof of the nation. Hence playwriting in Canada
"matures" into "its own" after the "arrival" of a public theatre enterprise. Those who came before
the establishment of the theatre profession are still referred to as "pioneers" and "forerunners."
Their significance is retroactively revised and adjusted. This phalanx of pioneers: Ringwood and
Denison, Voaden and Gowan, is still assessed largely in terms of their contribution to the present
structure of theatrical production.
This canonical argument is imbedded in the thinking of the Massey Report, which is the
architectural foundation of the theatre profession as we have known it into the mid-1990s. It is an
argument that depends on a concept of national culture that WET rejected outright, at least until
1935. In his survey of the theatre in Canada, Massey made no mention of WET, nor of its more
conciliatory successor, the Theatre of Action. It would have been surprising if he had. It may be
worth recalling here that in his report -- written in the deepest chill of the Cold War -- Massey
urged the necessity of arts funding with the admonition that our "cultural defences" need to be
secured (Royal Commission 275). Massey, I suspect, would have gone to the wall before
admitting that a theatre of young revolutionary communists had made a significant contribution
to the formation of Canadian drama.
In the construction of the genealogy of the canon, the mutual identification of drama and
nation has assigned primary value to those texts which accelerated the conditions of production,
which were produced, passed on and reproduced, and occasionally excited public attention. Or,
to borrow a phrase, which demonstrably contributed to the dredging of the mainstream. Massey's
exclusion of the workers theatre was in all likelihood quite deliberate; later erasures have been
more benign. Because Eight Men Speak did not seem to bear fruit, did not initiate a tributary
stream, it remained an unexamined, unproblematized curiosity.
But beyond that first level of supposition, there is another unanswered question, another
absence, that points to a more complex problem. Eight Men Speak has also been erased from the
genealogical canons of cultural resistance, and particularly from the minority discourse of the
left political theatre. Comparable plays in the United States and Great Britain -- of which
Newsboy may be both the nearest and the most famous example, have been assigned provisional
value in canonical genealogy: Newsboy begat Waiting for Lefty, just as the Workers' Laboratory
Theatre begat Theatre of Action in New York.2 As I will shortly argue, this narrative itself
contains an ideological problem that affects readings of Eight Men Speak, but nevertheless it
attempts to position the agitprop workers plays in some sort of canonical ordering. Why do we
not find a comparable ordering in the theatre of the Canadian left? Even Richard Wright and
Robin Endres, the editors of the 1976 New Hogtown Press edition, accepted the proposition that
Canadian theatre history has been "discontinuous" with the Second World War as the point of
discontinuity.3 For that matter, given that Eight Men Speak predates both Newsboy and Waiting
for Lefty but clearly anticipates both -- in the choral structure of Newsboy and the topical
interventionist temper of Lefty, why has Eight Men Speak been written out of the canonical
record of the American workers theatre movement to which it was so closely connected,
materially, ideologically and formally?
The answer, I submit, can be found in the far-reaching changes in Communist Party
policies in the early 1930s, and their regulation of the terms of reception by which the play was
understood. This raises a contentious issue. The relationship existing between WET, the
Progressive Arts Club, which was its sponsoring parent, and the Communist Party of Canada is
still largely a matter of surmise and deduction, and six decades later is still controversial.
In her memoir of the workers' theatre movement, Toby Gordon Ryan (who acted in Eight
Men Speak and whose husband Oscar was co-author and director of the play) narrates the troupe
as the enthusiastic project of young activists who wanted "to contribute, in a theatrical way, to
the protest movements then developing."(Ryan 30) Several years ago she rapped my knuckles
when I wrote that WET was sponsored by the Communist Party, and in several conversations
both she and Oscar Ryan stressed that the PAC and WET not Communist Party organizations.
But that there was a relationship was clear and the evasion of detail piqued my interest. In part, I
knew, it was an understandable position formed in a habitus of anti-communist persecution. But
there was more to it. The key came to my mind after several conversations when Oscar and Toby
referred to the artlessness of the Workers' Theatre work and Eight Men Speak; they remembered
it as crude, inartistic, primitive, lacking unity.
The Iconography of Control
In order to reveal the narratives of control and erasure in these terms, it is necessary to
position the workers theatre in the changing currents of Communist Party analysis. The figure
who enables me to make this connection is Oscar Ryan himself, who played an instrumental role
in the making of the play, and in its ideological context. Once that connection is made, the play
can be understood as a tactical moment in what has become known as Third Period Communism,
and its canonical erasure can be related to, if not ascribed to, the politics of the Popular Front.
This is my second point of controversy.
Oscar Ryan was one of four authors of Eight Men Speak, and he was one of its two
directors. He also played one of the most iconically significant roles on stage. Prior to that, he
was the catalyst who initiated the production; prior to that he was a main player in the events that
the play documented.
Oscar Ryan surfaces in this narrative some five years before the play was produced, when
he played an instrumental role in the historical transformation of the Communist Party. In 1929,
the CPC undertook a major change, during which a new leadership, led by Tim Buck, assumed
control of the party with the support of the Communist International. This coincided with the
implementation of the idea of Third Period communism, when international conditions were (as
Stewart Smith, recently returned from advanced studies at the Lenin School in Moscow
announced to the 1929 party convention) "intensifying and developing for a new frontal attack
on the capitalist class of the world." (Angus 237) In effect, this was the announcement and
stabilization of Stalin's hegemony in communist parties around the world.
Oscar Ryan was a major player in this renewal, which some critics of the party have
termed a Stalinist coup. In 1928 he was the Young Communist League representative on the
Party's governing Political Committee; in 1929 he was one of Tim Buck's closest supporters, and
a voting delegate to the party convention which brought the militant Stalinist faction lead by
Buck to power. In fact Ryan played a small but crucial role in the complex political battle of
charges and counter-charges that exposed various doctrinal and ethnic tensions in the Party, and
precipitated a crisis of leadership. Deft political manoeuvring, worthy of Stalin himself, gave
Buck a majority of votes on the Political Committee -- replicating a political process that was
played out in similar scenarios in almost every member party of the Comintern, all of which
reiterated Stalin's consolidation of power in the CPSU, the subtext of Third Period militancy. As
Buck reported to the Comintern the next year,
The line of our struggle was to be for a complete re-orientation of the Party
toward concrete struggles, organisation of the unorganised, independent political
action, abolition of all the federalistic remnants within the Party, and a sharper
struggle against the Right tendencies of our language work.(Angus 364-5)
The new, sharper struggle -- which led Stewart Smith to predict in 1928 that "in a very short time
the streets of Toronto will be running with blood" -- was predicted as the necessary result of
what the Comintern called "growing ferment among the masses" (Angus 258-9). It was
sharpened too by a new wave of repression from government authorities, including the ban on
communist meetings in Toronto implemented in 1928, the formation of the red squads that Toby
Ryan so vividly recalls, and of course the enforcement of Section 98 of the Criminal Code,
which outlawed leadership of a subversive organization, and which would be used to imprison
Buck and seven other communists in 1931.
An integral part of Third Period strategy was the establishment of public groups through
which the Party could promote revolutionary action. It was in line with this strategy that the
Party established the two organizations that converged in Eight Men Speak. The first, and
historically most effective, was the Canadian Labour Defence League, which had been founded
in 1925, had foundered and was revived in 1929, under the directorship of Stewart Smith's
father, Rev. A.E. Smith. The second was the Progressive Arts Clubs, which were established in
branches across the country. The Toronto Progressive Arts Club divided itself into several units,
of which WET was one. The figure of Oscar Ryan straddles both. He worked for the CLDL as its
Publicity Director, he was one of the founders of the PAC, which, as Toby Ryan recounts,
formed WET in 1932, and he was the founding editor of the PAC's journal Masses; moreover,
Oscar wrote one of WET's first original agitprops, Unity. Even before Eight Men Speak, WET
had worked closely with the CLDL, presenting a series of so-called "defense plays' at the
League's national convention in the summer of 1933. It was quite possibly this engagement that
inspired Oscar Ryan to propose to the WET that they produce a play on the trial and attempted
murder of Tim Buck.
The two narratives, of WET and CLDL converge here, historically and literally, because
this is the point where Oscar and Toby meet. Toby was one of the small group of troupers who
toured Southern Ontario in WETs' first agitprop tour in 1932. She had trained at Artef, the New
York cultural organization that sponsored the Workers Laboratory Theatre, the Prolet Buehne
and the magazine Workers Theatre.4
Toby Ryan's affinity with Artef establishes a definite linkage of style and tactical method
to the New York groups. In her memoir she identifies Prolet Buehne as the prototype for her idea
of what WET should be. That first tour of the newly established troupe included a script taken
from the Artef journal Workers Theatre, and papers in the Toby Gordon Ryan collection indicate
that other, more militant American agitprops were planned. In 1933 Workers Theatre published a
short street agitprop entitled Vote Communist! Toby's copy carries several pencilled marginal
notes which change American references to Canadian -- indicating that a performance was at
least considered. It is possible that Toby has censored her own memoir to elide over the more
obvious communist references, just as Clifford Odets omitted the explicitly pro-communist the
young actor scene (with its famous "Come out in the light, Comrade") from Waiting for Lefty in
his Collected Plays.5
Eight Men Speak was more than a theatrical response to the trial of Tim Buck almost two
years earlier; it was, though the actional figure of Oscar Ryan, a continuation of the CLDL's
propaganda efforts during and after the trial. Ryan had sat in the press seats during the trial as a
reporter for the party newspaper The Worker, and, as an official of the CLDL (which undertook
the legal defence of the seven accused), was at some level involved in the League's publicity
campaign, which centred on a "Workers Jury" that watched the trial and issued a verdict of not
guilty in a widely distributed pamphlet.
The actual catalyst for the play was the riot in Kingston Penitentiary in July of 1933,
during which a guard fired (and missed) several shots at Tim Buck while he sat out the riot in his
cell. Although the militancy of the Third Period had been waning, giving way to the more
conciliatory politics of the Popular Front (which was officially announced in 1935), the
attempted murder of a political prisoner won many supporters to the CLDL cause. The
performance and subsequent banning of Eight Men Speak gave the publicity campaign even
more urgency. By 1934 the CLDL had collected over 450,000 signatures on a successful petition
for Buck's release.
Eight Men Speak was a collective effort by the Workers Theatre, but it was a collective
closely regulated by Communist Party authority. Two of the four authors, Ryan and Ed CecilSmith were involved in the party leadership. Frank Love, one of the remaining two, recalls that
the production was closely supervised by Ryan and Cecil-Smith, who "worked together very
closely" (Baetz 45). (Cecil-Smith, it will be remembered, later commanded the Canadian
Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the International Brigade in Spain). The program of the play
lists Jim Watts and Ryan as director. Watts had been one of the core founders and backers of the
Workers Theatre, but as Oscar Ryan recalled in 1976, "Jim Watts directed the early rehearsals
and, when the load became too big, turned over the job to me but continued as assistant." (Ryan
44).
My sense is that this is a conveniently simple gloss, which may be true but incomplete.
Ryan doesn't actually define what he means by too big a load, nor does he explain why he was
the one to whom Jim Watts turned. The answer I suspect is that Watts was in a sense answerable
to Ryan, in his capacities as the representative of the CLDL, as a senior Party official to whom
some ideological deference would have been expected, as a co-author of the play, and as witness
to the original trial and friend to Buck. In other words, Ryan embodied the leadership of the
Party in the revolutionary struggle, and when Watts turned over the job to him, she was quite
literally surrendering leadership of the production to the Party.
Cecil-Smith notes in his preface to the play that it was developed in the space of two
months (which itself establishes an interesting precedent for the normal practice of collective
creation in Canada). Love, who had already showed some promise as a playwright with Looking
Forward in 1932, maintains that he "plotted the play, and it was a simple enough plot. We just
put the government on trial" (Baetz 40). His memory is that he wrote the prosecution, and CecilSmith wrote the defense; Mildred Goldberg, the fourth author, wrote the mass chant. Authorship
of the satiric first act is unclear.(Baetz 40-41) Love has suggested that it was added after the
performance, but as Elaine Baetz has concluded, this is unlikely (Baetz 47).
The regulatory function of the Communist Party was embodied in the mise-en-scène of
the production, and can be seen clearly in the only surviving photograph, which captures the
final tableau, in which the members of the Workers' Court point accusing fingers at the
personification of capitalism, played by Ed Cecil-Smith. The tableau is organized around the
presiding authority of the three workers' judges. The primary judge, seated in the centre and
commanding the stage, is Oscar Ryan, whose upraised fist, clenched in revolutionary salute,
provides a dynamic contrast to the diagonally pointing fingers of the other actors. Ryan is the
iconic authority of the Party at the centre of play.
Standing before and beneath him are the eight, whose testimonies and mass chant give
the play much of its structural movement. Amongst their number of course is an actor
representing Tim Buck; near him stands the young Toby Gordon Ryan, as the CLDL prosecutor.
The Party is thus configured as authority within and outside the terms of representation, by Party
officials assuming roles, and rank-and-file actors representing Party officials. Its authority is
confirmed by the representation as the mimetic product of analysis, and as the power that
authorizes the representation. This authority is signified by the iconic use of colour: the three
judges are dressed in the Workers' Theatre uniform of black shirt and trousers with red
neckerchief, and their bench is draped in red cloth. Behind them a painted panel showing a mass
scene displays a red flag above a sea of faces.
From that backdrop, a representation of the working class gazes out over the action to the
audience. The meeting of these two gazes enables and validates the representation on stage,
which is performed by workers who enact workers between the material (the audience) and the
ideological (the backdrop). The result is a embodied revolutionary analysis that claims authority
for the Workers Court. The mise-en-scène thus exemplifies the play's principle that the
revolutionary will of the people, configured as the Communist Party, exposes the government as
an instrument of class war. The Workers' Court, like the Workers' Jury during the trial, contests
the constitutional claim to governing authority by the ruling classes. It was this challenge to
authority that incited the Province of Ontario to ban the play after its only full performance. The
Standard Theatre orchestra, which had been hired to accompany the play, began playing "God
Save The King" as required by law at the end of the performance; when boos were heard in the
audience, the orchestra struck up "The Internationale", to loud applause. Frank Love has
suggested that the controversy over the booing of the royal anthem may have precipitated the
ban.(Baetz 46)
Eight Men Speak was a success as a Party pageant and as a propaganda action, and in
those terms its banning was in fact a useful point of mobilization. But it enters our canonical
history as more than an incidental pageant. Even in 1933 it announced itself as more than a
agitprop, by its sophisticated deployment of a range of dramaturgical techniques. Its six acts
build a rhetorical structure that begins in satire: we begin not with Buck but with the corrupt
representatives of the governing classes (the prison warden, a reverend, a torch singer) in a
garden party as they receives the news of the riot. Caught in the converging gazes of the
audience and the Party, the satire initiates the argument of the play by disallowing the moral and
political legitimacy of the state. From this initial point of satire -- which also serves of course to
warm up the house, the play moves through an emotional register than will conclude in
triumphant anger. When looked at as an orchestration of emotional responses, we find a clear
range from self-congratulation (in the Red Scare parody of Act Two) to melodramatic
sentimentality (when Buck reads a letter from his daughter in his cell), to passionate anger in the
careful rhythms of the monologues and mass chants of the imprisoned eight. The polyphonic
effect is carefully timed, and fully exploits contemporary notions of performance sophistication - as in the mass chant in the dark that begins Act Two, and the use of lighting to isolate, move
and then unify the dramatic fugue of Act Two, scene 6.
As a general principle, the play follows a polyphonic montage structure, in which scenes
are presented through rhythmic and staging contradictions. Transitions therefore tend to be
abrupt and contradictory rather than smooth elisions. The play makes liberal use of blackouts,
tightly focused and moving spotlights, gestic props (such as the pop-up masks in the jury box),
abrupt sound effects (such as the banging of a gavel) and tableaux. The photograph of the final
moment is particularly interesting in this regard because its choreographic arrangement indicates
a stylized physicality reminiscent of Soviet formalist performance. That the play was a deliberate
attempt to model new staging techniques is supported by Oscar Ryan's statement that
"We introduced, I think fairly effectively, new staging techniques which were not
then commonly employed in Canada but had been pioneered in some of the
European experimental theatres." (Ryan 44)
Although Toby Ryan, then Toby Gordon, seems to have played a subordinate role in the
production, it is quite possible that her experience of the political avant-garde in New York may
have been instrumental in this regard.
The Popular Front and the Genealogy of Unity
Toby Ryan calls Eight Men Speak both "the high point" (43) and "a turning point" (46)
for the Workers Theatre movement. Her narration presents the shift from WET to the
reconstituted Theatre of Action as one of an evolution towards professionalism, proceeding from
an artistic need to explore more complex scripts "that would speak to the major issues and
conflicts of the times in a deeper, more theatrical way."(46) Raphael Samuel makes a similar
point in the case of the British theatres in regards to the growing number of professional artists
attracted to the workers theatre, and the subsequent move away from agitprop.(Samuel 56)
Eight Men Speak was the final production of WET, and we might well ask why the
group's work ended with its most politically effective play, why its moment of success was its
moment of erasure. Toby Ryan merely says that "People involved began to drift away, many of
them for personal reasons"(46). But those personal reasons were formed in the context of an
international movement which dismantled the agitprop troupes and reconstituted them as
stationary "social" theatres; which saw the Workers' Theatre movements assimilated and
reformed as the New Theatre League in both Britain and the United States,
Workers Theatre magazine reinvent itself as the glossy New Theatre, and the Workers'
Experimental Theatre in Toronto resurface as Theatre of Action -- just as Workers' Laboratory
Theatre renamed itself Theatre of Action in New York.
The extent to which these changes can be attributed to the implementation of the Popular
Front, which moved away from the agitation of class war to a broad public alliance against
fascism in 1935-36 is still unclear, and the very question still excites controversy. In 1976 the
publishers of the Eight Men Speak anthology were forced by its editors to insert an apology for
their statement (in the preface to the volume) that the workers theatre movement was a casualty
of the Popular Front.6 And three years later, Oscar Ryan stated unequivocally that
It was suggested in some quarters recently that we had turned our backs on the
militancy of the earlier agit-prop theatre. On the contrary -- we sought to
strengthen the social core of our theatre, as a result of this transition, and to give
our work greater impact though a fuller exploration of the many forms of stage
expression. The new group strove to speak with a more mature voice.(Ryan and
Ryan 28)
Samuel notes, in his words "very summarily and crudely," that the British Workers Theatre
movement was a casualty of the Popular Front:
The Popular Front marked the end, or the partial end, of the revolutionary epoch
in European Communism; artistically it was associated with the rise of "socialist
realism" in the Soviet Union and a decisive rupture between communism and
experimental art. ... [T]he WTM was irretrievably associated with what now came
to be regarded as sectarianism; its "exuberant revolutionism was an
embarrassment." (Samuel 56)
The changing ideological climate was asserted as early as 1934, the year in which the
Soviet Writers' Congress adopted the doctrine of Socialist Realism as the empirically and thus, in
the original application of the now debased term, politically correct artistic attitude. This was
also the year that John Bonn's New Theatre published its stern review of the published text of
Eight Men Speak.
In the Soviet Union, the policy of Socialist Realism was a sign of Stalinist consolidation
of power, a state suppression of artistic experimentation, and a re-integration with the tradition of
humanism that had been disrupted by the modernism of agitprop and Proletarian Culture.
Defined in 1932 by Alexander Fadeyev as "an approximation to objective, historical truth,
revelation of the essential aspects of reality" (Fadeyev 66), Socialist Realism was understood in
North America to be, as John Howard Lawson described it, "a method of historical analysis and
selection, designed to gain the greatest dramatic compression and extension"(Lawson 209). In
the theatre, this meant a return to the mystification of artistic craftsmanship and a re-assessment
of the classical values of plot, character and dramaturgical unity, all of which were proposed as
trans-historical cultural properties subject to class-determined attitudes. The most developed and
sophisticated reconciliation of left-wing practice and classical humanist theory in North America
can be found in Lawson's 1936 text, Theory and Technique of Playwriting. Lawson argued that
effective drama expresses "a genuinely organic concept of unity" (177) because
The essential character of drama is social conflict -- persons against other persons,
or individuals against groups, or groups against other groups, or individual or
groups against social or natural forces -- in which the conscious will, exerted for
the accomplishment of specific and understandable aims, is sufficiently strong to
bring the conflict to a point of crisis.(168)
The homology of dramaturgical unity and the socialist construction of essentialist
character found support in the theatrical practices of Stanislavsky, which were endorsed by the
Soviet regime, and were first introduced to North American readers in the pages of New Theatre.
This brought a new critical vocabulary into play (or redeployed an older, displaced vocabulary)
to disallow the modernism of the agitprop theatre -- a disallowance in effect demanded by the
politics of the Popular Front. In January, 1934, a month after Eight Men Speak was produced,
John Bonn published a report on the Moscow Olympiad of Revolutionary Theatre, which shows
clearly that at the moment of its greatest public reward, agitprop was already facing the pressure
of changing political and critical discourse. The most successful entries, Bonn reported, were
those that showed a "broadening away from old-style agitprop"(Bonn 21). A British troupe was
criticized, for example, because its agitprop was "conscious primitivism, a stubborn self-imposed
limitation to the most restrictive means of expression"(Bonn 22). The notion of primitivism here
corresponds with Toby Ryan's perception that the Workers Theatre had to evolve to more
"artistic practice", what Oscar Ryan called "a more mature voice." Bonn reported that
The theory of primitivism is correct, as long as it is applied to the beginning of a
new theatre movement, as a transitional method of work in order to get the best
results out of the still primitive forms. ...
In contrast, he reported, a Dutch group was praised because
"Mass-movement, dance, songs, music, masks, etc, were combined with a well
balanced, dynamic, vivid production... The political import of the play was not
carried directly to the audience by speaking political editorials or mass slogans, it
was completely transformed into dramatic action.(Bonn 23)
Placed in these terms, the New Theatre review of Eight Men Speak can be read as a directive that
faults the play for a failure to meet the terms of a shifting political discourse. Will Ferris, the
reviewer, wrote that
The play has errors which dull its weapon edge.
The play is a confusion of styles. If four particular styles are used on the
same material, the result will be four different forms, consequently four different
plays which will relate to each other in the general and not in the particular. They
will only be coherent in relation to their subject matter. The unity of the four will
be accidental and beyond the intention and power of the playwrights. As a
consequence, uneven development of the dramatic idea, confusion of conflicts,
and lack of political clarity inevitably follow.(Ferris 30)
This is a response that can only be understood as an articulation of the emerging values of
Socialist Realism, with its emphasis on classical unity and its mistrust of what would soon be
denounced as obsessive "formalism." With this there developed a renewed emphasis on the
monophonic voice of the playwright, and a privileging of the dramatic text over the polyphonic
performance text. In December, 1934, in the same issue of New Theatre in which Michael
Chekhov introduced the ideas of Stanislavsky, Herbert Kline argued that
Playwrights who proclaim theatre is a weapon, should be able to give dramatic
life to these stirring themes. But with few exceptions, the plays simply do not
come off. In fact, most of them are so badly and carelessly written that their
translation into terms of living theatre on the workers' stage is a tribute to the
ingenuity of the theatre groups and their directors.(Kline 22)
Ferris had already criticized Eight Men Speak on grounds of dramatic construction rather
than theatrical performance and mise-en-scène. He acknowledged that Eight Men Speak was a
montage play, a style that he attributed, wrongly, to the cinema. But, he wrote, this style was still
forming, and was still wanting "a correct theoretical statement" that "can solve the difficult
problems of reproducing for our audience the dialects of things in motion." He noted several
examples that he considered more successful, including the Workers' Laboratory Theatre's
Newsboy. The mention of Newsboy is in fact revelatory, because it inadvertently reveals an
implicit discourse of nationalism, which displaces Eight Men Speak from the emerging canon of
revolutionary theatre. Ferris describes the second act as "in the style of Newsboy" -- which Eight
Men Speak actually predated. The traits which are criticized as a crude derivatives were in fact
theatrical precedents.
In effect, Eight Men Speak was not to be seen as the product of a tradition of agitprop
and political intervention, but as a poor example of a new form of dramatic literature. What was
needed was a play that could reconcile the modernist theatricality of the agitprop with the
classical dramatic values of the Popular Front "mature voice." No such plays emerged out of the
Canadian movement, but they did in New York -- especially Waiting for Lefty and Bury the
Dead, both of which were later produced in Toronto by the Theatre of Action.
By the end of 1934, the Workers Theatre had suspended operations, Tim Buck was free,
and Eight Men Speak was a memory of a political moment. By 1935, when Toby Ryan and Jim
Watts founded the Theatre of Action, Eight Men Speak was even less than a memory. The
Theatre of Action embodied the same terms that Ferris had deployed to condemn Eight Men
Speak as incorrect; it activated a vision of professional theatre as the product of humanist artistic
principles that transcend class difference. The Theatre of Action was remarkably successful in
this enterprise, and it achieved the standards it imposed on itself, but it did this by erasing its own
origins. In its first season, the company produced a pamphlet that served as both manifesto and
recruiting brochure. The pamphlet describes the founding of the troupe in language that is clearly
designed to sever it from its militant past:
The Theatre of Action was formed in June 1935 by a group of a dozen young
Toronto people who had followed with keen interest the development of the many
social theatre groups in the United States, and who felt the time was ripe to start a
similar movement, not only in Toronto, but throughout Canada.
Later in the text, the pamphlet stresses that founders were "a new and quite unknown group."
Whereas the Workers' Experimental Theatre had defined its performances as applied political
action which exposed the artfulness of the bourgeois theatre as fetishistic, the new Theatre of
Action seemed eager to position itself in a romantic tradition of the theatre as a cavalcade of selfsacrificing artistes:
The Theatre travelled far and wide, rigging up often the barest platform to meet
their needs, and overcoming almost insurmountable difficulties to bring the
theatre back to the people. It was a common backstage sight in the season of
1935-36 to glimpse a young member of the Theatre perched precariously upon a
stepladder balancing a prompt-script in one hand and focusing a baby spotlight
with the other. Probably never since the days of the Commedia del'Arte or the
American pioneering theatres, has the contact between the theatre and its lifespring, the people, been closer.
Never, we might add, since the now-overwritten days of Eight Men Speak, three years and a
political chapter earlier. In this sense, Theatre of Action was what happened when the Party lost
interest in the theatre as a tactical instrument, and those members of WET whose primary interest
was the theatre itself sought a way to enter the profession without abandoning their political
principles. Theirs' was a transition made possible by the reconciliation with bourgeois aesthetics,
formalized in the literary drama and the proscenium stage -- which, as Levine points out, had
previously been "denounced as a bourgeois instrument for instilling passivity in the
spectato"(Levine 92).
In both the political and the theatrical fields of production, the Theatre of Action
announced a retreat from the interventionist cultural principles embodied in Eight Men Speak. In
effect, the cultural model of the left moved from an aesthetics of resistance to one of
consolidation and affirmation, that is, to the aesthetic system of hegemony. The erasure of Eight
Men Speak from the canon is thus not simply the historical condition of one play, but also of the
aesthetic model it exemplified.
My argument here is that there is a principle of mise-en-scène as rhetorical organization
which can be traced in a genealogy of polyphonic performance, in both the political and the
theatrical fields. But the tracing of such genealogies is also the decoding of an historical
palimpsest: each historical articulation requires the erasure of the one before it, so that it
announces itself as new and revolutionary. In his "Principles for a Sociology of Cultural Works",
Pierre Bourdieu has observed that
In the struggles within each genre which oppose the consecrated avant-garde to
the new avant-garde, the latter is compelled to question the very foundation of the
genre through a return to sources and to the purity of its origins.(187)
Or, considered in terms of mise-en-scène and textual principles, the avant-garde of resistance
must present itself as either just such a return to sources, or as the released expression of
suppressed origins. In either case it must erase its precedents.
In both the political and the theatrical fields, the Theatre of Action announced a retreat
from the interventionist cultural principles embodied in Eight Men Speak. In effect, the cultural
model of the left had moved from an aesthetics of resistance to one of consolidation and
affirmation, that is, to the aesthetic system of hegemony. The erasure of Eight Men Speak from
the canon is thus not simply the historical condition of one play, but also of the aesthetic model it
exemplified.
Recurring structural similarities in the struggle between models of affirmation
and resistance across ideological fields may be found in the expressive literary text, but they
more commonly found in the performance principles by which texts are politicized in mise-enscène. The struggle between formal experimentation and universalist values in the revolutionary
theatre of the 1930s established the principle that dramaturgical and performance structures
embody ideological discourses. These discourse find expression as a binary that equates classical
unity, realist representation and closure as the affirmation of coercive ideological authority, and
the opposing principles of imagistic montage, circularity and polyphony as expressive of
disruptive cultural resistance. This same binary recurs in contemporary theatre, where it is
perpetually rediscovered. For example, in his preface to Daniel MacIvor's postmodern solo
performance text House Humans, Robert Wallace states that its typifying conditions of
The disruption of audience expectation, a reliance on reversal, the decentering of
the speaker, the subversion of traditions, the use of self-referentiality, a refusal to
end ... [outline] a future for Canadian theatre considerably different from its
past...(14)
I would argue instead that these are the recurring characteristics of the mise-en-scène of cultural
resistance, which have been denied historical agency precisely because their subversiveness has
in the past been defeated by the aesthetic systems they have sought to disrupt. The slogan of the
Third Period, "theatre is a weapon," was in this sense entirely accurate: it was a weapon in the
contest that took place on the symbolic level in the cultural field. Eight Men Speak did indeed
have a weapon edge, but it was not dulled by dramaturgical error, as New Theatre pronounced; it
was sheathed when it was no longer useful to the organization of power in the Communist Party.
As a dramatic text, it has been displaced from the canon because it was accounted as a failure,
both by its initial sponsors, for whom political necessity required that the play be forgotten, and
by successive generations of anti-communist critics who judged its politics to be an offense
against art. Thus Eight Men Speak was shrouded in a double obscurity, within and without its
originating ideological system. It was displaced from the canon of the left because its
fundamental artistic principles were repudiated, and then because it was overlooked by the
American historians and critics who examined the 1930s through the discourse of nation and the
genealogies of Broadway; and it was displaced from the canon of Canadian drama because, in a
word, it was too subversive to include. Eight Men Speak had to be denied agency because of its
origins as Communist propaganda, even though it articulated a theatrical vision that was
imagistic, fragmented, discursive, decentered: that was in fact modernist, and expressed all the
traits latterly ascribed to the postmodern.
In this unstable, contingent historical assignment, Eight Men Speak typifies the canonical
paradox of all Canadian drama. But as all canons are similarly contingent on ideological
narratives -- whether inscribed materially in theatrical practice or proposed in historical study -- I
suggest that Eight Men Speak may be looked at as an important precedent for the postmodern
polyphonic theatres of the present day. In 1982, Oscar Ryan wrote that Eight Men Speak "was
the first full-length "alternate" or "underground" production in English Canada" (Ryan 1982). In
the economic context which gave meaning to the prevailing usage of "alternate" and
"underground", he was wrong; in the deeper sense, the context that exposes those term as
products of the historical narrative that has displaced Eight Men Speak, he was perhaps more
accurate than he knew.
Notes
1.
The Worker's Experimental Theatre was also commonly known (even to its own
members and in its own publicity) as Workers' Theatre. Both usages seem historically
correct. I choose Worker's Experimental Theatre (WET) to differentiate it from the more
general usage of the Worker's Theatre movement, and the American magazine Workers
Theatre.
2.
For an historical analysis of the New York workers' theatres, and the ways in which the
text of Newsboy changed to reflect ideological shifts, see Cosgrove, Stuart, "From Shock
Troupe to Group Theatre," in Samuel et al, Theatres of the Left 1880-1935: Workers'
Theatre Movements in Britain and America, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985)
3.
"While we might agree that Canadian dramatic writing has been discontinuous (World
War II certainly diverted people's attention from theatre), the traces of agitprop are very
much in evidence."(Wright & Endres, xxxv)
4.
Workers Theatre was a crudely typed and mimeographed predecessor to the glossier New
Theatre. In his notes Cosgrove indicates that Workers Theatre is difficult to find, and
points readers to a microfilm copy at Cornell University. Since then, an original set has
been acquired with the Toby Gordon Ryan papers at the University of Guelph.
5.
There is a further irony around the suppressed scene in which a young actor is recruited
into the Communist Party by a receptionist. When the Toronto Theatre of Action
performed Waiting for Lefty in 1936, they used the edited version. In the late 1980s, I
had a conversation with Toby Ryan in which I mentioned the scene; she had never heard
of it, and didn't believe that it was part of the play until I sent her a copy of the restored
text.
The Young Actor scene appears in Odets' Three Plays, published in 1935 (the
year he left the Communist Party), but it was omitted from Clurman's 1939 Six Plays of
Clifford Odets. Demastes (66) notes that the scene was deleted from the Group Theatre
production; Miller suggests that it was dropped when the Group Theatre moved the play
to Broadway; Odets "pulled it" because it was "untypical" (166) - whether of the
playwright's changing politics or the Party's, he does not say. In any event, the scene was
obviously omitted from the version acquired by Theatre of Action. More significantly
perhaps, the omission of the scene did not seem to excite comment.
Demastes incorrectly identifies both anthologies as carrying the revised script as
"originally produced" (without the Young Actor scene) but notes that the original
publication in New Theatre did carry the scene. Toby Ryan collected New Theatre but in
later years had no memory of the scene.
6.
In the publishers "Preface" to Wright and Endre's Eight Men Speak and Other Plays from
the Canadian Workers' Theatre, the New Hogtown Press collective wrote that
"The dramatic forms illustrated in our anthology were not allowed to die a natural
death but were cut off by the Communist Party's move toward the Popular Front
policy in 1935, perhaps before they had an opportunity to mature." (x)
The editors of the anthology adamantly disagreed with this position. Consequently, the volume
was released with an insert that noted this opposition.
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