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Actors as Activists: The Theatre Arts Committee Cabaret, 1938–1941
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Extract
Given the omnipresence of performers of all political stripes speaking for a variety of causes and candidates, it is difficult to remember a time when artist-activists were not an integral part of America's theatrical landscape. Indeed, under David Douglass's leadership, the American Company (formerly the Hallam Company) assuaged Puritan fears about the presence of ‘theatricals’ in staid eighteenth-century New England by performing benefits for local causes, thereby injecting its work with a social purpose. Throughout its history the American theatre has used performance as a propaganda weapon for such causes as abolition (Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852), temperance (Ten Nights in a Bar Room, 1858), civil rights (A Raisin in the Sun, 1959), and currently the AIDS crisis (Angels in America, 1993). Political activism in the American theatre flourished in the 1930s, largely through the work and ideology of such enterprises as the Group Theatre, the Theatre Union, even the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and similar left-wing movements that sought to produce plays that deal boldly with deep-going social conflicts, the economic, emotional, and cultural problems that confront the majority of people. The mission was realized mostly through traditional theatre means, i.e. plays or agit-prop dramas à la Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers. These have been chronicled in a number of useful surveys, most notably Gerald Rabkin's Drama and Commitment (1964), Sam Smiley's The Drama of Attack (1972), and especially Malcolm Goldstein's detailed look at the 1930s radical theatre, The Political Stage (1974).
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References
Notes
1 Mays, David D.. ‘The Achievements of the Douglass Company in North America, 1758–1774’, Theatre Survey 23 (November 1980), 144.Google Scholar For instance, Douglass's actors raised money for an organ for the Charity School in Philadelphia in 1759, and in 1761 played two benefits for the poor in Newport, Rhode Island. Mays illustrates that Douglass was motivated for reasons other than altruism; his benefits were designed to alleviate criticism about the acting profession. Douglass did not perform benefits in areas where anti-theatre sentiments were not expressed.
2 Manifesto of the Theatre Union, quoted in Rabkin, Gerald, Drama and Commitment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), p. 45.Google Scholar
3 The most useful discussion of the cabaret, political and otherwise, in the United States is Gavin, James's Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of the New York Cabaret (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991).Google Scholar Curiously, Gavin makes no mention of TAC Cabarets, although they were among the most popular such events in New York in the late 1930s.
4 Goldstein states that the Cabaret premièred on 5 May (p. 200), but an article in the first issue of TAC Magazine (July 1938, 3)Google Scholar cites the 9 May première, and a story about the Cabaret's first anniversary performance of the TAC Cabaret was on 5 May 1939, and it is likely that Goldstein used this date. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (18 May 1938), the New York Times (30 April 1939)Google Scholar, and Variety (11 May 1938)Google Scholar all note that the TAC Cabaret was the first of its kind in America. Variety believed that the TAC was in the process of ‘establishing a new form of entertainment — political cabaret — which was popular on the continent in the predictatorship era, but new in the USA’.
5 Leaflet advertising TAC (n.d.), Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York City Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center.
6 Meltzer, Milton, ‘TAC Has Stirred Screen, Stage, and Radio Stars for Cause of Peace and Democracy’, The Daily Worker, 3 April 1939.Google Scholar Most material concerning the early history of the TAC has been taken from this source.
7 ‘Manifesto’, Theatre Arts Committee, Leaflet, Billy Rose Theatre Collection.
8 Ibid.
9 Ocko, whose name occasionally crops up in TAC literature, is one of those ‘unknowns’ who was active in TAC projects, although it is virtually impossible to find her name associated with Broadway shows of the era. When director-choreographer Jerome Robbins was summoned by H.U.A.C. to testify in 1953 about his affiliation with the Communist Party, he named several actors (Madelaine Lee and Elliott Sullivan), writers (notably Jerome Chodorov who wrote Wonderful Town and My Sister Eileen), labour organizers (particularly Lionel Berman, the principal party organizer for the Communist Party in the theatre district), and, curiously, Edna Ocko, ‘whose occupation I do not know’. (Kihss, Peter, ‘Robbins, showman, Admits He Was a Red’, New York Times, 6 May 1953, Sec. I, p. 23).Google Scholar
10 Goldstein, p. 198. Though Stewart is best known as a writer, most notably for the screenplay of The Philadelphia Story (for which he won an Academy Award in 1940)Google Scholar, he began his Broadway career as an actor in 1928 by creating the role of Nick Potter in Barry, PhillipHoliday.Google Scholar He had other acting credits on Broadway, and TAC audiences would have considered him an actor who was only beginning to establish himself as a writer.
11 Strauss, Theodore, ‘News of Night Clubs’, New York Times, 30 April 1939.Google Scholar
12 Roman, Seymour, ‘TAC Takes Off’, TAC Magazine, July 1938, 3.Google Scholar
13 TAC ‘Manifesto.’
14 ‘Comments’, TAC Magazine. July 1938, 3.Google Scholar Blitzstein was knowledgeable about European cabaret — as were the Europeans with his work. When Lotte Lenya first appeared in America at Herbert Jacoby's popular and trendy Le Ruban Bleu (56th Street and Fifth Avenue) on 7 April 1938, she sang not only Kurt Weill's songs, but those of Blitzstein as well (Gavin, 31). Since Weill was a committee chairman for the TAC, it is likely she attended at least some of the early Cabarets.
15 Reinhart, Robert, ‘Political Cabaret's “Schnitzle bank” with Social Significance Debuts’, Variety, 11 May 1938.Google Scholar
16 ‘Cabaret tac [sic] is One Year Old’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 30 April 1939. Keating enjoyed a short-lived Broadway career, appearing in — among other plays — Forsaking All Others (March 1933, which marked Tallulah Bankhead's return to Broadway)Google Scholar and All Good Americans (December 1933, with a very young Jimmy Stewart).Google Scholar
17 A copy of the mimeographed single page ‘programme’ can be found in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection.
18 Reinhart, Variety, 11 May 1938.
19 ‘The Theatre’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 18 May 1938.
20 TAC Magazine, May 1939, 15.Google Scholar
21 TAC Magazine, December 1938, 12.Google Scholar
22 TAC Magazine, July 1938, 3.Google Scholar
23 The following season tickets were lowered to 55 cents to make the Cabarets more accessible to working people. By 1940 the top price was $1.65. (Daily Worker, 4 October 1940Google Scholar).
24 Morrison, Hobe, ‘Cabaret TAC, a Political Monotone on a Single Theme, Rather Boring.’ Variety, 23 November 1938.Google Scholar Though Morrison is describing the Fall revival of the Cabaret, one assumes that his description could equally apply to the opening night.
25 Variety, 11 May 1938.Google Scholar
26 ‘Comments’, TAC Magazine, July 1938, 3.Google Scholar
27 Reinhart, Variety, 11 May 1938.
28 Drake, Herbert, ‘The Play Bill’, New York Herald Tribune, 4 September 1938.Google Scholar
29 Bogar, Robert, ‘Dancers Put on Amusing Show’, New York Herald Tribune, 1 September 1938.Google Scholar
30 TAC Magazine, May 1939, 21.Google Scholar
31 TAC Magazine, February 1939, 17.Google Scholar
32 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 30 April 1939.
33 The Daily Worker, 7 February 1940.Google Scholar
34 TAC Magazine printed an important five page exposé in its November 1939 issue entitled ‘Some Shocking Facts about Hollywood’, 14–17. In addition to its analysis of anti Jewish (and therefore pro-Nazi) sentiments in the film making industry, the article — the copy of a speech delivered by Michael Elkins of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League — discussed Ku Klux Klan activity in the Los Angeles area, warning TAC readers that ‘this Klan is not the Klan of yesteryear — comic opera, crackpot, and lynch-mad. This is the new Klan, with a new purpose, a new direction, a new danger’, 17.
35 TAC Magazine, February 1939, 16.Google Scholar
36 Boorstin, Daniel J., The Creators (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 217.Google Scholar
37 TAC Magazine, February 1939, 17.Google Scholar
38 Ibid.
39 TAC Magazine, January 1939, 14–15.Google Scholar
40 Pollock, ‘The Theatre’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 2 June 1938.
41 ‘Cabaret TAC Opens with New Show’, The Daily Worker, 4 October 1940.Google Scholar
42 Proctor, James, ‘Cabaret TAC Again!’, TAC Magazine, December 1938, 12.Google Scholar
43 PIC, 24 January 1939.Google Scholar
44 Quoted in Buttitta, Tony and Witham, Barry, Uncle Sam Presents: A Memoir of the Federal Theatre 1935–1939 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), p. 187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Dies also distinguished himself during Committee proceedings by declaring Christopher Marlowe ‘a Communist’.
45 ‘Urge WPA to Restore 6000 to Art Rolls’, New York Times, 14 February 1939.Google Scholar
46 The Daily Worker, 16 May 1940.Google Scholar
47 TAC Magazine, February 1939, 17.Google Scholar
48 PIC, 24 January 1939.Google Scholar
49 TAC Magazine, July 1938, 3.Google Scholar
50 Goldstein, p. 211–12.
51 Strauss, ‘News of Night Clubs’, New York Times, 30 April 1939.
52 Meltzer, The Daily Worker, 3 April 1940.
53 Proctor, ‘Cabaret TAC Again!’, TAC Magazine, December 1938, 27–8.
54 Morrison, ‘TAC Cabaret, a Political Monotone’.
55 C.P. ‘Broadway’, PIC, 24 January 1939, 22.Google Scholar
56 See Goldstein, p. 204–5, for a brief history of the Revuers.
57 PIC, 24 January 1939.Google Scholar
58 TAC Magazine, November 1939.Google Scholar
59 Shank, Theodore, ‘Political Theatre, Actors and Audience: Some Principles and Techniques’, Theatre 10 (Spring 1972), 100–101.Google Scholar
60 C.P. ‘Broadway’, PIC, 24 January 1939.Google Scholar
61 TAC Magazine, November 1939, 12–13.Google Scholar