I. Saal 
New Deal Theater 
The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater

New Deal Theater recovers a much ignored model of political theater for cultural criticism.While considered to be less radical in its aesthetics and politics than its celebrated Weimar and Soviet cousins, it nonetheless proved to be highly effective in asserting cultural critique. In this regard it offers a vital alternative to the dominant modernist paradigm developed in Europe. Rather than radicalizing content and form, New Deal theater insisted that the political had to be made commensurable with the language of a mass audience steeped in consumer culture.The resulting vernacular praxis emphasized empathy over alienation, verisimilitude over abstraction. By examining the cultural vectors that shaped this theater, Saal shows why it was more successful on the American stage than its European counterpart and develops a theory of vernacular political theater which can help us think of the political in art in other than modernist terms.

Table of Content

The Failure of Epic Drama: Reconsidering Political Theater * Disjunctive Aesthetics: A Genealogy of Political Theater * Strike Songs: Working and Middle Class Revolutionaries * Plays of Cash and Cabbage: From Proletarian Melodrama to Revolutionary Realism * Why Sing of Skies Above?: Labor Musicals and Living Newspapers * Towards Postmodernism: The Political Theater of the 1960s

About the author

Ilka Saal teaches Drama & Theater and American Studies at the University of Richmond.