Evening star., 1939-03-05
PrOletariat's
Voice Fails
Stage
Significant Plays
Have Not Been
That
By Ira Wolterf.
NEW YORK.

NEW YORK.
Whatever else this has been, it
Is not year for the proletarian
play. This is not because the labor
lads and ladies were silent, but
because nobody was listening to
them.
The proletarian play has had an
in-and-out career on Broadway in
the matter of getting hearings. But
the box offices didn't waver even
that much Out" was what they
said from the beginning. and they
must have said it with lifted
thumb because the plays raced
past like automobiles in a hitch
hiker's nightmare. Although num-
ber of them created critical ex-
citement, Clifford Odets' Awake
and Sing" is the only one that
climbed out of the red. I mean,
of course, on the ledger books. In
cidentally, this play will be revived
Monday by its original sponsors, the
Group Theater, to share split weeks
with Mr.. Odets' current Rocket
to the Moon"
Whatever your politics, hope
you will agree that, from the point
of view of art, this is an unhappy
state of affairs. For, the most
important contribution our century
can make to dramatic literature
is this proletarian art, sometimes
called social minded art by its po-
litical admirers, or dismissed con-
temptuously by its political despisers
as propaganda.
The producers having given up
producing for Lent, had thought
to give up being irritated for the
same period, but these pro and
con ves-social-minded and
propaganda - battle like gravel
against the brain. Anybody who
understands anything about art
wouldn't use them. 1t is as intel
ligent to admire or hate a play
for being social-minded or propa-
ganda as it is to admire or hate
a piece of music for being made
up or sound waves. A decent play
has to be about the living of life
(social-minded) and has to have
the power to convince (propaganda.
What is unhappy about the box
Office reception of proletarian plays
is that it proves the plays weren't
very good. They were very hot
plays, but half-baked just the same.
They made the fatal mistake of
being more about politics than about
life. Politics is an art in itself, and
a play about politics comes very
definitely to be critical essay on
art. There is place in literature
for critical essays on an art, but it
is not on Broadway stage.
A musical comedy in town at the
moment is limping along to the
tune of 1--WE Have No Social Signifi-
cance" Unfortunately, this is the
only comical thing it has to say, and
that must have something to do
with the bad business it is doing.
The pieces one joke, of course, is
on itself, an absence of significance
being no more marketable than an
absence of potatoes.
However. the empty boast reflects
a state of mind current in the thea
ter. The producers have been
watching audiences come out of
theaters where the hero and heroine
were rescued from fate worse than
death by a trumpeting horde of
union organizers There was time
when the producers thought that
was what the public wanted. But
the only reaction from the audiences,
stupefed at seeing now this horde
and now that horde come trumpet
ing in under Tapping flags as much
in the nick of time as the United
States Marines used to be, was
plaintive bleat of I'VE want enter
tainment."
The producers, waking as from a
horrid dream, interpret entertain
men as being mo proletarian
drama"
AS any professor of literature can
tell them, they are quite wrong.
Europe, of which the United States
is an intellectual part, has been
dominated by two classes of So
ciety-frst the nobility and, lately,
VIC AAAA0AAS SAooo. VAlCClo lllcNlldUly
write about the society in which
they live. Shakespeare, for instance,
and nearly everybody else you can
think of in his and previous and
later days, wrote about the nobility
and Ibsen wrote about the middle
class.
This is the century in which the
proletariat-by which is meant the
people whose major property is a
jobs beginning to make it's weight
not so much felt as heard. Mass
education has taken hold and made
them vocal. They speak now. It's
not so much duty as a facet of the
present century to develop the kind
of writing that will speak to them.
There is very little in past liter
ature that the proletariat can turn
to for the very wonderful kind of
entertainment derived from seeing
an artist react to something ia
miliar. The opportunity is our CEN
tury's.
(copyright 1889, BY the North American
Newspaper Alliance, Inc}