New Deal Theater: The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: New Deal Theater: The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater Jonathan Chambers New Deal Theater: The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater. By Ilka Saal. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; pp. ix + 232. $69.95 cloth. In the prologue to her superb study, New Deal Theater: The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater, Ilka Saal posits the following question: “What form [of theatrical expression] is most expedient to the political mobilization of a broad public?” (2). Saal’s endeavor to respond to this query leads her to reevaluate the leftist stages in the United States during the 1930s (principally those in New York) in terms of how many of the artists presenting work in that arena drew from American vernacular or massculture aesthetics, as opposed to European modernism. More precisely, Saal argues that New Deal political theatre “persistently vernaculariz[ed] the political issues at hand,” and in so doing, stressed “absorption over alienation, verisimilitude over abstraction” (2). In taking this view, Saal acknowledges that her examination works as a corrective to the various analyses emerging from the Frankfurt School, anchored as they are in the assumption that the consumption of popular cultural commodities unavoidably leads to a contented and, ultimately, docile public. Alternatively, in drawing on the work of Michael Denning, Saal speculates that both the production and the reception of political theatre in 1930s New York were complex undertakings, and that the use of vernacular aesthetics was not an expression of American naiveté or ignorant compliance, but instead was a means for “the consolidation [End Page 685] of a heterogeneous public against capitalist exploitation, racism, fascism, and war” (4). Thus, through the course of six lucid, coherent, and convincingly argued chapters, Saal adroitly shifts the mode of analysis of Depression-era theatre away from the critique of the bourgeois-culture industry (which too often has resulted in quick dismissal of vernacular aesthetics), and instead highlights the ways that such popular aesthetics positively and negatively interrelated with various matrices of power. With chapter 1, “Brecht on Broadway: Reconsidering Political Theatre,” and chapter 2, “Disjunctive Aesthetics: A Genealogy of Political Theatre,” Saal offers a nuanced unpacking of her study’s design and method. The crux of chapter 1 is her thorough explication of the ill-fated production of Brecht’s Die Mütter by Theatre Union in November 1935 (simply titled Mother in that production). At this juncture, Saal demonstrates how Paul Peters’s sentimental translation/adaptation of Brecht’s text radically subverted epic dramaturgy, swapping alienation for identification, critical reflection for absorption, and ideological argumentation for emotional empathy. For Saal, the attempt by the most visible workingclass theatre in New York to modify the work of Brecht to speak to US audiences exemplifies her guiding premise: that New Deal theatre was haunted by competing and often incompatible notions of what constituted political theatre. As such, Theatre Union’s production of Mother, which embodied the opposing vernacular and modernist currents, was “quite typical for the praxis of leftist professional theatre of the time and in line with larger discussions over the form and public of political art” (15). Building on this assertion in chapter 2, Saal works to trace the common roots (i.e., “the bourgeois tradition of melodrama and naturalism”), but ultimately different paths (i.e., mimetic or nonmimetic forms of representation) of modernist and vernacular political theatre (28). While the first third of this chapter includes a well-versed review of European modernism and the historical avant-garde, the balance is where Saal charts new territory and, as such, it stands as the acme for the entire study. Here, Saal systematically traces “the four cultural vectors” that were crucial to the development of vernacular political theatre in the United States: “the renaissance of a vernacular cultural nationalism, the lack of a transformative historical avant-garde, the intrinsic commercialism of American theatre, and, above all, the spread of consumer culture and the concomitant ascent of middlebrow aesthetics” (45). The terminology and theory forwarded by Saal herein will most certainly prove invaluable to other theatre scholars interested in examining the American vernacular tradition in other contexts. Over the course of the next three chapters, Saal turns her attention to...