Some plays entertain. Others are written to make an audience want to do something when they walk out the door. American theatre has a rich tradition of protest plays: works that respond to the news of their day and push audiences to see an issue differently. Here's how that tradition has worked, from the Great Depression to the turn of the century.
This post is part of our series on theatre and social change. Start with Broadway's legacy of social change, then read about Broadway and the civil rights movement.
Protest theatre is drama made to respond to a social or political problem and to move audiences toward awareness or action. It can be a full-length play, a short piece performed at a union hall, or documentary theatre built from real interviews. What sets it apart is purpose: the play wants something from its audience beyond applause.
That doesn't make it propaganda. The best protest plays work because they're good theatre first. They build characters an audience cares about, and the message lands through the story rather than a lecture.
Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty premiered on January 6, 1935, at the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York and moved to Broadway's Longacre Theatre that March under the Group Theatre. Inspired by a 1934 New York taxi strike, it's set at a union meeting where drivers debate whether to walk off the job, with flashbacks showing what brought each of them there.
The play breaks the wall between stage and audience, treating the theatre itself as the meeting hall. At the premiere, the audience was so moved that the cast took 28 curtain calls. Director Harold Clurman later wrote that audience and actors had become one. Because it needed almost no set, hundreds of groups asked to stage it in union halls and small theatres across the country.
During the Great Depression, the Federal Theatre Project put thousands of theatre workers back to work and brought live performance to audiences across the country. One of its most original inventions was the Living Newspaper: plays built from real news, statistics, and public debate.
One-Third of a Nation (1938), for example, took its title from President Franklin Roosevelt's second inaugural address, which described one-third of the nation as ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished. It opened with a fire in a crumbling New York tenement and traced how the city's slums came to be. Living Newspapers turned public policy into theatre and invited audiences to think about problems facing their own communities.
Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock, a musical about labor organizing in a steel town, was set to open as a Federal Theatre Project production in June 1937. Amid federal budget cuts, officials ordered new openings delayed, and on June 15, the day before the planned opening, the theatre was padlocked.
The company rented the empty Venice Theatre, and the crowd of about 600 people walked 21 blocks north to see it. Actors' Equity ruled that its members couldn't perform onstage without the federal producer's approval, so Blitzstein played the score alone at a piano onstage while cast members stood up and sang their parts from seats in the audience. That night has become one of the most famous in American theatre history, a story about artists finding a way to be heard.
Later protest theatre often drew on real people's own words. In 1998, Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, was murdered in Laramie, Wyoming. Moisés Kaufman and members of Tectonic Theater Project traveled to Laramie and interviewed hundreds of residents. The result, The Laramie Project, premiered in Denver in February 2000 and then played Off-Broadway at the Union Square Theatre.
It has since been staged by high schools, colleges, and community theatres across the country, often followed by conversations about prejudice and how communities respond to violence. In 2009, a follow-up, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, was read at nearly 150 theatres on the same night. Few plays have sparked as many community conversations.
Looking across these examples, a few things stand out. The plays respond to something audiences already feel. They give that feeling a human face. And they leave the audience with a sense that what happens next is up to them.
That last part is the bridge between theatre and civic life. A play can open a conversation, but people carry it forward. That's the idea behind Broadway for Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit that helps fans and theatre workers register, get informed, and vote. We don't tell anyone what to think. We help everyone take part. You can find other organizations that put theatre to work for the public good in our guide to Broadway charities and nonprofits.
Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty (1935), about a taxi strike, is one of the best-known American examples. More recent ones include documentary plays like The Laramie Project (2000).
A type of play created by the Federal Theatre Project in the 1930s that dramatized current events and public issues, using real news, statistics, and debates.
Amid federal budget cuts, the government padlocked the theatre the day before the Federal Theatre Project production's June 1937 opening. The company performed it anyway at another theatre, with the actors singing from the audience.
Not necessarily. Protest theatre responds to social issues, and plays have come from many points of view. Its common thread is asking audiences to pay attention and take part.
Help theatre audiences take part in civic life. Donate to Broadway for Democracy.
