Staging communities in early twentieth-century American labor drama

Author

Lee Papa

Date of Award

8-1995

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Stanton B. Garner, Jr.

Committee Members

Tom Cooke, Chuch Maland, Mary Papke

Abstract

Labor drama of the early twentieth century has received scant critical attention beyond mention in American theatre histories and studies of the two canonical texts of the movement, Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape and Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty. Yet the labor drama movement provides an important bridge between the Little Theatre Movement of the first two decades of the twentieth century and American drama of the 1940s and 1950s.

Using labor historiography as a basis, this study demonstrates how labor drama reveals a deep desire for the worker to engage with and form communities with other workers. The plays of the movement attempt to extend that community from the stage to the audience in the theatre. The strategies employed by labor plays to achieve this communitarian goal reveal a developing theatrical and dramatic methodology.

Beginning with the Paterson Silk Strike Pageant of 1913, the labor stage was committed to enlightening both performers and audience in order to forward the goal of a labor community. When labor organization reached its lowest point in the 1920s, labor plays dramatized governmental and societal attacks against union males, as exemplified in plays by O'Neill, John Howard Lawson, Maxwell Anderson, and Upton Sinclair. In the 1930s, the labor college movement provided a greater role for women workers, and labor drama became an educational and organizational tool while reflecting this expanding female presence. Finally, with the rise of the workers' theatre in the mid-1930s, the labor drama reached its problematic pinnacle with Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets, who appropriated the entire history of the labor stage in his play. The very success of the Odets work brought the labor play away from its union roots.

Recommended Citation

Papa, Lee, "Staging communities in early twentieth-century American labor drama. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1995.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/10061