‘Injunction Granted’ in Its Times: a Living Newspaper Reappraised

1990 ◽  
Vol 6 (23) ◽  
pp. 279-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerry Cobb
Keyword(s):  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Theatre ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Theatrical Practice ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
The University ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Living Newspapers

Back in the early 1970s, the original Theatre Quarterly published a number of articles which revived interest in the Federal Theatre Project. In TQ 4, Heinz Bernard placed the work of the FTP's Living Newspaper Unit in the context of American left-wing theatrical practice in the 1930s, and a piece on its techniques by Arthur Arent, the principal writer of the Living Newspapers, first published in 1938, was reprinted in the same issue. Then, in TQ 9 (1973), came Arnold Goldman's incisive and far-ranging article, ‘Life and Death of the Living Newspaper Unit’, which not only traced the political rise and fall of the Unit and the Project, but suggested the importance of the Living Newspaper form to American political theatre, and identified important formal links with Soviet and German practices. This marked the beginning of a reassessment of the work of the Unit, whose reputation had been tarnished and somewhat marginalized in the wake of the FTP's closure by Congress on the grounds of political extremism, and the subsequent legacy of the McCarthy years. The present article by Gerry Cobb continues the reassessment process, and deals with the Living Newspaper considered most contentious of all both by Congressional opponents of the Project and by its own hierarchy – Injunction Granted. Cobb argues that this piece was singled out for attack because of its divergence from the policies of the New Deal, and its call for the organization of workers under the auspices of the CIO, its politics thus coming to obscure its theatrical strengths. His article both demonstrates the historical relevance of Injunction Granted at the time of its creation, and emphasizes and reassesses its strengths as a piece of theatre. Gerry Cobb is a postgraduate student at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where, in addition to working on a doctoral thesis on the Living Newspapers, he is editing a volume of the four major works in the form, including Injunction Granted, for publication by Bristol Classical Press late in 1990.

The Losey–Moscow Connection: Experimental Soviet Theatre and the Living Newspaper

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Political Theatre ◽  
Santa Barbara ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Epic Theatre ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
The University

Although Joseph Losey is best known as the blacklisted director of films such as the Pinter-scripted The Servant, The Go-Between, and Accident, as well as Mr Klein starring Alain Delon, he also had an important career in leftist theatre prior to making his Hollywood film debut in in the late 1940s. Because of his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht on the 1947 Hollywood production of Galileo, it is assumed that Losey learned from him most of his stagecraft – particularly the use of Verfremdungseffekt and self-reflexivity. However, as this article shows, Losey's apprenticeship was rooted not in the Epic Theatre (which was largely a second-hand phenomenon) but in the Soviet theatrical avant garde, observed at first hand during a 1935 Moscow visit studying the techniques of Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, and Pavlovich Okhlopkov, whose ‘theatre in the round’ stagings and use of complex ramps and projections provided the basis for Losey's subsequent Federal Theatre Project ‘Living Newspaper’ productions – notably Triple-A Plowed Under and Injunction Granted! Under the aegis of co-founder Hallie Flanagan, the Living Newspaper proved to be the model of 1930s political theatre: topical, didactic, fast-paced – and almost immediately obsolete as events superseded the plays' relevance. Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of critical studies on Joseph Losey and Karel Reisz for Manchester University Press's ‘British Film Makers’ series and of Beckett, Deleuze, and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art for Palgrave Macmillan. He is currently working with Felicity Colman on a three-volume Encyclopedia of Film-Philosophy.

scholarly journals The Americanization of the Soviet Living Newspaper

2008 ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Lynn Mally
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Theater ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Red Army ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
Living Newspapers

This article examines the migration of a Soviet agitational theatrical form from Russia to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. The Soviet living newspaper, or zhivaia gazeta, began during the Russian Civil War as a method to act out a pro-Soviet version of the news for mainly illiterate Red Army soldiers. During the 1920s, it evolved into an experimental form of agitprop theater that attracted the interest of foreigners, who hoped to develop new methods of political theater in their own countries. In the United States, the living newspaper format was first adopted by American communist circles. Eventually, the depression-era arts program, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), incorporated an expanded and altered version as part of its many offerings. Living newspapers eventually became one of the FTP’s most celebrated and criticized performance genres. The political content of American living newspapers was a major factor in the government’s elimination of the FTP in 1939.

Arthur Miller

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan C.W. Abbotson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Arthur Miller ◽  
Radio Stations ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
The University ◽  
Cover Up

Arthur Asher Miller (b. 1915–d. 2005) was born in Harlem, New York. The successful clothing business his immigrant father had built up went bankrupt during the Great Depression, and the family relocated to Brooklyn. After working at an auto parts warehouse to finance college, Miller attended the University of Michigan from 1934 to 1938. He switched his major from journalism to English after successfully winning a university prize for playwriting. After graduation he returned to New York to work on his plays, first for the Federal Theatre Project, until it closed down in 1939, and then for various radio stations. In 1940 he married his college girlfriend, Mary Slattery, with whom he would have two children, Jane and Robert. In 1944 he published his first book, Situation Normal . . . , about his experiences touring army camps, and had his first full-length play produced on Broadway—The Man Who Had All the Luck—which closed after six performances. Miller nearly quit writing plays and turned to fiction, producing a novel about American anti-Semitism: Focus (1945). Returning to drama, he achieved success in 1947 with All My Sons, about a man who tried to cover up selling faulty aircraft parts to the air force, and swiftly followed this with the now seminal Death of a Salesman (1949), which covers the last day of Willy Loman’s frustrated life. Miller continued to write a series of successful modern tragedies, including The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1956), as well as a variety of other plays, short fiction, and essays. In 1956 he would divorce his wife to marry the actress Marilyn Monroe, for whom he wrote the screenplay The Misfits (1961). After this marriage collapsed, he wed the Austrian photographer Inge Morath, with whom he would have two children, Rebecca and Daniel, and live happily for the next forty years. Miller’s reputation in America suffered for decades following his marriage to Monroe, even while he was lionized abroad. His drama continues to be regularly produced around the world. As his biographer, Christopher Bigsby, suggests, “[Miller] wrote metaphors rather than plays, and that is why they continue to live on the pulse, constantly reinvented, earthed in new realities” (Arthur Miller 1962–2005 [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2011], p. xii). Miller has been both hailed and scorned as “America’s conscience,” and his works are rooted in a profoundly humanistic philosophy that is fiercely patriotic, just as it is determined to bring attention to America’s flaws. His driving concern was to make a difference, convinced that theater was a public art that could do that.

Responses to Revolution: the Soviet Union Portrayed in the British Theatre, 1917–29

1992 ◽  
Vol 8 (29) ◽  
pp. 62-69
Author(s):  
Steve Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
British Library ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Theatre ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Right ◽  
Unpublished Manuscripts ◽  
The University

In theatrical parlance, ‘political’ is often taken to be synonymous with ‘left-wing’, and research into political theatre movements of the first half of this century has perpetuated the assumption that the right has generally avoided taking politics as subject matter. This article, the first of two about British political theatre in the 1920s, concentrates on plays about Communism and the Soviet Union during the decade following the Russian Revolution, and offers some contrasting conclusions. Steve Nicholson, Lecturer in Drama at the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds, argues that, whether such plays shaped or merely reflected conventional views, they were used by the establishment for the most blatant and explicit propaganda, at a time when it felt itself under threat from the Left. The article has been researched largely through unpublished manuscripts in the Lord Chamberlain's collection of plays, housed in the British Library, and derives from a broader study of the portrayal of Communism in the British theatre from 1917 to 1945.

The Drama of Farming: The Federal Theatre Living Newspapers on Agriculture

Prospects ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 325-358
Author(s):  
John O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Current Problem ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Documentary Drama ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
A Current ◽  
Living Newspapers

The term “Living Newspaper” has been used to describe various topical theatrical productions adapting a considerable diversity of performance styles and relationships to an audience. For the Works Projects Administration (WPA) Federal Theatre Project (FTP) (1935–39), the Living Newspaper was a documentary drama that examined the nature, size, and origin of a current problem or issue. In theory, the action and dialogue would be completely objective by simply reenacting actual events. In practice, however, the authors of the Living Newspaper selected what they thought typical or representative to highlight or explain the “facts.” The play generally concluded by exhorting the audience to support a particular position or a specific piece of legislation.

Living Newspaper: Theatre and Therapy

2000 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Casson
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
Living Newspapers

Living Newspapers—a hallmark of the Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s—were foretold in 1915 by the Italian futurists, brought into existence in 1919 in the Soviet Union, further developed in Vienna in the 1920s by the founder of psychodrama, Jacob Moreno, played in India in the 1960s and after, and are used as therapy today.

Kate Dossett. Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal

Modern Drama ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-375
Author(s):  
Julie Burrell
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Black Performance ◽  
Black Theatre ◽  
Black Public Sphere ◽  
Performance Communities ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
The New Deal

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal focuses on the Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project (1935–39). Dossett argues that Black performance communities consisting of Black theatre artists and the Black public sphere helped shaped the performance and reception of theatre manuscripts in the New Deal era.

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