THEATER CHRONICLE
Class Angles and Classless Curves
Pins and Needles
at Labor Stage is like a New Deal parade, a union
picnic, a college play, a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, a smart, up-to-date
Broadway revue. "It illustrates," the program says, "the concept of
working class drama which has guided Labor Stage, Inc. from the be–
ginning: that plays for workers must be entertaining and alive."
If
Labor
Stage, Inc., which is sponsored by the International Ladies Garment
Workers Union, is any barometer of the state of mind of the working
class, then America must already have achieved a classless society. For
what
Pins and Needles
least resembles is the proletarian theater. Only
its actors-cutters, pressers, cloakmakers and dressmakers of the I.L.G.
W.U.-are proletarian. Its themes, its techniques, its perspectives arc
bourgeois-democratic.
In
Pins and Needles
there are, to be sure, certain nostalgic whiffs
of revolutionary theater, certain misleading family likenesses to the old
Theater Union Sunday night potpourris. The ancient enemies, Hitler,
Mussolini, the Mikado, are once again summoned up-but with a dif–
ference. They have lost the aura of menace that used to attend them,
and now appear merely as clowns. The metamorphosis of the dictators,
as a matter of fact, gives the key to what estranges
Pins and Needles
from Fourteenth Street and unites it to Broadway. It is simply a question
of intention.
Pins and Needles
is
g~signed
to divert. All
t~e
didactic and
hortatory elements of the proletarian drama have been shed, and in
their place we get high spirits, merriment, and bounce. Good nature
has superseded bitterness. The dictators have turned comedians, and the
indictment of capitalism is subdued to a genial spoofing of Macy's,
militarism, Americanism ( 100 per cent, not twentieth-century), popular
love songs, high-pressure advertising, social snobbery, and etiquette
books. Ingratiation is the keynote of the performance. The presence of
amateur actors on the stage is in itself disarming, and nothing that
might disturb the good feeling between the actors and an ordinary
middle-class New York audience has been allowed to creep into the
production.
'
This bonhommie toward capitalism and the world at large is easily
explained. Where the revolutionary theater represented (by proxy) .a
working class which was irreconcilably hostile to society, the I.L.G.W.U.
players represent (directly) a section of the working class which has
made peace with society under the aegis of the New Deal.
Pins and
Needles
is the group expression of a large, well-run, relatively contented
labor union whose union contracts are signed without much trouble and
whose demands on the system do not exceed decent minimum wages,
decent maximum hours, the closed shop, and the right to picket. You
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