page_title: Living Newspaper
section_title: Living Newspapers outside of New York
hierarchical_section_title: Living Newspaper / History of the FTP's Living Newspapers / Living Newspapers outside of New York
caption_attribution_description: English: Silkscreen poster for Spirochete, a Living Newspaper play by Arnold Sundgaard produced by the Federal Theatre Project
context_page_description: Living Newspaper is a term for a theatrical form presenting factual information on current events to a popular audience. Historically, Living Newspapers have also urged social action and reacted against naturalistic and realistic theatrical conventions in favor of the more direct, experimental techniques of agitprop theatre, including the extensive use of multimedia.
  Though Living Newspapers originated in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution, the English term is most often associated with the Living Newspapers produced by the Federal Theatre Project. Part of the federally funded arts program established under the Works Progress Administration in the United States of the 1930s, the Federal Theatre Project wrote and presented a number of Living Newspapers on social issues of the day, including Triple-A Plowed Under, Injunction Granted, One-Third of a Nation, Power, and Spirochete. Controversy over the political ideology of the Living Newspapers contributed to the disbanding of the Federal Theatre Project in 1939, and a number of Living Newspapers already written or in development were never performed, including several that addressed race issues.
context_section_description: Though the New York Living Newspaper Unit produced most of the major Living Newspapers, other units in cities throughout the U.S. produced or planned Living Newspapers.  In most cases, these productions were local runs of the New York Living Newspapers.  Both Power and One-Third of a Nation ran throughout the U.S., with the scripts altered to various degrees to suit local conditions.  In Seattle, the mayor declared "Power Week" in honor of the week-long run of Power, recognizing the timeliness of the play's subject matter: With the public Bonneville hydroelectric project on the horizon, private and public power companies were vying for support in the city.
  Non-New-York Units also researched and wrote their own Living Newspapers.  The Southwest Unit, in California, planned and researched Spanish Grant, on a historical incident in which a series of "speculative land deals" took land from communities, and Land Grant, on the 1848 cession of California to the United States and corrupt land deals that led up to it.  Washington's unit planned Timber; Iowa's Dirt; and Connecticut's Stars and Bars; however, none of these regional Living Newspapers ever made it to full production.
  On the other hand, Chicago produced an original Living Newspaper that rivalled the later New York Living Newspapers in its impact and positive reception.  In 1938, Arnold Sundgaard's Spirochete, a Living Newspaper on the history of syphilis, opened in Chicago.  Using the image projections, extensive sound design, shadowplay, brief scenes, and "little man" character (here, a patient embodying all syphilis sufferers throughout history) made standard by the New York Unit, Spirochete followed syphilis from its introduction in Europe in the 15th century through to the social stigma surrounding it in the 1930s.  The play pushed for audiences to support the Marriage Test Law of 1937, which required blood tests for syphilis prior to marriage.  Spirochete became the second most produced Living Newspaper, after One-Third of a Nation and ran in four other major cities as part of a nationwide syphilis-education and -prevention campaign.
caption: Poster for the original Chicago production of Spirochete (1938)
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