Living Newspaper: 50 Interesting Facts

The living newspaper as a theatrical form began during the Russian Civil War when pro-Soviet newspapers were first read aloud, then later performed, to factory workers and illiterate soldiers in the Red Army. Soviet living newspapers were known as zhivaia gazeta, literally translated as “live newspaper”.

Characteristics of Soviet Living Newspapers

• openly, and proudly, a form of agitprop (agitated propaganda)
• communicated Communist policy in the form of political theatre
• structured as a dramatisation of the printed newspaper
• followed the format of a newspaper with dramatised headlines, local and international news
• consisted of dozens of short sketches (episodic)
• heavily didactic
• highly portable productions performed in a range of non-traditional spaces
• limited or no use of a set
• basic props only
• simple costumes
• eclectic in style – anti-realistic / non-naturalistic
• no attempt at illusion, as per the theatre or realism
• use of a narrator
• individuality was quashed with non-identifying character names
• aspects of vaudeville, song, acrobatics, music hall, skits, pantomimes, dance
• use of stereotypes, satirical humour (mocking) and caricature
• use of fragmentary costumes and exaggerated props to denote character

After living newspapers began to decline in Russia around 1932, the form soon began to gain popularity in the United States. Worker’s theatres sprung up in the early 1930s, effectively behaving as agitprop theatre just like their Russian cousins before them. By 1935, formal living newspaper plays emerged as one of a number of genres in the Federal Theatre Project, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal era Works Progress Administration.

During the Great Depression, an estimated 20,000 theatre workers were unemployed across America, many of them in New York City. Between 1935 and 1939, the federal government funded productions about social and economic issues of the day, at the same time employing up to 12,000 theatre-makers involved in every aspect of production.

Although only a handful of Federal Theatre Project productions are remembered today, there were more than one thousand shows in thirty-one states. Audiences were largely admitted free of charge. Shows were written by teams of researchers functioning as dramaturgs. Scripts, and even theatre programs, listed the research team’s bibliography. The accuracy of the research was paramount.

Characteristics of American Living Newspapers

Living newspapers in America, as part of the Federal Theatre Project, had a number of similarities to their Russian counterparts, but some distinct differences, also:

• American productions did not focus on dramatising events in the daily newspaper
• nor did they follow the structure of a printed newspaper on stage
• each production focused on one main topic or theme affecting society
• Hallie Flanagan became director of the Federal Theatre Project in 1935
• documentary theatre using fact as the basis for the plot
• verbatim theatre with public figures and newspaper articles often quoted in performances
• the collective team of researchers and writers painstakingly compiled the scripts (dramaturgs)
• Arthur Arent synthesised the works, readying them for performance
• eclectic in style
• “Loudpseaker” character functioning as a narrator character
• lack of individuality with character names – based on social or economic function
• multi-roling – players performing multiple roles
• use of shadowplay puppetry, dance and pantomime.
• large time jumps between episodes
• use of projection
• full musical scores
• time sequences were disjointed – flashbacks and flash-forwards
• in contrast to the Soviet productions, the American newspapers had detailed costumes
• constructed set pieces
• didactic in nature – teaching the audience about a social problem
• left-wing and politicised

Four of the most successful Federal Theatre project living newspapers were:

1. Power – a play about the ownership of energy utilities
2. Triple A Plowed Under – a play about the farming crisis
3. Injunction Granted – a play about worker’s rights
4. One-Third of a Nation – a play about the housing crisis, particularly slums in New York City

While one of the main aims of shows funded by the Federal Theatre Project was to have adult theatre free of censorship, it was censorship that became its downfall. By 1938 the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities began investigating the program, fearing the subject matter of its plays and the communist sympathies of many of its key personnel. The government abruptly closed the program the following year.

While the content of these early American documentary plays was drawn from everyday life, particularly the experiences of first and second-generation working-class immigrants, their form was decidedly modernist, embracing collage, montage, expressionism, and minimalism in a symbiotic relationship with new forms of visual art, early cinema, and atonal musical compositions.

Jules Odendahl-James, A History of U.S. Documentary Theatre in Three Stages