Theatre History Studies

At a union-owned space on New York's West Forty-Third Street, you will find the only labor union gallery in the nation, the Bread and Roses Gallery.¹ With its origins in the 1199 Bread and Roses cultural project, it has been named "the most important cultural expression in the labor movement today."² District 1199 of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees union initiated this project in 1979, with major external funding, and produced theatre, film, art, and photographic exhibits, primarily focused on working people. Led by entertainer and Civil Rights activist Harry Belafonte, Bread and Roses remains an active part of the 1199's life, featuring visual art, drama, music, and other art forms. The mission of the project is "to be used as a cultural resource for union members and students in New York City who would otherwise have little access to the arts. Special emphasis is given to programs that signify and interpret their history while generating new artistic expression."³ The union's promotion of creativity and the arts had its precedent, however, many years before: in the drama Professional Men, written in 1938 by 1199 members Charles Shillet and I. J. Alexander.

The theatre that has been organized and presented within unions has a history of more than a hundred years in the United States. Over the past two decades, the traditional concerns of labor historians—studies of industrial action, trade unions, and working-class struggles—have been widened to include a rich array of artistic and intellectual themes, and this has served to extend the boundaries of labor history into cognate fields of inquiry, including cultural and [End Page 9] artistic studies. A notable example is Michael Denning's masterly 2010 work The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. While studies of various types of culture have arisen within this new agenda, studies of union theatre as a component of the culture of labor have been uncommon. Until recent years, researchers have focused on single studies of the more popular union productions such as the well-known Pins and Needles, a work of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union that became the longest-running musical of the Depression era.⁴ Scholars have also studied the broad area of American workers' and left-wing theatre,⁵ as well as the short-lived Federal Theatre Project, which sometimes intersected with union culture.⁶ This is despite the fact that since the early twentieth century, a large number of unions have established theatre organizations within their structures—what I call "union theatre." While the theatrical endeavors of some of the large industrial unions have been the focus of substantial research, the work of less prominent unions, such as newly organized white-collar unions, is not as well known; hence my focus in this study.⁷

Theatre has been a popular method for union organizers to build occupational identity outside the strict industrial life of the workers and to ground collective organization in a broader concept of unionization; it also has provided a less confrontational form of union activity than striking a workshop (figure 1). The examination of theatre within the labor movement not only advances our understanding of "the laboring of American culture," in Denning's term, but also provides significant context for contemporary attempts at labor renewal. That is, as Julie Guard et al. have argued, theatre also has great potential for building solidarity and revitalizing contemporary unions.⁸ Workers have experienced the recent return of conditions similar to those that inspired the rise of the Popular Front, including drastic growth in fiscal inequality, increasing numbers of working people living in poverty, a decline in union membership, significant occupational shifts, and major changes in the gender and racial makeup of the working class—what Sawchuk has termed the evisceration of working-class communities through contemporary global capitalism.⁹ Any renewal of the political impetus that was seen in earlier times has to come from the grassroots and with forms of engagement, such as theatre, that connect with ordinary working...