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McComb, USA follows the theatrical form of the living newspaper: Living Newspaper, theatrical production consisting of dramatizations of current event social problems, and controversial issues, with appropriate suggestions for improvement. The technique was used for propaganda in the USSR from the time of the Revolution in 1917. It became part of the Epic theatre tradition initiated by Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht in Germany in the 1920s. The Living Newspaper was initiated in the United States in 1935 as part of the Federal Theatre Project. One of its major supporters was Elmer Rice, a dramatist and producer who believed in the value of drama as an instrument of social change. It became the most effective new theatre form developed by the Project, vividly dealing, in flashing cinematic techniques, with the realities of agriculture, housing, and economics. Outstanding productions were Triple-A Plowed Under, dealing with the Supreme Court's invalidation of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), and One-Third of a Nation, dramatizing the plight of that part of the nation who, in President Roosevelt's words, were "ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished." Criticism of the Living Newspaper for alleged communist leanings contributed to the cancellation of the Federal Theatre Project in 1939.1 Writing in a volume of scripts of Living newspaper from the Federal Theater Project (P. de Rohan (ed.), Federal Theatre Plays [New York: Random House, 1938]) ,Hallie Flanagan, the Director of the Federal Theater Project quotes Elmer Rice, the director of the Federal Theater Project in New York and initiator the first Living Newspaper, as saying "We could dramatize the news with living actors, light, music, movement" (p. vii). Flanagan goes on to say that "the Living Newspaper from the first was concerned not with surface news, scandal, human interest stories, but rather with the conditions back of conditions" (p. viii). The Living Newspapers were: Melodrama? Of course. Like all so-called new forms the Living Newspaper borrows with fine impartiality from many sources: from Aristophanes, from Commedia dell' Arte, from Shakespearean soliloquy, from the pantomime of Mei Lan Fang. Being a flexible technique and only in its beginning, it still has much to learn from the chorus, the camera, the cartoon. Although it has occasional reference to the Volksbühne and the Blue Blouses, to Bragaglia and Meierhold and Eisenstein, it is as American as Walt Disney, the March of Time and the Congressional Record, to all of which American institutions it is indebted. (p. ix). McComb, USA contains 23 short scenes with the singing of civil rights songs between the scenes. The events in the play were, as the front page of one of the manuscript versions of the play puts it, . . . selected from the actual happenings of the summer; the dialog is taken from the actual words spoken at the time. If any license has been exercised in compiling this production it has only made slight changes to the strict chronology of events.
THE FREE SOUTHERN THEATER As the second Freedom School session (August 3-21) begins, a tour of the Freedom Schools throughout the state is scheduled for the Free Southern theater production of In White America. The Free Southern Theater was organized early this year by SNCC with the assistance of COFO and Tougaloo College as an attempt to "stimulate thought and a new awareness among Negroes in the deep South," and "will work toward the establishment of permanent stock and repertory companies, with mobile touring units, in major population centers throughout the South, staging plays that reflect the struggles of the American Negro . . . before Negro and, in time, integrated audiences," according to a Free Southern 'neater prospectus. An apprenticeship program is planned which will send a number of promising participants to New York for more intensive study. The company will include both professional and amateur participants. The development of the Free Southern Theater was sparked by the "cultural desert" resulting from the closed society's restriction of the patterns of reflective and creative thought. Each performance of In White America will be accompanied by theater workshops in the Freedom Schools designed to introduce students to the experience of theater through participation. As the classroom methods of the Freedom School are revolutionary in the context of traditional American patterns of education, so the Free Southern theater brings a new concept of drama to these Mississippi students. Dr. Staughton Lynd comments that the aim of the Theater "is the creation of a fresh theatrical style which will combine the highest standards of craftsmanship with a more intimate audience rapport than modern theater usually achieves." Segregated schools, controlled textbooks, lack of discussion of controversial topics, the nature of the mass media in Mississippi demand the development of a cultural program, to be viewed in the context of education, among an entire people. Among the objectives listed for the Free Southern Theater by its originators are "to acquaint Southern peoples with a breadth of experience with the theater and related art forms; to liberate and explore the creative talent and potential that is here as well as to promote the production of art; to bring in artists from outside the state as well as to provide the opportunity for local people with creative ability to have experience with the theater; to emphasize the universality of the problems of the Negro people; to strengthen communication between Southern Negroes; to assert that self-knowledge and creativity are the foundations of human dignity." Among the sponsors of the Free Southern Theater are singer Harry Belafonte, authors James Baldwin and Langston Hughes, performers Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Theodore Bikel, and Lincoln Kirstein, general director of the New York City Ballet. From: Len Holt (1965) The Summer That Didn't End (New York: William Morrow), Appendix VII: Freedom Schools Data (COFO). |