When the wind blows... posted by Richard Seymour

Marc Blitzstein was a 1930s communist playwright who enjoyed the honour of having his play The Cradle Will Rock fucked up by Orson Welles, banned by the US government, then played at the disused Venice Theatre before an audience that had literally marched through the streets to see it by actors who had been banned by their union from performing it. This play, an exhiliating musical polemic in the style of Bertolt Brecht, had sold between 14,000 and 18,000 tickets in advance. It was centred on a strike at a steel plant in Steel Town, USA. There was the archetypal capitalist, Mister Mister, who ran most of big steel, owned the local press and was head of the anti-union Liberty Committee. The union organiser, Larry Foreman. The capitalist's wife, Mrs Mister. The good Reverend Salvation. And the pressman, Editor Daily. The 'cradle' in question is the cradle of power, in which the rich, corrupt and powerful are shaken and blasted from branch to trunk. This is not a work, then, of subtle characterisation and ambiguity. Shades of grey are deliberately eschewed for the sake of political urgency.


Blitzstein, performing his musical in the Venice Theatre on 59th Street.

The tumult of 1930s America is illustrated with unusual clarity in Howard Zinn's breath-taking work, A People's History of America. With unemployment soaring and the economy contracting, workers were becoming restless and bosses terrified. Strikes for higher wages and better working conditions abounded, US corporations were busily flogging steel, oil and rubber to Fascist Italy to keep those tanks and trucks moving, and radical ideas proliferated. Striking workers were attacked by paid strike-breakers and police - many were literally beaten to death on behalf of the state. Meanwhile, President Roosevelt certainly knew what to do:

One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment... ; If it doesn't turn out right, we can modify it as we go along.

It didn't turn out right. The New Deal economy became the permanent war economy, and gave Harry Truman the idea of a lifetime when he lodged his ass in the Oval Office ("say, fellahs, why not have us a National Security State?"). But one of the many reforms Roosevelt attempted in order to combat unemployment was the erection of state-sponsored projects like the Federal Theatre Project, chaired by Halle Flanagan. The project paid for theatre productions and kept professional actors, writers and theatre workers employed. It was under the rubric of the FTP that Marc was initially to have his play performed. Orson Welles, assigned to direct the play, imagined that what the play really needed was a wild cacophony of glass set-pieces including "illuminated glass wagons" . These sets invariably crashed and smashed in rehearsal.

Then, however, a House committee (the Special Committee to Investigate Un-American activities, forerunner of HUAC) was formed to investigate the existence of communism within the Federal Theatre Project. Martin Dies, a blow-hard Democrat, headed the team, which swiftly began to hoover up whatever bilious emissions certain very willing witnesses were able to produce. Some of these communists in the FTP talked about familial sex, relationships with Negroes, all that crazy left-wing stuff - then it turned out that Halle Flanagan had been to Russia. And what was that play she was overseeing, The Cradle Will Rock? That was getting an awful lot of attention for one play, which was particularly worrying as it appeared to preach class war. Isn't there something we can do to stop this sumbitch?


Martin Dies.

Blitzstein, himself the son of a wealthy socialist banker(!), could not join the Communist Party because he was a homosexual. In that golden age, pink and red flags were not publicly mixed. But he was a communist, and he did blatantly wish to polarise his audience. Richard Eyre, commenting on Brecht's style, said he wanted audiences to relax, smoke cigars, take sides and analyse as if they were at a boxing match. None of this bourgeois deference to the theatre and its sacred traditions. Blitzstein was much the same. So, with the Senate pressing for the closure of the FTP, the government cancelled all new productions and shed 20,000 Federal Theatre Project jobs. The Cradle Will Rock, therefore, could not be performed at the Maxine Elliot theatre as planned. Armed security guards were stationed outside the theatre just to make sure. And so Jack Houseman, the producer of the play and Orson's homosexual friend and colleague, made arrangements to find a new theatre. Meanwhile, the actors union informed the cast that if any of them partook of any performance of Blitzstein's play, they would be unceremoniously ex-communicated.

But Blitzstein's play was about revolution, about collective action, about the organised power of working people. They had been reading it, living it, breathing it for months. They revolted. Blitzstein, not a member of the actors' union, was initially planning to perform the play all by himself from the stage of the Venice Theatre. However, several leading cast members broke their silence, even while seated in the back rows of the theatre, to sing their part. Having marched to the theatre with a militant audience, and cheered wildly when a Fascist flag was ripped down by an audience member, they now defied the government and their union to perform this delirious play.

So, what was in this play that made it so frightening, so dangerous for those in power? It was not the only play by Blitzstein to be banned for political reasons, but it is the most notorious. Well, the finale's chorus, with unionised workers marching round the stage, singing a terrifying warning to Mister Mister cowering in the wings, should clear it up:

That's thunder, that's lightning,
And it's gonna surround you!
No wonder those storm-birds
Seem to circle around you!
Well, you can't climb down and you can't sit still
That's a storm that's gonna last until
The final wind blows...
And when the wind blows...
The cradle will rock!