Download 1 “A Qualified Workers Theatre Art”: Waiting for Lefty and the (Re

“A Qualified Workers Theatre Art”: Waiting for Lefty and the (Re)Formation of
Popular Front Theatres
Alan Filewod
Published in Essays in Theatre 17.2 (May 1999): 111-128
This inquiry into the political meaning of textual changes in Clifford Odet’s Waiting for Lefty
examines a complex of ideological authority and critical reception in the historical
moment(s) when revolutionary agitprop troupes of the workers theatre movement
reconstituted as Popular Front professional theatres in the mid-1930s.1 An analysis of textual
changes in Waiting for Lefty in the context of ideological crises in the shifting terms of left
critical reception in the 1930s shows how Waiting for Lefty functioned as the instrument that
not only consolidated social humanist aesthetic regimes in the American radical theatre, but
at the same time announced the primacy of American humanist dramaturgy that overwrote
local practices outside of the United States.
This inquiry begins with an anecdote, a chance remark in a conversation with a
veteran of the Canadian workers theatre that drew my attention to the political
instrumentality of Waiting for Lefty. Toby Gordon Ryan’s history was typical of the
movement: as a young woman she had gone to New York, studied at Artef, the Jewish leftwing theatre, and in 1933 was one of the founders of the Workers’ Experimental Theatre,
Toronto’s first agitprop troupe, modelled on the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre. The company
ceased operation in 1934, and when it reformed as the Theatre of Action in 1935, it
recommenced its program with Waiting for Lefty. Toby’s husband Oscar had participated in
WET as an author and actor, but more important to this narrative, he was a senior member of
the Communist Party of Canada, active in the executive committee, closely involved in the
1929 coup which had captured party leadership by the Stalinist faction (as happened in other
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Communist parties in that same year), and had been one of the party’s chief organizers in the
cultural sphere.
In my conversation with the Ryans, Toby spoke with enthusiasm about the
Theatre of Action’s inaugural production of Waiting for Lefty in Toronto. But neither she nor
Oscar remembered the famous scene in which a Broadway producer’s secretary offers a
young actor a copy of the Communist Manifesto with the invitation to “Come out in the light,
Comrade.” This apparent failure to recollect the scene was on one level understandable,
because the Toronto production had omitted it, as had many American productions. Odets
and the Group Theatre had dropped the scene from the play at some point in the seven
month period between its opening at a benefit variety performance for the New Theatre
League in January, 1935 and its Broadway restaging in July at the Belasco Theatre, and it
appears only in occasional anthology editions after the first magazine and book editions in
1935. The excision of the scene coincides but was not necessarily consequential to Odets'
repudiation of the Communist Party.2
The deeper problem emerged when Toby Ryan vehemently denied that such a
scene could have been in the play. Why was the most overtly communist scene in Waiting for
Lefty -- and not just the scene, but the memory of the scene -- removed from history at the
precise moment that the play entered the international canon as the artistic triumph of the
workers theatre movement? Toby Ryan's own copy of the original 1935 edition of the play
(published shortly after its premiere in New Theatre magazine) contains penciled marginalia
indicating that she had read the original version at some point, and had, apparently, forgotten
it.3 The Ryans’ reluctance to accept that there had been such a scene derived in part from the
ambivalent and still contentious relationship of the workers theatre movement and the
member parties of the Communist International (Comintern). The historical placement of
Waiting for Lefty in the shift from agitprop to dramatic realism requires some consideration
of the Communist Party’s role as a site of cultural authority. This is not to suggest that the
workers theatre movement was a Party mechanism -- in many cases the opposite was the
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case. But at the same time, the simultaneity of the shifts from agitprop to Popular Front
humanism around the world owes much to the claim to centralized vanguard leadership that
the Party advanced, the inspirational on-the-ground leadership that it often provided, and the
widespread reliance on international communication through cultural agencies in Moscow,
where the Comintern functioned both as an international meeting of Communist parties and
as an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. This issue is contentious because of a tacit
understanding among Party members that discussion of the Communist Party's relationship to
the workers’ theatre movement violates the silence nurtured over decades in a habitus of
persecution, both within and outside the Party. Because the history remains suppressed and
censored, it is still an intervention in the narrative to raise the questions it poses. There is no
mention, for example, of the Communist Party's formative role in the Canadian workers
theatres in Toby Gordon Ryan's memoir, Stage Left: Canadian Theatre in the Thirties. For
the Ryans and many like them, decades of living in a culture of persecution produced a text
of secrecy and loyalty that outlasted the secrets that it framed. A key problem in this text is
the nature of the Popular Front itself.
As a playtext and an event, Waiting for Lefty enacted the movement of the
movement to the Popular Front. Across the English-speaking world in 1935-36, theatres with
names like Theatre of Action, New Theatre, Unity Theatre, names that recurred across
national boundaries, used Waiting for Lefty to enable and obscure their transition from their
agitprop beginnings and reconstitute themselves as professional “people’s theatres.” The Left
Book Club’s Theatre Guild in London supplied an explicit model of the play’s function as
enactment of the Popular Front in its pamphlet, Notes on Forming ‘Left’ Theatre Groups:
We believe that the fight against war and Fascism can best be conducted on the
basis of a popular front, and we are convinced that the theatre gives as good, if not
a better basis for such activity than the Left Book Club itself. This applies equally
to actors and audiences. An example of this is the Unity Theatre Club’s production
of “Waiting for Lefty”. The twenty or so actors who form the cast of this play
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number among them members of the Liberal, Labour, and Communist parties,
members of Co-Operative Societies, Trades Unionists, and so on. (Left Book Club
1-2)
Because Odets released the play without royalties in the United States, there were
dozens of productions across the United States (where, Odets later estimated in a speech at a
New Theatre Dinner, it had been produced “103-104” times). In Canada it was produced in
Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver as the charter play for new theatre groups. In Australia,
Waiting for Lefty was a foundational play for troupes in Brisbane, Melbourne, Newcastle and
Sydney; in New Zealand it enabled the founding the People’s Theatre in Auckland. It had
equal currency in the United Kingdom, in Bristol, Glasgow, Manchester and London, where
it became the site and occasion of the rupture in the Rebel Players that led to the dismantling
of the Workers’ Theatre Movement and the founding of Unity Theatre. Outside of North
America, these productions tended to include the Young Actor scene, because they were
based on the original magazine publication, and as Chambers has shown in the case of the
Rebel Players, were produced without license from Odets’ agent. The Young Actor also
appeared in Joseph Losey’s production in the centre of world revolution by the “Moscow
Red Players, Anglo-American Section of the Foreign Workers’ Club”, who sent Odets a copy
of the program with a fan note:
To Clifford Odets,
With revolutionary greetings from the Red Capitol where the premiere of “Waiting
For Lefty” (May 1935) was a great success. A swell play! We're waiting for more
“Lefty's.”
In this circulation, Waiting for Lefty had quickly moved from its apocryphal
beginnings (as mythologized by Clurman in The Fervent Years) to become an international
signifier of the Popular Front as a non-sectarian alliance. It is still deployed as the metonymic
exemplar of Popular Front cultural mobilization; Michael Denning, for examples, uses the play,
and its historical moment, as the platform for his study, The Cultural Front. Denning is the most
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detailed and persuasive, but not the only, historian to argue that the Popular Front must be
understood as an “historical bloc” rather than a particular party policy; as Andy Croft has said of
the British experience, “The culture of the Popular Front in the 1930s was a massive, various,
lively and influential one that had little to do with the Labour Party. It was prompted,
encouraged, at times sustained by the Communist Party, but it was never reducible to the
Communist Party”(9). Nevertheless, the Communist Party claimed authority over the terms of
the “front,” providing it with the militant rhetoric of struggle and establishing itself as the
benchmark of revolutionary analysis. In the words of CP-USA general secretary Earl Browder
(to the delegates of the American Writer’s Congress in 1934),
a united front against reaction is unthinkable without the participation of that
group of cultural workers directly affiliated with the Communist Party and
working under its general direction. This group, although a minority, is
rapidly growing in influence, an influence that arises directly from the electric
current of Marxist-Leninist thought which it transmits to the whole body of
progressive fighters on the cultural front. (68)
There was in fact more than one Popular Front: there was the vast social movement
so named, and there was the particularized “Popular Front” as proposed, directed and
theorized within the domain of the Communist parties. “Cultural front” popular mobilization
explains the historical movement of aesthetic forms within particular national cultures, so
that as Denning argues, the workers theatre was one of a vast range of progressive
movements that characterized American culture in the 1930s. It does not however explain
how and why Waiting for Lefty became the foundational text for formerly communist
revolutionary theatres in Canada and Britain in their (re)formation as “people’s theatres.”
The answer to this problem lies in the correspondence of these formations with the
movement to the Popular Front as understood within the Communist parties. In this sphere of
Comintern policy, the question of sectarianism in the workers theatre movement begins to
clarify the disappearance of the Young Actor from Waiting for Lefty.
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Most historians of the movement agree that the famous premiere of Waiting for Lefty
in Greenwich Village on January 6, 1935, marks a critical moment in the history of the
workers theatre movement, both as the victorious renunciation of left sectarianism in
aesthetic theory and as a model for the reconciliation of a deeply invested history of agitprop
with the newly dominant values of social realism. It also staged the changes in structure and
theory that enabled theatres of the left, with varying degrees of difficulty, to adjust to the
newly critical regime demanded by the politics of the cultural front. Interpretations of those
changes have produced two fundamentally opposite readings, based on very differrent
national experiences of the Popular Front. In Britain, Raphael Samuel (56) and Stourac and
McCreery (59) state unequivocally in their respective studies that the workers theatre
movement was killed off by the Communist Party’s move to the Popular Front. In Canada a
small controversy erupted as recently as 1976, when the editors of a compilation of Canadian
workers theatre plays demanded that the radical publishing collective that produced the book
insert a statement denouncing the publisher’s preface which had similarly attributed the end
of agitprop to the Popular Front (Endres and Wright x). In the United States, the moment of
transition is more commonly replayed as an aesthetic as well as a political evolution, in
which progress beyond sectarianism was expressed theatrically by a declared renunciation of
crude amateurism. In this parallelism, the arrival to a newly reformulated dramatic maturity - the triumph of form over contingency -- was the literal enactment of the Popular Front.
Most historians of the American movement have read these changes as evolutionary products
of a particularized national experience. Most authoritative is Levine, who sates that
The changes in the politics, playwriting, and amateur status of the radical
theatre that took place from 1933 through 1935 reflected the left wing’s
positive revaluation of realism as a dramatic method. This was primarily an
indigenous American development even though it occurred almost
concurrently with the Russian formulation of “Socialist Realism.” (108)
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Levine’s analysis is reluctant to examine the deeper connections with Soviet practice and
policy in the American movement, and is unable to explain the synchronicity of similar
changes to similar effects in other English-speaking countries. Douglas McDermott more
usefully locates the shifts to realist dramaturgy in a context of political change when he
attributes the end of radical agitprop to the “demise” of an active leftist political movement,
but at the same time he places equal emphasis on the greater audience appeal of a less
“strident” theatre (131).
Whether the Popular Front “killed” the workers theatre movement (as dissident
left British historians argue) or the shifts in the movement were part of a wider embrace of a
cultural front (as Denning and Levine both argue), in all cases we see a common progression:
a surge of revolutionary agitprop from 1929, a return to more traditional aesthetic norms
from around 1932, and a marked shift in the values of critical reception in the three years
prior to the Comintern’s declaration of its Popular Front policy in 1935, followed by the
(re)formation of popular theatre troupes and a reconciliation with artistic values that had
previously been criticized as produced by the class experience of bourgeois culture.
As Samuel has pointed out in regard to the British movement, “The rise and
extension of the WTM was closely associated with the ‘Left’ turn in the Communist
International (1928-1934), and its translation into terms of ‘class against class’[...]” (33). In
1929, the changing political climate in Europe, particularly in Germany, the crisis of the Wall
Street crash, and power struggles in the USSR resulted in the Comintern's declaration of what
is commonly known as the Third Period militancy, after Stalin's phrase describing the final
crisis in capitalist development and “a new frontal attack on the capitalist class of the world”
(Angus 23). To a large extent, the Third Period policy was one of the instruments Stalin used
to consolidate his power in the CPSU. But as reproduced through the Comintern, Third
Period politics was an instruction to member parties to intensify political opposition and
exploit “growing ferment among the masses”(Angus 253). In the Western industrial nations,
the chief task of the Communist parties lay in the sphere of unionism, but in the first three
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years of the 1930s there was a prolific increase in the number of party-regulated cultural
activities, including theatres.
By 1929 time the various practices of the agitational theatres of the left had
already clarified into two tendencies, expressed in artistic methods and structural
organizations. The first and most evocative to modern eyes was the mobile agitprop
companies, founded on the model of the German Red Rockets and exemplified by the Prolet
Buehne and the Shock Brigade (or Shock Troupe) of the Workers Laboratory Theatre in New
York, and Red Megaphone and the self-named Workers’ Theatre Movement in the United
Kingdom. The second was the stationary drama of companies like Artef, and later Theatre
Union and the Group Theatre. Many of these companies were constituted in the mid-1920s,
but by the end of the decade the movement was running out of steam. The major exception
was Prolet Buehne, which announced in 1928 that it would henceforth focus exclusively on
political action performances. In the renewed militancy of the class war, the mobilization of
Communist agitprop troupes became an integral and often leading part of the wider social
mobilization caused by the intensified unrest that followed the Wall Street crash in 1929.
In the years 1930-33, for instance, the Workers Laboratory Theatre revived and
formed its Shock Troupe; the first crudely typed and mimeographed issues of Workers
Theatre began to map the ideological ground of the movement; the Group Theatre formed
out of Theatre Guild; the various troupes in New York formed the League of Workers
Theatre and associated with the Workers International Relief (a sponsored organ of the
Comintern); the newly formed League hosted a national “Spartakiade” in New York; Artef
formed an agitprop troupe, and publicly acknowledged the “splendid cooperation and
guidance of the Jewish Bureau of the Communist Party” (Buchwald, “ARTEF” 5). In that
same year, the young Toby Gordon saw Prolet Buehne perform while studying at Artef, and
on her return to Toronto took part in the founding of a similar company. 1933 was also the
year of the International Olympiad of Revolutionary Theatres in Moscow, which exerted
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direct influence on the subsequent development of agitprop troupes around the world by
revising the terms of critical authority.
This was the period of Stalinist consolidation in the Comintern, when member
parties around the world were purged of “right deviationists” (an echo of Stalin's victory over
Bukharin), and local party leadership was captured by Stalinist cadres, many of whom had
been trained at the Lenin School in Moscow. In most cases, the Party was only involved with
theatre troupes at a distance, as a source of inspiration and ideological authority, and as the
organizing body of performance events. The major exceptions in the United States were the
Prolet Buehne and Workers Laboratory Theatre of New York, both of which were closely
connected to the organizational structures of the Comintern, and which together produced the
magazine Workers Theatre. The other clear exception was the Workers’ Experimental
Theatre in Toronto, where the close affinity of party authority and theatre can be explained
by the relatively small size of the Communist Party of Canada. Despite the pretense of
distance, the WET was an explicit staging of party authority; its 1933 Eight Men Speak can
be read as a pageant of Party leadership, with senior Party members (including Oscar Ryan
and Ed Cecil-Smith, who later commanded the Canadian contingent in the International
Brigade in Spain) portraying imprisoned Party leaders. In Britain, where the relationship to
the BCP was as ambiguous as it was in the United States, the Party seems to have paid less
attention to the theatre than the theatrical activists wanted.
In the United States, the CP-USA encouraged a wide diversity of troupes with
complex differentiations. In the New York area, on the margins of a heavily capitalized
theatrical culture, various workers theatres claimed doctrinal authority but were distanced
from the actual organizational centre of the party. The core ideological site of authority was
the Prolet Buehne and the Workers Laboratory Theatre, and the journal they jointly
produced. These were the instruments that John Bonn (director of Prolet Buehne, editor of
Workers Theatre, and later head of the New Theatre School) used to begin a process of
rationalizing and centralizing the New York troupes. 4 These centralizing structures deployed
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the language of political organization to legitimize and map political territory; as Herbert
Kline, who assumed editorial leadership when Workers Theatre became New Theatre, told
the American Writers’ Congress in 1934, the magazine was “not just a cultural organ, but a
reporter, an ideological guide and an organizer as well”24 (Hart 182). The movement was
defined by its exclusions, and terminology marked territory: in its second issue, Workers
Theatre published an open letter by the Workers Laboratory Theatre to a “self-named
Workers Theatre,” accusing it of appropriating the label for political opportunism.5 The
troupe’s signature resonates with the industrial modernism of Comintern rhetoric: “Workers
Laboratory Theatre / of the W.I.R. / Org.Comm” (Workers Laboratory Theatre, “Open
Letter,” 36-37). Reproducing the Communist party's claim for control over the discursive
terrain of the revolutionary left, the core groups of the workers theatre movement claimed
authority over the license to invoke both ideological site (the working class) and political
instrumentality (the “Movement”).
The WLT's relationship to the Workers International Relief offers an example of
the hidden text of party leadership in the core New York companies. The WIR, as one of the
agencies of the Communist International, was a legitimate fund-raiser for social aid
programs, but it also promoted cultural solidarity, and was a mechanism to enable operations
in countries officially hostile to communism. In that sense it was a model of what would be
demonized by red-baiters as “front” organizations. In a 1933 brochure, the WLT described its
relationship to the WIR in language that struggled to conceal the actual directions of power
its describes:
The Workers Laboratory Theatre is affiliated with and has been aided by the
Cultural Department of the Workers International Relief. This is an organization of
working class solidarity and culture with a record of over ten years of activity,
helping workers on strike with food and clothing, sending workers' children to
summer camps, and organizing cultural activities of all kinds among workers and
farmers. Our purpose in this field is to build and develop W.I.R. branches by
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establishing in them dramatic groups connected with the Workers Laboratory
Theatre, thereby spreading the influence of the Theatre and helping other workers
to build their own theatres. As a socially conscious workers theatre actively
assisting in the cultural betterment of the conditions facing the workers, it is an
important part of our program to bring the role of the W.I.R. in dramatic form to
the eyes of the masses of workers. This task is carried out as follows;
A W.I.R. Director is placed in charge of developing dramatic groups in the
various branches of the W.I.R. in Greater New York. He has the assistance of all
departments of the Workers Laboratory Theatre. All dramatic work in these
branches is to be connected with the Production, Training, Technical and
Playwrights groups and to the W.I.R. Department by means of, for example, the
sending of leading members to be trained in the central training classes, or the
central organization aiding and assisting with practical and theoretical guidance.
(Workers Laboratory Theatre, Brochure)
The relationship is iconically clear, although still masked, in an accompanying
flow chart of the organizational structure of the WLT. The company was structured with an
Executive Committee overseeing five departments: the Artistic Council (which ran the
performance groups, including two Theatre of Action troupes, as well as dance and music
groups), a Business Department (Finance, Publicity and Bookings), a Training Department
(which ran classes in acting, diction, playwriting, technical theatre, politics and “the Social
Basis of Theatre”, the Theatre Club (lectures, forums and social events), and the WIR Branch
Department. This was divided into subgroups, identified only as Branch Groups 1, 2 and 3.
This, it would appear, was the locus of ideological authority in the company.
The WLT’s organizational structure was an apparent replication of industrial systems of
management, but it was also derived as well from Soviet practice. In the first issue of
Workers Theatre, a letter from “the Blue Blouses of Russia to the Workers Laboratory
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Theatre” describes the organization of the Blue Blouse troupes in terms that are very similar
to those inscribed in the WLT:
Each group consists of 12 people: 1 general manager, 1 pianist, 6 actors, 4
actresses. In the Central Organization there is a Literature Buro, which invites the
authors of our theatre; a Director’s Burro, which supplies the directors for our
productions, and finally there is a Party Buro which watches over the political
side of the work. [Workers Theatre, April 1931: 6]
But party regulation was never simple or uncontradictory; changes in hegemonic
systems take place because hegemony arises out of the negotiations for power between
factions, sites and practices. In its Third Period phase, the workers theatre movement was
marked by a struggle expressed in aesthetic debates that were codified in binary oppositions
that reflected international factional struggles in the Comintern. In the recurring debates over
form which fill the pages of Workers Theatre, the major binary was that of the mobile and
the stationary stages, and the issue at stake was their relation to bourgeois traditions. This
was the question that dominated the 1934 Spartakiade. John Bonn, one of the conveners of
the Spartakiade, tried to reconcile the debate by invoking a strategy of rhetorical authority:
Comrades, I hope the situation is clear to you. The question is not: Agitprop
theatre or stationary theatre. [...] For: we need both types as weapons in the class
struggle, the flashlight effect of the mobile up-to-date agit-prop theatre as well as
the .... broad attack of the Stationary theatre. (Bonn, “Situation and Tasks” 8)
Bonn was the most prominent advocate of the view that the mobile agitprop was
a new, revolutionary and sophisticated form which found its most developed practice in the
troupe he directed. Its template was the highly disciplined mass drill of the later German
style, which was reproduced in North America by Prolet Buehne, which Bonn called “the
most disciplined, and politically and artistically most advanced workers theatre in the
U.S.A.” (Bonn, “Situation and Tasks” 8). But even at the point of its clearest articulation, in
Bonn’s stagings and in the writings of Alfred Saxe, theorizing the theatricalist modernity of
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Newsboy (Saxe 12-13), the aesthetic of the mobile agitprop was under attack. In his review
of the Spartakiade, Nathaniel Buchwald, a member of Artef and a reviewer for The Daily
Worker, criticized Bonn and Prolet Buehne, arguing that its “ringing, galvanic forcefulness”
and “perfect rhythm” were “devoid of effective theatrical form” and “dramaturgical shaping”
(Buchwald, “ Prize Winners” 8-9). The international retreat from agitprop (indicative of the
pressures leading up to the Popular Front) was announced in December, 1932, at the Second
Plenary of the International Union of Revolutionary Theatres in Moscow, which “set out
tasks” to correct “mistakes and failures.” These all focused on the militant sectarianism that
agitprop enacted. They criticized the “Serious underestimation of the bourgeois theatre,” and
“The inability of most of the IURT sections to create a ‘united front’ of the workers with
social democrats and other theatre-organizations...” The Plenary concluded that “The vigour
and militancy of the agitprop troupes had caused the mistaken view to arise, that such troupes
were the only form a revolutionary theater could take. This was left sectarianism which
despised other theatrical forms.” Finally, the Plenary announced that “Artistic weakness must
be overcome. [...]. The Olympiad could hope to overcome these weaknesses” (Jones 32-133).
The Moscow Olympiad of revolutionary theatre, projected as the climactic
moment of the workers theatre movement, was thus to be the stage for its ideological and
formal retooling. The Olympiad was also to be the stage that firmly grounded the
international workers theatre in the ascendant politics of Stalinism. Nowhere is this more
vividly clear than in the ceremonial letter to Stalin written by (and likely for) the
international delegates (which included American observers but no American entries in
competition), that read in part, “And we say to you Comrade Stalin: All our strength, all the
power of our art we will devote to the cause of transforming the whole world into a Union of
Soviet Republics” (Buchwald, “The First International” 139). This strategy failed; in North
America, Stalin’s name was conspicuously absent from discussions of the workers theatre
movement, and in Britain the clumsy attempt to impose the cult of personality on the
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movement backfired when the dismal appraisal of the British entry in the Olympiad produced
a backlash that exacerbated factional tensions.
The debates over form were closed in 1934 by the endorsement of Socialist
Realism in the Soviet Union. There had been a hidden crisis in those debates: the opposition
of transnational class practices, of international proletarianism versus international bourgeois
aestheticism, masked a more complex debate about the discourse of nation. Agitprop had
been argued as a transnational form that modeled the historical process of revolutionary
change in industrial society, and it was because mobile agitprop was proposed as a class
practice that the Olympiad used scoresheets to rate entries from around the world on quality
of performance, political analysis and stage movement. But the Olympiad in its very
structure embodied a critique of agitprop as a circumstantial form subject to what Buchwald
called “infantile diseases” (Buchwald, “The First International” 141). The Soviet entries in
the Olympiad ostensibly demonstrated a post-revolutionary proletarian aesthetic which,
having moved through the pre-revolutionary agitprop phase, could revisit questions of
dramatic technique and artistry. Their presence demonstrated that agitprop would henceforth
be considered a transitional form that preceded the artistic recuperation of national traditions.
Buchwald was likely typical of the western delegates when he wrote, “That [the Soviet
entries] displayed superior artistic form and skill goes without saying” (Buchwald, “The First
International” 141). This was a traumatic experience for some of the visiting companies, and
it had a particularly critical effect on the British movement.
The renunciation of agitprop as a sectarian political practice called for a new
rigour of craft and artistry, and was thus received as a release from the constraints of a form
now understood to be inherently flawed. Michael Blankfort and Nathaniel Buchwald
provided a typical text for this reformation at the American Writers Congress, when they
stated that
The agit-prop theater, as it was called, made a virtue of its crudity and started off
on the wrong foot by proclaiming its independence not only from the content of
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the bourgeois theatre but also from its forms and techniques. [...] Gradually the
agit-prop theater grew out of its infancy and began to show a decent respect for
competent acting, staging, writing, etc. (131-32)
Similarly, Ewan MacColl recollected later that,
It wasn’t that we objected to the didactic nature of our sketches. It was merely that
we wanted the didacticism to be tempered with drama. So when, on the heels of an
International Workers Theatre Olympiad, a statement was issued by the central
committee of the International Union of Revolutionary Theatres recommending a
return to traditional theatre forms, we embraced it enthusiastically in spite of the
fact that our knowledge of traditional theatre forms was minimal. (MacColl 208)
Reporting on the Moscow Olympiad, and the lessons learned there, Bonn capitulated in a
statement that prepared the ground for the critical reception and subsequent canonization of
Waiting for Lefty:
Our attitude to the bourgeois theatre was up to now incorrect. I in particular had
taken a wrong leftist standpoint in my report to the Workers Cultural Conference
on June 14, 1931, when I stated that there is no relation between bourgeois theatre
and workers theatre, as the bourgeois theatre approaches the rich while the workers
theatre approaches the workers. This attitude led to a dangerous neglect of the
bourgeois theatre. But after a closer study and wider experience I now fully agree
with my critics who urged a more active attitude towards the bourgeois theatre.
The bourgeois theatre, as an instrument of our class enemy, must be fought by
exposing its class character to the workers, by replacing it by a qualified workers
theatre art. (Bonn, “Dram Buro” 8)
This reassessment of artistry entailed a reconsideration of national tradition and
popular form which (re)situated agitprop in a history of popular “folk” art – a point made by
MacColl who compares agitprop to village rituals and mummers plays.(MacColl 213).
Revisionism of this sort exposed agitprop as something more local than the Prolet Buehne
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model; it could be seen as an anthology of local forms (as it had been for the Red Rockets in
Berlin). In the United States, these included vaudeville, Coney Island sideshows, red puppets
and revolutionary circus. But at the same time these localisms appeared to express national
“people’s” traditions, they also reinforced an organic notion of artistic form as a something
that evolves through stages of immaturity, maturity and ultimately, decadence (usually
figured as “formalism”). In this process of revision., agitprop was not art, but the
precondition of art.
This is where Waiting for Lefty enters the narrative, as a fable of artistic and
dramaturgical growth which offers a moment of transition so sharply that it is conventionally
retold as the arrival of cultural maturity (for both Odets and the radical theatre), only
somewhat marred by its traces of origin.6 Waiting For Lefty has been canonized as the
turning point of the left theatre in part because it was a transitional work in the development
of Odet's own dramaturgy, and in part because of its narrative form, which enacted the
cultural politics of the Popular Front by absorbing the militant fervor of agitprop in the social
humanism of dramatic realism. In this argument, Waiting for Lefty circulated widely because
it marked the transition it helped enable. As Denning suggests, the opening of play, as text
and event, in January 1935 announced the arrival of the cultural front as a mass movement of
radical democracy. As Odets himself rhapsodized after the first production, “The proscenium
arch disappeared. That’s the touchstone, the key phrase: the proscenium arch disappeared”
(Brenman-Gibson 316). In their respective writings on the play, John Howard Lawson and
Harold Clurman both used it to map the political urgency of the workers theatre onto the
domain of dramatic literature in the canonical tradition of American drama. 7 Lefty was one
of the instruments that materialized the emerging method of socialist realism. Stanislavsky
was another, and it is no accident that New Theatre published Michael Chekhov's explication
of Stanislavsky at the same time as it published Waiting for Lefty.
This arrival had been rehearsed in the material sphere of the workers theatre in the
two years prior to Waiting for Lefty, when the signifiers of radical militancy had been
16
suppressed. Workers Theatre became the glossy New Theatre, the League of Workers
Theatres became the New Theatre League; Theatre Union described itself as “a united front
theatre”; and the Workers Laboratory Theatre began calling itself the Theatre of Action,
following the League's recommendation that the word “agitprop” be abandoned. A Workers
Theatre editorial explicitly directed this change of name as a united front tactic:
The coming year finds the Workers Theatre facing great problems and great
opportunities. If we work intelligently, without sectarianism, we can reach out to
large numbers of workers and farmers heretofore outside our audience. We can
establish many more workers theatre groups. We can win many little theatre and
professional theatres workers to the working class viewpoint of the theatre. We can
become a mass theatre.
But to do that we must be able to make effective use of the medium of the theatre
as an art form. We must study its technique, adapting and experimenting to develop
the most effective artistic methods of bringing out what our playwrights have to say.
Moreover we must be able to express our revolutionary ideas in terms of the
theatre. [...] One point in the program advises the abandonment of the Workers
Theatre groups of phrases and terms that have mainly political connotations rather
than theatrical ones.
....The National Executive Committee [of the League of Workers Theatres, shortly to
become New Theatre League] recommends one specific change at once, -- that we
abandon in common practice the term “Agitprop Theatre” and adopt instead the term
“Theatre of Action.” (New Theatre, July/Aug. 1933: 13)
The new term was instrumentally useful because it functioned as a cipher which both
announced and concealed its political origins. Not surprisingly, it was reproduced elsewhere,
not only in Toronto but in Britain, where, as Ewan MacColl later recalled, “we had
reorganized the group and we were now calling ourselves the Theatre of Action, a title
which, I believe, we had borrowed from the New York group.” (Stourac and McCreery, xxxi)
17
In March 1935, the same month that Waiting for Lefty moved into the Longacre
Theatre, as a formal production of the Group Theatre, the WLT celebrated its name change
(by which it marked territory, claiming the generic term Theatre of Action as its own) with a
ball featuring a dance band and “mass games”. The renaming was the visible aspect of deeper
changes in theory and technique, all of which emphasized the universality of artistic
standards and announced the primacy of socialist realism, which overwrote the aesthetic
theory of the workers theatre. It is this shift that enabled Toby Gordon Ryan to accept the
damning review of Eight Men Speak in New Theatre in 1934 (Ferris 30), which denounced
the play's montage structure as lacking in unity; it also enabled her to recall the play as
“inartistic” many years later. And it implicitly required that Odets and the Group Theatre
drop the Young Actor from Waiting for Lefty.
Waiting for Lefty has been hailed as the first masterpiece of the left theatre because its
realistic given circumstances and character-based scenes enable psychologically inflected
acting methods, without losing the immediacy of agitprop. Lefty was not the first play to
attempt this integration; three months previously Elia Kazan's Dimitroff had also fused short
realist scenes with agitprop chorus, and we can discern the beginnings of such fusion as early
as Eight Men Speak in 1933. Odets’ own attitude when the play was first presented can be
surmised from his handwritten comment on his copy of a review of the play in New Masses
in which Herbert Kline wrote,
Every part he conceives, every line he writes is designed with a sure knowledge of
stage and audience. Sometimes his stage ingenuity is a disadvantage. More often he
has poignant situations, rather than complete characters. (New Masses, 19 March
1935).
To this Odets answered in the margin, “this is agitprop.” Despite the growing critical opinion
that the play was a humanist drama struggling to escape its agitprop origins, Odets seems to
have clung to a notion that the text was an adaptive political instrument that could be
reconfigured to meet local conditions. Waiting for Lefty in this model is not a text, but
18
particular moments of textuality.8 The first adaptation of course was the excision of the
Young Actor scene, and the addition of the Lab Assistant scene (not included in the New
Theatre edition, but already present in the 1935 Random House edition), but more were to
follow. An undated typescript with the title “Revised Script” and a stamp reading “New
Labor Theatre 268 E 78th St” in Odets’ papers contains numerous changes introduced to tone
the revolutionary edge of the play. The Actor scene remains, but in its most celebrated line,
the Communist Manifesto is replaced to read, “Or one dollar buys nine loaves of bread and
one copy of this labor pamphlet. Learn while you eat. Read while you run...”
The most extensive change is in the play's rousing climactic speech, when the
previously silent Agate makes his famous strike call. This was the moment memorialized by
Clurman, when the audience joined the calls from the stage so that the entire house
reverberated. As published in the original New Masses version, Agate's final speech reads:
AGATE: (Crying) Hear it, boys, hear it?
Hell, listen to me! Coast to coast! HELLO AMERICA! HELLO. WE'RE
STORMBIRDS OF THE WORKING-CLASS. WORKERS OF THE
WORLD....OUR BONES AND BLOOD! And when we die they'll know what
we did to make a new world! Christ, cut us up to little pieces. We'll die for
what is right! but [sic] fruit trees where are ashes are! (To audience). Well,
What's the answer?
ALL: STRIKE!
AGATE: LOUDER!
ALL: STRIKE!
AGATE and Others on stage: AGAIN!
ALL: STRIKE, STRIKE, STRIKE!!!
In the undated New Labor version, the speech is naturalized in Popular Front rhetoric,
corresponding to the Communist party push to mainstream unionization:
19
AGATE: Did you hear that boys? Did you hear it? Hell, listen to me! From coast to
coast! HELLO AMERICA HELLO We're the men that build the bridges and
dig the coal, we're the men that make up steel and keep the wheels rolling!
Thirty million of us, Workers of America! Can you hear us? We're saying
organize, we're saying Union, and we won't give up till every workingman's a
union man! (To audience) Well, what's the answer?
ALL: Join the union!
AGATE: Louder!
ALL: Union!
AGATE: Again!
ALL: UNION!
This tactical shift was marked even more explicitly in a Federal Theatre Radio Division
broadcast in February 1938, in which the final speech changes “working class” into the less
categorical “industrial struggle”:
AGATE: Here that boys! They got Lefty! Lefty was fighting the company union. He
wanted an Industrial union! So Lefty's dead.
VOICES: More angry shouts.
AGATE: What are we going to do about it?
VOICES: To hell with the company union!
AGATE: Right! Let's strike -- for an industrial union. HELLO AMERICA --hello. We're
stormbirds of the industrial struggle.
VOICES: Strike! Industrial union!
AGATE: Louder!
VOICES: Industrial Union!
AGATE: louder. Louder.
VOICES: Strike! Industrial union! Industrial union! Strike! Strike!
20
This is the repatriation of Lefty, as the revolutionary instrument is adapted to accommodate
New Deal consensus and CIO organization. This humanization of its militant agitprop origins
was welcomed by the Communist parties and can be seen in the play's circulation outside of
New York and beyond that, outside of the American canon. This is a history of the play not
as a canonical expression of an epochal moment (no matter how fervent) but as a text used by
particular groups -- a product of localized cultural practices which it expressed, and which it
affected because of the way the play circulated and reproduced.
Despite Odets’ own use of the play as an adaptive tactical text, beginning with the
excision of the Young Actor scene, Waiting for Lefty circulated as a monolithic text that
confirmed non-partisan humanist values suitable for export when the play was used to enable
the (re)formation of Popular Front troupes in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the
United Kingdom. The inaugural moments of the play around the world marked the coming
dominance of American popular culture on the left, a colonizing system in which the
cultural work of the New York Popular Front theatres circulated as normative values of
artistry. This was reinforced in material practice in the Toronto Theatre of Action, which, at
the same time it turned to Lefty as an enabling text, also imported a director from New York
to give the company the gloss of professionalism in its formative years.
Outside of New York, the most important result of the Popular Front (re)formation
was the overwriting of past practice, a process in which Waiting for Lefty , with its
accelerating celebrity, functioned as both site and marker. The most well known example of
this took place in London, where the play was the means of transition between Rebel Players
and Unity Theatre. Although that transition was contentious, the fact that it centered on a
celebrated foreign script may have displaced the struggle somewhat safely away from local
texts that may have been more deeply invested with personal histories and class allegiances.
In Australia and New Zealand, Waiting for Lefty was the exemplary model that enabled the
formation of workers theatres beginning in the Popular Front phase, but at the same time it
21
has become originary to the point that it obscures previous, unclaimed histories of Third
Period agitprop.
In Canada, the play enabled a very different shift, one somewhat implied in Australia,
Britain and New Zealand. Less than 12 hours by train from New York, Toronto was the
cultural centre of the closest satellite in the emerging American imperial sphere, and the
demographic, social and linguistic affinities between anglophone Canada and the United
States made cultural exchange sufficiently easy that the border seemed to disappear in the
popular imaginary. In this context, Waiting for Lefty domesticated national difference even
as it reconciled class practices. We can see this happening in Toronto, where in 1935 the
Theatre of Action not only distanced itself from its previous life as the Workers Experimental
Theatre, but totally erased its history. In its publicity pamphlet, the new Theatre of Action
invoked the romantic genealogy of a popular people's theatre, and made the explicit point
that this was a “new and quite unknown group” -- which technically it was -- and that it “did
not seek to make the theatre a political platform” (Theatre of Action 1). Its inaugural
production of Waiting for Lefty, without the sectarianism of the Young Actor, was not the
localized, naturalized agitprop that Odets had originally given to the Group Theatre, but a
text that had circulated beyond those origins to become an internationalized talisman of
American cultural leadership.
In the United States, Waiting for Lefty marked the revisionist erasure of “ultra” left
modernist dramatic theory, and the subordination of the mobile stage to the theatrical
mainstream in the cultural front. Elsewhere in the English-speaking word, it had a different
valence. Most clearly in the Canadian example, the critical shift that disallowed its agitprop
origins also invalidated local forms as inartistic, suppressed an emergent dramaturgical
method, and reinforced imperial models (and their attendant artistic methods of training and
production). In Britain, Lefty was complicit in the ascendency of the professionalized
humanism of Unity Theatre over the working class radicalism of Rebel Players. In the
spheres of left critical aesthetics and national professionalized cultures, the narrative of the
22
workers theatre was captured by the dominant narratives that position metropolitan theatre
as the normalizing site of discourse.
These mechanics of displacement function to obscure the process by which
oppositional practices are utilized in the reproduction of imperial power. They also explain
why, a half-century after “the proscenium arch disappeared” and Waiting for Lefty began its
history as an adaptive text, a Communist veteran of the Canadian movement suppressed her
memory of the emblematically militant moment of the play. The Young Actor leaves and
reenters the play in its various moments, always reminding us that Waiting for Lefty has been
from its inception a pluralized site of struggle over the terms of cultural authority on the left.
NOTES
1. Although “workers theatre movement” was and is frequently capitalized, I use lower case to
distinguish the broad historical movement as such from specific historical usages ( such as the
Workers’ Theatre Movement in Britain). Conventions of apostrophizing “Workers’” follow
original usage as much as possible given the inconsistencies of historical practice.
2. Most of Odet’s critics have noted the excision of the Young Actor only in passing, and
because of the absence of archival documentation, the facts are confused. The absence of
documentation, or even mention in memoirs and biographies, suggests that the change did not
occasion particular notice at the time. Mendelsohn suggests that the scene was dropped for the
1939 Modern Library collection of Odet’s Six Plays edited by Harold Clurman, and quotes
Odets as saying that the “problem was not sufficiently universal, that it had special meaning
only for actors”(24). Miller states that it was dropped when the play moved [back] to Broadway
in September 1935 (173); Demastes merely notes that it was dropped from the Group’s
performances (66). The Group performed Waiting For Lefty an indeterminate number of times
between its opening in January and its second re-opening at the Belasco in September, by which
time the scene had disappeared from the cast list. Odets may have dropped it for political
23
reasons when he quit the Communist Party that spring; he may have dropped it because the
play’s rapid circulation attracted police repression across the United States; he may have
dropped it at the urging of Harold Clurman for dramaturgical reasons; he may have dropped it at
the urging of Communist friends; he may have dropped it out of concern for his public
reputation; he may have dropped it because its unflattering portrayal of the Broadway producer
simply wasn’t a smart career move. All of these are speculative but all lead to the same
conclusion: that the scene, whether ideologically atypical, artistically disruptive, politically
sectarian, or socially awkward, did not belong in the social humanist mode in which the play
was retooled.
3. The marginalia consist of line and beat analyses, in the manner of a scene study, in the “Joe
and Edna” scene that initiates the flashback sequences of the play.
4. Although John Bonn [Hans Bohn] was one of the key organizers of the New York workers
theatres, most written histories of the movement elide him. A biographical statement in the New
Theatre School brochure for 1937-38 states that he “Studied at the Reich Dramatic School in
Berlin and at the Universities of Berlin, Cologne and Leipzig. Worked as a director and
playreader with the Chamber Theatre in Leipzig, State Theatre in Berlin, the Theatre Collective
and the Federal Theatre in New York.” (Clipping files, Billy Rose Collection, NYPL).
Cosgrove includes more detailed information on Bonn’s career in Germany (212).
5. Because Workers Theatre issues were numbered erratically, I cite them by month rather than
volume and issue number. Workers Theatre first appeared in April 1931, and until May 1932 it
consisted of crudely reproduced hand-typed pages with line drawings. From May 1932 until it
re-emerged in 1935 as the glossy New Theatre, the format remained the same but the pages were
typeset.
24
6. As narrated first by Harold Clurman in The Fervent Years, and then by generations of
subsequent critics and biographers, Odets was a tormented and politically ambivalent visionary
who struggled to reconcile his political beliefs with the rapid celebrity that quickly took him to
Hollywood. This is a narrative that has become so familiar and conventionalized that it has
become detached from its subject, as seen for example in Ethan and Joel Coen’s film Barton
Fink..
7. The ecstatic response to the premiere was replicated several months later in London,
where the Rebel Players premiere in April 1934 was no less “fervent.” But where the
American response seems to have been predicated on a rhapsodic sense of mass historical
movement and theatrical discovery, the excitement of the London opening seems to have
been related more explicitly to the promise of political action that the play rehearsed. As
Bram Bootman recorded in his “organizing secretaries” minutes immediately after the
premiere,
For “Lefty” the atmosphere was electric. The audience was held from the first
word to the last; every scene was concluded in a burst of applause. [...] Some
well known comrades of the furnishing trades union came to us in the interval &
asked if they could take a collection in support of a strike at their factory for
trade union conditions. At our request they refrained from doing so until after our
presentation of “Lefty”, where after the last echo of the shouts for the strike had
died away an announcement was made from the stage about the strike & an
appeal was made for funds.
8. Waiting for Lefty ‘s continuing history as adaptive agitprop resurfaced in 1999 in an
ironic but generally unremarked moment in the Academy Awards. The same ceremony that
honoured Elia Kazan (who had played Agate when the play reopened at the Belasco
Theatre) with a controversial lifetime achievement award also featured (as part of an acting
award nomination) a clip from American History X, a film about white supremacists in
25
contemporary America. The clip shown in the ceremony contained a direct quotation from
Agate’s final speech in Waiting for Lefty.
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Kline, Herbert, New Masses, 19 March 1935.
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-----. Six Plays of Clifford Odets.. Modern Library, 1939..
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29