Reviewed by: Rehearsing Revolutions: The Labor Drama Experiment and Radical Activism in the Early Twentieth Century by Mary McAvoy Christiana Molldrem Harkulich Rehearsing Revolutions: The Labor Drama Experiment and Radical Activism in the Early Twentieth Century. By Mary McAvoy. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019. pp. 266. $90.00 paper. Mary McAvoy's excellent study of drama programs at labor colleges in the United States begins with the provocation from the 1936 Brookwood Worker's Theatre Conference that there is "No labor audience for this theatre" (1). Louise Schaffer's proclamation was a bell toll for the death of many of the programs whose histories McAvoy regales, but it also prompts provocative research questions that the book takes up: Who was labor drama for? Whom did it serve and how? These questions drive Rehearsing Revolutions into a history of pedagogy, dramaturgy, and educators that spans the continent and a tumultuous period between the world wars. Woven within this history of drama programs are the labor colleges themselves: the education programs founded and supported by labor unions for their workers that for the most part did not survive the first half of the twentieth century. This book is ambitious and edifying, stitching together the many events and influences in the world that created the crucible of labor drama. Rehearsing Revolutions begins with a needed overview of the larger concerns and history of labor colleges and the labor movement in the United States to situate the importance and position of drama programs. Each subsequent chapter is a case study of a particular educator and their influence on a specific regional labor college's drama program. McAvoy deftly utilizes archival records and a broad and careful historical understanding to reveal the economic tensions at play in each of these chapters. The book organizes a constellation of labor colleges chronologically based on the start date of their labor programs. This choice allows McAvoy to trace pedagogical influence from program to program as each educator struggled with the questions of who labor drama was for [End Page 176] and what it was meant to accomplish. Instead of focusing primarily on productions or actors, McAvoy focuses on the educator, which ends up illuminating women's roles and impact, as so many women who may not have had much professional dramatic training were thrust into the role of drama program coordinator. Rehearsing Revolutions uncovers the labor of the drama educator that is often ignored in this period in favor of attending to the professional stage. Following the overview, the second chapter focuses on Doris Smith's work with Portland Labor College from 1921 to 1925 as the earliest example of what the new field of labor drama could be and of the tenuous relationship between radicalism on the stage and approval by the larger sponsoring labor organization. The third chapter focuses on Brookwood College from 1925 to 1926 and the work and pedagogy of Hazel MacKaye, the daughter of US American playwright and stage technology inventor Steele MacKaye. MacKaye's experiments in drama at Brookwood created plays like the 1926 drama The Miners (collected in Lee Papa's Staged Action) that illustrated the need for the dramatic work to come from the workers. Unlike many of the other teachers in this study, MacKaye had experience in professional theatre and larger political pageant work prior to joining the labor movement. Her experience caused her to ask and publish on the larger questions about what labor drama could do and could look like at Brook-wood and across the United States. While MacKaye spent only a year at Brook-wood, McAvoy points toward the influence that her writing and thinking had on the labor movement. While chapters 2 and 3 focus on Northern, more industrial concerns, chapters 4 through 6 turn to the more contentious and racially and religiously fraught work of labor drama and labor organizing in the Southeast. McAvoy's attention to regional differences illuminates aspects of the labor movements that are often missed when too much attention is paid to the industrial north. Chapter 4 examines the work of journalist and activist Hollace Ransdell's brief foray into labor drama from 1928 to 1936 with...