Living Newspaper

Theatre and Therapy Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

John W. Casson

The historical development of Living Newspapers can be traced from the ideas of the futurists in the early part of the century, through experimental theatres in the Soviet Union and Vienna, to the worldwide development of a theatre form. In this article I consider the relationship between this theatre and Jacob Levy Moreno’s Theatre of Spontaneity, psychodrama, and sociodrama, and evaluate the therapeutic potential of this technique.

Italy, – In  an Italian futurist manifesto on the theatre, written by F.T. Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli, and Bruno Corra insisted on a new theatre that is “born of improvisation, lightninglike intuition, from suggestive and revealing actuality. We believe that a thing is valuable to the extent that it is improvised, not exten- sively prepared” (in Drain :). Nothing should get in the way of the artist’s natural talent: “he must be preoccupied with creating synthetic expres- sions of cerebral energy that have the absolute value of novelty”:

DRAMATIZE ALL THE DISCOVERIES (no matter how unlikely, weird, and anti-theatrical) THAT OUR TALENT IS DISCOVERING IN THE SUBCONSCIOUS, IN ILL-DEFINED FORCES, IN PURE ABSTRACTION, IN THE PURELY CEREBRAL, THE PURELY FANTASTIC, IN RECORD-SETTING AND BODY-MADNESS. SYMPHONIZE THE AUDIENCE’S SENSIBILITY BY EXPLOR- ING IT, STIRRING UP ITS LAZIEST LAYERS WITH EVERY MEANS POSSIBLE; ELIMINATE THE PRECONCEPTION OF THE FOOTLIGHTS BY THROWING NETS OF SENSATION BE- TWEEN STAGE AND AUDIENCE; THE STAGE ACTION WILL INVADE THE ORCHESTRA SEATS, THE AUDIENCE. (in Drain :)

In an earlier manifesto () Marinetti described the variety theatre as: “a cumulus of events unfolded at great speed [...] and now let’s have a look at the Balkans: King Nicholas, Enver-Bey, [...] fistfights between Serbs and

  John W. Casson

Bulgars [...] instructive, satirical pantomimes [...] a more or less amusing newspaper” (–).

Soviet Russia, – In  a decree of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union Commu- nist Party advocated public readings of the news, illustrated with “demonstra- tions,” illuminated by cinema and magic lantern shows, and “concert numbers” to ensure the dissemination of news and revolutionary propaganda Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 amongst the illiterate (Cosgrove :). Mikhail Pustynin was a poet and theatre director who is credited by Robert Leach with developing the idea of the Living Newspaper so that “news could be made more accessible through dramatisation” (Leach :). In  he was director of the Vitebsk Rosta agency, a telegraphic agency using posters to spread revolutionary ideas, and set up the Terevsat (Theatre of Revolutionary Satire), whose aim was:

to express in theatrical terms the subjects of the Rosta posters. Terevsat came to Moscow in  and a number of groups were soon to be found performing in streets, factories and stations. Its short sketches, in which music had an important role, drew largely on review, operetta, vaude- ville and the tchastuchka (rhymed popular songs with a monotonous rhythm). Initially one major aim of Terevsat was the diffusion of information and it evolved its own forms of Living Newspaper [...]. (Bradby and McCormick :)

Pustynin later worked for the Blue Blouse Theatre. Between  and  Vladimir Mayakovski, a leading exponent of the Russian futurist group, had drawn some  Rosta posters (Bradby and McCormick :). In  Mayakovski wrote a Living Newspaper that was directed by Nikolai Foregger at Terevsat’s Moscow Studio (Leach :). Sergei Eisenstein “was a keen follower of Marinetti’s futurist ideas” (Bradby and McCormick :). Eisenstein “gave an example of theatrical- ised living newspaper with [...a] montage of attractions in his agit-buffonade The Wise Man” (in Stourac and McCreery :). Eisenstein acknowledged Vsevolod Meyerhold and Vladimir Mayakovski as fellow futurists (Drain :). Meyerhold utilized the genre of Living Newspaper in Give Us Europe (in Stourac and McCreery :). Blue Blouse’s inspiration was drawn from the futurist interest in music hall and variety theatre, and from the experimental work of Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Nikolai Forreger. In  Boris Yuzhanin, a teacher of journalism, started the Blue Blouse Soviet Living Newspaper touring theatre company from his base at the Mos- cow Institute of Journalism. The blue blouse was the basic costume of the performers by which they showed solidarity with the factory workers who wore loose blue smocks.

Yuzhanin aimed to offer the group’s audiences, many of whom could not read, a “living newspaper”—a concept which spread to left-wing groups internationally. Yuzhanin refused to use professional writers, but practised “lit-montage”, i.e., the scripts were cut-ups, principally of material from papers and magazines. He staged them in revue style, performing in factories, workers clubs and in the open air. (Drain :)

Living Newspapers kept their illiterate audiences in touch with the issues of the day. The subjects were by no means always topical or politi- Living Newspaper 

cal. [...] Often a Living Newspaper could include an item or two of more general educational content such as the dramatized Fight Against Typhus [...] or looking after and breeding hens. (Leach :, )

Blue Blouse performances offered:

skits, verse, monologues, and avant-garde oratory among an uninter- rupted montage of scenes, songs, music, dance, mime, acrobatics and gymnastics. Messages were punched home with bold visual effects. Blue Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Blouse offered a model on which countless variations have been devised by agit-prop and guerilla theatre groups ever since. (Drain :)

While many Soviet Living Newspapers were written, the actors did impro- vise when necessary:

The style of acting resembled the old troupes of strolling players and was often rooted in improvisation based on character types. Because the news changed day by day the actors often had only time to agree on the form of the sketch before going on stage, and performing in the open air they frequently had to cope with interjections and heckling from the audience. On one occasion an agitator interrupted the performance to an- nounce the defeat of Denikin. The audience burst out cheering and the actors improvised a scene of Denikin dancing, then being chased off by Red Army soldiers. (Leach :)

The Blue Blouse group was hugely successful: “In its first two months of existence Blue Blouse performed to , people” (Stourac and McCreery :).

Other groups started up on the same pattern [...] eventually more than five thousand Blue Blouse groups were active, with a membership of ,. [...] In  Blue Blouse visited Germany, where the workers’ theatre movement was already practising similar techniques [...]. (Drain :)

According to Robert Leach, “Blue Blouse were so successful they spawned innumerable Blue Blouse groups abroad, in England, France, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, China, U.S.A. and Germany” (:). It even spread to Japan by : Seki Sano, who directed many Living Newspapers, later became a close associate of Hallie Flanagan when he eventually moved to the U.S.A. to es- cape arrest (Cosgrove :). Such spontaneity and creativity was not, however, attractive to Stalin: within a year of their successful  German tour, Blue Blouse was officially dis- banded. It was a year of forced collectivization and massive, often brutal, social reorganization. An alternative view is that Blue Blouse died because audiences became bored by the propagandizing, clichés, and poor quality of this agitprop theatre (Stourac and McCreery :, ). In fact they were out-maneuvered in the artistic politics of the development of Stalinist Social Realism (–).

Moreno in Vienna, – In , the year before Yuzhanin set up Blue Blouse, Moreno established Das Stegreiftheater (Theatre of Spontaneity) in Vienna. The first edition of his book on this experimental theatre, Das Stegreiftheater, was published in . One of the methods for promoting spontaneity Moreno used was to base improvisations on  John W. Casson

the day’s news: in  he called this the “dramatized newspaper” (in the  edition of the Theatre of Spontaneity he calls it “living newspaper”). Given the time it takes to write and publish a book it seems likely that Moreno was creating theatre from the news in  or even from  (see Marineau :–). Vienna lies halfway between Italy and Russia: is it not possible, even likely, that Moreno would have heard of the futurists’ ideas? The futurist manifesto quoted above shows spontaneity was an important source of creative energy for these artists as well. Central to Moreno’s developing ideas was the concept of spontaneity: Moreno explained that the idea of using the news of the day as Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 a source for the Theatre of Spontaneity was to counter the suspicion of critics who supposed, when the performance was successful, that the pieces were rehearsed. Moreno “turned his actors into journalists, sending them into the streets of Vienna to pick up news of incidents there, or bring in national or international events and disasters of all kinds” (Zerka Moreno ). Jonathan Fox points out that the Russian Theatre was known in Vienna: the  New Theatre Festival program featured an article by R.F. Muller on “Die Neue Russiche Buhne.” Muller knew and reviewed Moreno’s Stegreiftheater en- thusiastically (Fox in Buer ) so it is highly likely that he and Moreno had discussed these parallel theatre developments. Russian theatre influences were certainly felt in Vienna: as early as  Stanislavski’s theatre concerned with psychological truth, the Moscow Art Theatre, had toured the cities of Ger- many and Austria (Sayler :; Casson ). Réne Marineau states that Moreno “also toured Germany with his group” (:–): this must have been in /, three or four years before Blue Blouse’s German tour, when “the workers’ theatre movement were already practicing similar techniques” (Drain :). Did Moreno influence them or did the idea of Living Newspaper also occur simultaneously to the German theatre creators? Moreno published a paper on his “invention” in Berlin in , which he quotes in a footnote of his Psychodrama, First Volume:

It is a synthesis between drama and newspaper, therefore it differs in es- sence from the mediaeval and Russian custom of a spoken newspaper. The dramatized newspaper is not a recital of news, life itself is enacted. The events are dramatized. (in Moreno [] :; emphasis added)

This footnote is interesting because it shows Moreno was aware of previous oral traditions, including those of Russia. It is either a historical coincidence or a remarkable instance of synchronicity that within  months (/), two theatre creators in the Soviet Union and Vienna should develop the same idea. Did Moreno pick up news of this idea from the Soviet Union and experiment with it in his own Theatre of Spontaneity? Or are the two forms ac- tually different in nature? The main difference seems to be that Blue Blouse plays were scripted (even if only roughly; they did have a text) and Moreno’s were spontaneous, improvised creations. The motivation of their creators was also different: Yuzhanin, as journalist, was concerned with the dissemination of news, while Moreno, as philosopher and psychiatrist, was doing spontaneity and role research. The idea of dramatizing the day’s news meant that actors could not prepare the drama but had to be spontaneous. “At first I used the term, ‘living newspaper’ which was changed later to the more appropriate term ‘dramatised newspaper’” (Moreno [] :). My research for this article reveals that the truth was the other way round. His earliest published term is Die Dramatisierte Zeitung (Moreno ). In the first edition of Das Stegreiftheater he does not even use this term but writes: “Das Stegrieftheater hat die Aufgabe, dem Augenblick zu dienen. Es erschafft den Tag, nicht als Pendant von Parlament, Gericht und Zeitung, Living Newspaper  sondern vom Triebwerk der Interessen gelost” (:). He later translated this as:

The theatre for spontaneity has the task of serving the moment. It reports the daily events but not with actual earnestness of parliaments, courts and newspapers but freed—in a “Stegreif ” sense—from the machinery of personal incentives as interests. (Moreno :)

The heading “The Living Newspaper” on this page in the later version is not Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 in the  original German edition. Only in  did Moreno use the term “Living Newspaper” in the substantially rewritten American edition of The Theatre of Spontaneity. Perhaps we need to regard these related theatre forms as two different methods: Yazhanin’s being a Living Newspaper and Moreno’s being a Dramatized Newspaper. The possibility of a link between them however is intriguing. Zerka Moreno, responding to an earlier version of this paper, wrote:

Moreno told me that two of his followers, a young man and a girl, both declared Marxists, went to Russia in the early ’s, hoping to assist in the revolution. They returned a few months later to Vienna, rather disillu- sioned because they had in fact started The Living Newspaper format in Moscow; they were very soon stopped by the powers-that-be at the time as they insisted on knowing ahead of time “what the contents were going to be.” You can imagine that there was no room for spontaneity there. Indeed, it was one of the factors that seriously influenced Moreno to shake off the dust of Europe and head west to the new world where he hoped spontaneity would be better accepted. ()

Moreno’s idea was radical: to stimulate actors’ and audiences’ spontaneity, to engage in living acts. His Dramatized Newspaper leads directly into his idea of sociodrama, the spontaneous exploration of social issues through role-taking and group improvisation. He wrote:

Among the forms of writing, the newspaper comes nearest to being a spontaneous expression and to fulfilling—in a trivial and limited way— what we mean by the concept of the moment. It is tied up with the present. An event, soon after it has happened, loses its news value. It has therefore a natural affinity to the form of the spontaneous drama, which requires for its unrehearsed, immediate form an equally spontaneous and immediate context, for instance the ever new and ever-changing social and cultural events that are flashed from moment to moment to the edi- torial office of a newspaper. In this sense the living newspaper was not only dramatic, but rather sociodramatic. ([] :–)

“Impromptu” was the word used to name Moreno’s spontaneous theatre in the U.S.A. from : “When a playwright writes a play about news, that news has already lost the thrill of immediacy and actuality. But in Impromptu both poles meet: the moment in life and the moment in the creator” (Moreno [] :).

The U.S.A., – It was in  that Moreno first produced what he later called “living newspaper” performances in New York. They were noticed and reviewed in the press. In none of these reviews, reprinted in Moreno’s books, are the  John W. Casson

words “living newspaper.” The words used to describe his performances suggest that Moreno was calling his work “impromptu” and “dramatized newspaper.” In the New York Evening World Telegram,  March : “To obviate the suspicion of previous rehearsals Dr. Moreno’s troupe will dramatize news events of the day.” In the New York Times,  April : “a newspaper drama.” In the New York Morning Telegraph,  April : “The impromptu players will present a spontaneous dramatization of a newspaper” (in Moreno [] :–). The idea of the Living Newspaper had in fact already arrived in the U.S.A. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 As early as  Mike Gold, an American writer who had worked in Germany with Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Toller writing a Living Newspaper, had been try- ing to set up a workers’ theatre in the U.S.A. (Cosgrove ). In the early s small theatre groups of the workers’ movement (Rebel Players in Los An- geles, Vanguard Group in Philadelphia, Jack London Group in Newark, Solidar- ity Players in Boston) were attempting to do Living Newspapers, inspired directly by Blue Blouse. There was even a group who called themselves Boston Blue Blouses (Cosgrove :–). From  to  a major national project using Living Newspaper was created by the Federal Theatre Project, a government-funded employment scheme for theatre workers that was part of the Work Projects Administration (WPA, –) created after the s Great Depression. It was Hallie Flanagan who suggested the idea: “I suggested the plan of dramatizing contemporary events in a series of living newspapers” (:). She had traveled to the Soviet Union in  and seen Blue Blouse (Cosgrove ). Joseph Losey, a film director, claimed it to have been his own concept (Styan :). The playwright Elmer Rice is also credited with having introduced the concept of the Living Newspaper (Styan :). He was the state director of the Federal Theatre Project in New York in . Elmer Rice had twice traveled to study theatre in the Soviet Union (Styan :) and so may also have picked up the idea from Blue Blouse. A number of Ger- man immigrants, fleeing Nazi persecution, were also involved in agitprop groups in the U.S.A. in the early s (e.g., J. Bohne, director of Prolet Buhne). European ideas crossed the Atlantic and took root in American soil. The Federal Theatre Project form of Living Newspaper was scripted in ad- vance. A  reviewer reported:

The dramatization of the news stories had liveliness and vitality, the two short plays were skilful intensifications of social problems, and [...] it was eminently successful acting for it gave an unusual sense of reality to the material it had at hand, and that is what acting is for. (in Flanagan :)

However, the federally funded project ran into difficulties. Controversial subjects provoked threats of subsidy withdrawal and attacks by establishment figures. Elmer Rice resigned from the project in protest against censorship (Bradby and McCormick :). The Federal Theatre Project was closed by an act of Congress in . In Flanagan’s book there is a dramatic photograph of a Living Newspaper production showing the use of simple lighting and shadows to create atmo- sphere against a plain backdrop. Some plays did use some minimal, symbolic scenery—single items such as a garbage can or a rusty tap to suggest location. Eleanor Roosevelt believed the play One Third of a Nation (about poor hous- ing) achieved a degree of immortality, describing it as:

something for which we will be grateful for many years to come, something which will mean a tremendous amount in the future, socially, and Living Newspaper 

in the education and growing up of America [...] far more than any amount of speeches which [...] I—or even the President—might make. (in Flanagan :)

Styan has a photograph of this play, showing a very substantial realistic set of a tenement building (:). These Living Newspapers then were repeatable performances, given night after night. They were not the news of the day, as Moreno had intended, in- stantly improvised each time. They were scripts that could be refined, played Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 again, and thus become “cultural conserves”—scripts that are still available and have been performed as recently as  (Brown :viii). Moreno criticized the Living Newspapers of the WPA as well as the March of Time, a newsreel documentary series. The latter was shown in cinemas and used both live foot- age and reconstructions of events as performed by actors. Moreno denounced both for their lack of spontaneity and for trivializing and distorting his original concept ([] :). He may not have realized that, despite the similar- ity of the ideas, the source of the American Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project was (through Flanagan, Rice, and others) Blue Blouse. The use by filmmakers of fakery—of models and actors to re-create news stories of which they had no live film—had been going on since the th century. The March of Time was heir to experiments to recreate news that began in the s with actors used to film scenes from the Dreyfus scandal. The film company of Charles and Emile Pathé staged a fond farewell between actors impersonating Dreyfus and his wife before he was sent to Devil’s Island (); they filmed actors in reconstructions of the Boxer rebellion in China (); and replicated the sinking of the Lusitania (; Large Door Productions ). Eisenstein is perhaps the most famous filmmaker to re-create news: his use of montage and his historical reconstruction of the Russian Revolution in the Battleship Potemkin () raised the art to the level of masterpiece. He also, as we have seen, was influenced by the futurists and created Living Newspaper theatre. There were already established links between American theatre creators and their Russian colleagues (see Sayler ). Russian and German theatre creators had emigrated to the U.S.A. in the s and ’s due to the political upheavals in their countries, so it seems certain that they, and not Moreno, were the source of the American Living Newspapers. However, as Moreno worked with actors in Vienna and New York, his influence cannot be entirely ruled out.

Britain, – The first piece in Living Newspaper format performed in Britain was a poem by American Communist V.J. Jerome, adapted by the Rebel Players in . In this play the “truth behind the headlines is acted out in brief, inter- cutting scenes. The text was changing constantly to keep up with events and the writer Simon Blumenfeld remembers scripting a completely new version at Unity” (Chambers :). The Unity Theatre, formed in  as the first “relatively stable Labour movement theatre group” (Bradby and McCormick :), created the Liv- ing Newspaper Busmen, a play about the trial of busmen’s strike leaders before the union executive. The Unity had direct links with the American Living Newspaper creators: “Arthur Arendt, author of Triple A Plowed Under, came to Unity to share his experiences. He pointed out that Living Newspapers should not be a substitute for a pamphlet and could not be dashed off in  hours or even  days” (Chambers :). This reveals the gulf between Arendt and Moreno’s ideas.  John W. Casson

John Allen, who had directed Newsboy for Unity was keen to attempt a wholly British Living Newspaper in which we would be more adventur- ous than the Americans in the use of music and verse and dance. [...] The group engaged in a process of “total” theatre in which the form and content were shaping each other under the impact of diverse influences. They wanted to emulate on stage the effect of The March of Time newsreel from America [...]. The style of the production owed much to the work of German theatre—Piscator, Kaiser, Toller—and was explicitly non-naturalistic. The Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 back of the stage was painted with a honeycomb of eight-foot squares which corresponded to different levels of a three-dimensional construc- tion set and formed separate acting areas, including rare use of the pro- jecting cubes at the sides of the stage to bring actors out into the audience. These different areas could be lit in turn, alternating with the action forestage, giving a cinematic quality to the juxtaposition of scenes. Details of the dispute were projected in graph form and the Voice of the Living Newspaper, off stage in the flies above, would comment and link the action like a chorus. (–)

As Arendt had said, such a complex production took time to make and Busmen was performed in , a year after the events it reported: a rather late edition! Despite being scripted, the form demanded spontaneity. Another Unity production, Crisis, was put up in two days. It was

written and rehearsed in forty-eight hours on the occasion of the Munich crisis, September, . The script, which tried to bring out Britain’s possible role as peace keeper, changed from day to day according to the situation itself. This production encountered some difficulties with the Lord Chamberlain, as did a similar production by Joan Littlewood in Manchester called Last Edition, which was forced to close three weeks after the outbreak of war and for which Littlewood and Ewan McColl were fined £ each. (Bradby and McCormick :)

Moreno knew spontaneity was a powerful force, regarded by those interested in the status quo as subversive. It is interesting to note that in Russia (), America (–), Germany (), Japan (s), and Britain (), the authorities put a stop to Living Newspapers by censoring the productions or simply closing down the theatres. The Unity Theatre continued creating Living Newspapers in postwar Brit- ain: Black Magic (, on the need for recruits for the coal industry) and World on Edge (, on the situation in Hungary). The form inspired Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop productions culminating in the famous Oh What a Lovely War! ().

Aloke Roy in India,  onwards A painter who turned to theatre as a more relevant means of communication, Aloke Roy founded Jagran (which means “awakening”), a clown/panto- mime theatre, in . This theatre is dedicated to promoting change, both personal and social, to liberate poor communities in India. The company goes to city slum and rural poor areas and invites the people to tell them their news stories and problems. Out of these they create and rehearse a play that shows the people how the problem develops and how they can empower themselves to solve it. Over the years the company has literally saved lives with plays on Living Newspaper  nutrition, disease, and human and legal rights. By celebrating the peoples’ suc- cess stories (Black Marketeer [] showed how the people of one area ex- posed and had arrested a man who was profiteering from kerosene), they ensure that such stories, which might not be in the printed newspapers of the richer classes, are powerfully told and their lessons learned.

Augusto Boal in Peru, 

Boal developed his own Newspaper Theatre in Peru, within a literacy program: Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

It consists of several techniques for transforming printed news items into dramatic performances including simple reading, juxtaposition of con- trary news events, inclusions of omitted data or information, rhythmical reading, improvisation, reinforcement of news with songs and visuals, and concentration of news events (such as hunger and unemployment) that are minimised through abstraction in news print. (Schutzman and Cohen-Cruz :, n. )

Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed aims to enable “spect-actors” (audience members who become actively involved in the performance) to examine their oppressions and try to make changes to the situations presented (Boal ).

Can Living Newspapers Be Therapeutic? Revolutionary, artistic, educational, and political theatres aim to change society and people’s consciousness, attitudes, and behavior. The Russian Living Newspaper was not concerned however with individual psychology, the presen- tation of which “was felt to be a relic of bourgeois theatre” (Bradby and McCormick :). The aim was propaganda: to incorporate the individual in the greater good of the mass movement. While inviting “the audience to formu- late their own judgments of the characters presented” () these characters were caricatures. “No attempt at individual psychological delineation was attempted” (Bradby and McCormick :). While up-to-date information may empower, it can also be used to manipulate for the benefit of the state/revolution: the Russian sketches “were also used as a form of recruitment, encouraging men to volunteer to go to fight at the Front” (Bradby and McCormick :). Any technique that has the potential to be therapeutic also has the potential to be anti-therapeutic. However the Soviet Living Newspaper did aspire to empower and heal:

[O]ver-fatigue when it becomes chronic, as we are observing with our young people, leads to physical weakness and to the creation of excep- tionally favourable conditions for the development of infectious diseases. [...] Stage productions [...] create positive emotions, they “infect” the viewer with energy, activity, they help remove disintegrating tissues, they cleanse the blood. [...I]t is the business [of Blue Blouse] to [...] sharpen the viewer’s awareness on themes which are close to him in his social [...] life. (Blue Blouse Magazine, ; in Stourac and McCreery :)

Living Newspaper and Sociodrama Moreno thought of the Living Newspaper as sociodramatic; it enabled a group and audience to explore a social, shared problem, to understand the in- terplay of roles and events. The theatre creators of Russia and America also realized that it was not useful to just present a series of stories; it was more ef-  John W. Casson

ficacious to explore a problem through the drama. Arendt, who directed Triple A Plowed Under, the successful Living Newspaper for the American Fed- eral Theatre, expressed his views on the form in :

The Living Newspaper is the dramatisation of a problem—composed in greater or lesser extent of many news events, all bearing on the subject and interlarded with typical but non-factual representations of the effects of these news events on the people to whom the problem is of great im- portance. (in Bradby and McCormick :) Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

In their book on People’s Theatre, David Bradby and John McCormick describe Triple A:

Apart from historical characters, who spoke in direct quotations, there were also characters representing ordinary people, labelled “first farmer”, “first city man”, etc., whose function was to show the impact of the situation on their everyday life. Some particularly relevant news items were also amplified. One of these was the trial of Dorothy Sherwood who had drowned her infant son because she could not bear to see him starve. (:)

This is very much like Moreno’s idea of sociodrama, the difference being that in Arendt’s Triple A it was done by a theatre company using a prepared script. Living Newspaper, whether created by Moreno or others, was a theatre form wherein a company of actors presented the news to an audience. In a sociodrama, Moreno would involve members of the whole group—audience and trained auxiliaries—who would spontaneously take on roles to explore social issues of concern to the group. Sociodrama is a creative action method used today in group therapy and education. There is no separate audience: it is the drama of the group, usually exploring through hypothetical, fictional situations—perhaps based on current events—those matters that concern group members.

Living Newspaper and Psychodrama In the evolution of Moreno’s theory and practice, the Living Newspaper oc- cupies a crucial place. While many elements of the psychodrama process were implicit in earlier ideas and activities, it was one particular session that showed Moreno the therapeutic potential of theatre. It was a Living Newspaper performance that must have taken place between  and . Moreno writes:

One elusive night a Theatre of Spontaneity [turned] into a Therapeutic Theatre. [...] We had a young actress, Barbara, who worked for the theatre and also took part in a new experiment I had started, the extempora- neous, living newspaper. She was a main attraction because of her excellence in roles of ingenues, heroic and romantic roles. It was soon evident that she was in love with a young poet and playwright who never failed to sit in the first row, applauding and watching every one of her actions. A romance developed between Barbara and George. One day their marriage was announced. Nothing changed however, she remained our chief actress and he our chief spectator, so to speak. One day George came to see me, his usual gay eyes greatly disturbed. “What happened?” I asked him. “Oh, doctor, I cannot bear it.” “Bear what?” I looked at him investigating. “That sweet, angel-like being whom you all admire, acts like a bedevilled creature when she is alone with me. She Living Newspaper  speaks the most abusive language and when I get angry with her, as I did last night, she hits me with her fists.” “Wait,” I said, “you come to the theatre as usual, I will try a remedy.” When Barbara came back-stage that night, ready to play in one of her usual roles of pure womanhood, I stopped her. “Look Barbara, you have done marvelously until now, but I am afraid you are getting stale. People would like to see you in roles in which you portray the nearness to the soil, the rawness of human nature, its vulgarity and stupidity, its cynical reality, people not only as they are, but worse than they are, people as they are when driven to extremes by Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 unusual circumstances. Do you want to try it?” “Yes,” she said enthusias- tically, “I’m glad you mention it. I felt for a while that I have to give our audience a new experience. But do you think I can do it?” “I have con- fidence in you,” I replied, “the news just came in that a girl in Ottakring (a slum district in Vienna), soliciting men on the street, had been at- tacked and killed by a stranger. He is still at large, the police is searching for him. You are the streetwalker. Here (pointing to Richard, one of our male actors) is the apache. Get the scene ready.” A street was improvised on the stage, a cafe, two lights. Barbara went on. George was in his usual seat in the front row, highly excited. Richard, in the role of the apache, came out of the cafe with Barbara and followed her. They had an encounter, which rapidly developed into a heated argument. It was about money. Suddenly Barbara changed to a manner of acting totally unex- pected of her. She swore like a trooper, punching at the man, kicking him in the leg repeatedly. I saw George half rising, anxiously raising his arm at me, but the apache got wild and began to chase Barbara. Suddenly he grabbed a knife, a prop, from his inside jacket pocket. He chased her in circles, closer and closer. She acted so well that she gave the impres- sion of being really scared. The audience got up, roaring, “Stop it, stop it.” But he did not stop until she was supposedly “murdered.” After the scene Barbara was exuberant with joy, she embraced George and they went home in ecstasy. From then on she continued to act in such roles of the lower depth. George came to see me the following day. He in- stantly understood it was therapy. She played as domestics, lonely spin- sters, revengeful wives, spiteful sweethearts, barmaids and gun molls. George gave me daily reports. “Well,” he told me after a few sessions, “something is happening to her. She still has her fits of temper at home but they have lost their intensity. They are shorter and in the midst of them she often smiles, and, as yesterday, she remembers similar scenes which she did on the stage and she laughs and I laugh with her because I too remember. It is as if we see each other in a psychological mirror. We both laugh. At times she begins to laugh before she has the fit, anticipat- ing what will happen. She warms up to it finally but it lacks the usual heat.” It was like a catharsis coming from humour and laughter. I continued the treatment, assigning roles to her more carefully, according to her needs and his. One day George confessed the effect which these sessions had upon him as he watched them and absorbed the analysis which I gave afterwards. “Looking at her productions on the stage made me more tolerant of Barbara, less impatient.” That evening I told Barbara how much progress she had made as an actress and asked her whether she would not like to act on the stage with George. They did this and the duets on the stage which appeared as part of our official program, resembled more and more the scenes which they daily had at home. Gradually her family and his, scenes from her childhood, their dreams and plans for the future were portrayed. After every performance some spectators would come up to me, asking why the Barbara-George scenes  John W. Casson

touched them more deeply than the others (audience therapy). Some months later, Barbara and George sat alone with me in the theatre. They had found themselves and each other for the first time. I analysed the development of their psychodrama, session after session, and told them the story of their cure. ([] :)

The bad news is that Barbara and George separated soon after they had worked with Moreno and five years later George killed himself (Marineau :). The good news is that Moreno learned much from their work with Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 him and continued to develop psychodrama. Living Newspaper had shown him the possible therapeutic value of people playing roles other than their usual role and this was the basis of role reversal.

Living Newspaper in Therapy Today I was facilitating a psychodrama training group in  at the outbreak of the Gulf War. They enacted the infamous encounter between a group of Western hostages, including a small boy, and Saddam Hussein. One man in the role of a hostage spoke out his anger at Hussein. Later in the sharing he stated that he never normally allowed himself to express such feelings. Daniel Feldhendler also reports on his use of Living Newspaper at that time to explore the roles, motivating forces, and power dynamics of Bush and Hussein that led to escalat- ing conflict predictive of war. Feldhendler does not report any therapeusis for the group members, although the work did raise awareness of the gender as- pects of power dynamics (Schutzman and Cohen-Cruz :–). The catharsis resultant from confronting someone in role in such Living Newspaper dramas is also illustrated by a report into a Living Newspaper/ sociodrama on the trial of Adolf Eichmann conducted by Moreno in  at the American Psychiatric Association Convention. Louis Yablonsky, who played the role of Eichmann, describes the session:

During the three-hour session the results were electrifying. Many of the psychiatrists in the group were refugees from Germany who had themselves lost family members in the death camps supervised by Eichmann. [...] People stood up crying, attacking me in my role with terrible curses and accusations. The important outcome [...] was the deep-reaching catharsis within the group and the expression of hidden feelings about the catastrophe that up until then had been festering in the souls of the participants. (:)

Living Newspaper was used in a therapy group for women survivors of sexual abuse in . The therapists invited the women to imagine they were attending a women journalists’ conference on the rights of children.

The idea of the Women Journalists’ Conference was to invite the women to be adults, to speak up and have the power to publish the facts of abuse and the rights of children. We provided newspapers and magazines around a large table [...]. By coincidence, several of the newspapers and magazines contained articles on child abuse and this placed the drama in the wider social context that empowered the women in their realisation that they were not alone and the secret need no longer be kept [...]. (Corti and Casson :)

The newspapers were brought to life in this drama. Feelings of anger, grief, and guilt were expressed, insights were gained, and the experience of power- Living Newspaper  lessness was replaced by an experience of power, validation, witnessing, and being witnessed. Anne Bannister, psychodramatist and dramatherapist, describes working with a group of adolescents who were on probation for various offences in her chapter “Images and Action” in Dramatherapy with Children and Adolescents (:–). She offered them local newspaper reports of different incidents and invited the young people to role-play the scene. They often chose reports of rape or child molestation and then followed through the enactment to a fantasy court scene where the abusers were punished. The women in the sur- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 vivors group described above also enacted such a trial scene: the abuser was found guilty and sent to prison. Moreno would see this as the fulfillment of “act hunger.” This kind of completion of unfinished business, even on a fantasy level, can be satisfying and releasing for people. Sean came to a psychodrama training group feeling troubled about what was happening at work. In choosing a news story he wanted one about a crime and found a report in which an old man had attempted to bludgeon a woman to death for rejecting his advances. He enjoyed the opportunity to express his murderousness through playing the role. That night he had a dream in which he bludgeoned a male figure whose body turned into soil. The next day he told his dream and warmed up to act out the role of the protagonist in his own story. He worked to express his rage at the destructive policies of his managers and his grief at what was happening at work. In the psychodrama he was able to vent his fury and to take responsibility for how he expressed his anger, but not for other people’s behavior. After this work he felt invigorated, grounded, his energy focused. He dreamed that night of figures from his psychodrama and woke feeling a sense of integration. Living Newspaper had provided a warm-up: an opportunity to inhabit his murderousness through the safe distance of a role that was not his. Having connected with these feelings he was able to take this further through a psychodrama, connecting the newspaper drama with his own life. Returning to his job the following day he felt empowered by this drama and was able to stand his ground in a conflict more constructively because he felt clearer. As well as the catharsis of tears and anger, Moreno valued the catharsis of laughter, and Living Newspapers can of course be comic. From the start the futurists wanted the form to be like the variety theatre. Cabaret, music hall, circus, and commedia dell’arte all influenced the Blue Blouse style. A Blue Blouse manifesto states: “Humour and satire should take up a great deal of time in any living newspaper” (in Cosgrove :). Jacques Prevert, who worked with Le Groupe Octobre, a French theatre using Living Newspaper in the s, insisted that the shows be fun and encouraged farce, suggestive humor, and laughter (Bradby and McCormick :–). The plays of Jagran in India, discussed above, are hilarious, even obscenely funny. Laughter not only relaxes us but also stimulates attention and engagement, empowering through satire and by debunking pomposity. While tragedy brings us closer to pain, comedy distances us, releases energy, freeing us to be playful. Psycho- dramatist Peter Howarth stresses the value of using the day’s papers with his group to promote the liveliness and involvement: “When done well ‘enacting the news’ as I have called it, can both be an enjoyable session in itself, a useful introduction to the sociodramatic method, and a powerful psychodrama warm-up” (Howarth :).

Living Newspaper and Empowerment Sociodramatist Ron Wiener writes of a Living Newspaper performed at a community arts day in Leeds, :  John W. Casson

Does a living newspaper have anything to offer at the end of the twentieth century when multi-channel T.V. and the Internet reign supreme? Six participants select from the day’s news a theme exploring whether a man can change his destiny. His life story develops. In the different scenes some roles are played stereotypically, some typically and some atypically as people find their own dramas become intertwined with the roles they are playing. This leads to some self-learning which emerges in the sharing, followed by a discussion on roles and sociodrama. The session finishes with an appreciative round of applause—the newspaper still Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 lives! (Wiener )

We are passive consumers of endless news programs from multiple news media. Actively participating in making and interacting with the news can enable us to change our destiny. Instead of being depressed by bad news we can become cocreators of social change—Moreno’s original goal of “sociatry,” the healing of society. This is confirmed by the work of Bernice Fisher, a feminist teacher at New York University, using Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Op- pressed techniques to explore the news. She describes one of her workshop sessions, which began with:

each person choosing a newspaper page from among a number of pages scattered on the floor. Each was asked to read an article and notice how the reading had affected her own body. Then I asked participants to do a self-sculpture (adding sound and movement if they wished) followed by a group sculpture expressing the impulses they had discovered in themselves. (in Schutzman and Cohen-Cruz :)

Later in the workshop, “to nurture a renewed sense of vision and inspire discussion about political values,” she encouraged the groups to create an ideal newspaper on a large posterboard:

Participants often framed these issues so that women’s roles as newsmakers remained central, so that women’s experiences helped define what constituted news. Working together in this way promoted an integration of thinking, feeling, and physical awareness. It enabled women to articulate and combine their political and personal values into an image of social change. (–)

In a public theatre in  when Di Adderley and I invited an audience to cocreate an evening of spontaneous theatre, we used a modified form of Liv- ing Newspaper, inviting the audience to project into the future and imagine what the news would be in . What emerged—through visualizing and sculpting the photographs in the paper, composing the headlines, and sharing hopes and fears—were a number of stories that explored individual and group concerns, culminating in a series of scenes in which parenting was explored. Would parents in the future have to apply for permission to have children? Be vetted? Trained? This was a sociodrama of the future by the people who will create that future. What news stories shall we create tomorrow? Through such projection of the future perhaps we can take greater control over our lives, prevent some of the bad news, and create more good news.

In Conclusion It seems that there are two forms of theatre here: one scripted and the other spontaneous, and it would be better if Moreno’s was called “dramatized news- Living Newspaper  paper” (his own preferred title) to distinguish it from the scripted “living newspaper.” It seems that the Living Newspaper movement, which from  to  was a global, creative, revolutionary theatre, owed nothing to Moreno and it is more likely that he picked up the idea from reports of the futurists’ experiments in Russia from  to . S. Cosgrove, () who has written the most thorough history of Living Newspapers, does not mention Moreno at all. Jonathan Fox concludes:

Moreno was correct to distinguish his version from the Russian variety: Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 he was not interested in a recitation of official reports, but of the dramatisation of “life itself”; he was not concerned to impart information, but to uncover the human truths hidden in daily happenings. Like- wise, he was correct to distinguish what he did from the American Living Newspaper. [...] Moreno’s [...] had little to do with propaganda or reportage. Its thrust was psychological, like the best theatrical art. He had no message. He was interested in a flow of feeling, in connections, and the wisdom of the human heart. (in Buer :–)

Fox’s Playback Theatre is the current theatre form—which has now spread around the world—that comes closest to Moreno’s idea of spontaneous theatre: a dramatized newspaper for the people’s stories (see Fox ; Salas ). But no one has a monopoly on good ideas. Roy’s Jagran and Boal’s Newspaper Theatre are related forms that also empower their audiences to achieve personal and social change.

Notes . Stourac and McCreery are quoting from the Blue Blouse Magazine, , /:–. . Stourac and McCreery cite this as reported in the Blue Blouse Magazine, , /:.

References Bannister, Anne  “Images and Action.” In Dramatherapy with Children and Adolescents, edited by Sue Jennings, –. London: Routledge. Boal, Augusto  Theatre of the Oppressed. New York: Urizen Books. Bradby, David, and John McCormick  People’s Theatre. London: Croom Helm. Brown, Lorraine, ed.  Liberty Deferred and Other Living Newspapers of the s. Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press. Buer, Ferdinand, ed.  Jahrbuch fur Psychodrama, psychosoziale Praxis & Gesellschaftspolitik . Opladen, Germany: Leske & Budrich. Casson, John  “Evreinoff and Moreno: Monodrama and Psychodrama, Parallel Develop- ments or Hidden Influences?” Journal of the British Psychodrama Association , /:–. Chambers, Colin  The Story of Unity Theatre. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Cosgrove, S.  “The Living Newspaper: History, Production and Form.” PhD diss., Hull University.  John W. Casson

Corti, Pamela, and John Casson  “Dramatherapy into Psychodrama.” Journal of the British Psychodrama Associa- tion ,  (Winter):–. Drain, Richard  Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge. Flanagan, Hallie  Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre. New York: Limelight Editions.

Fox, Jonathan Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/44/2 (166)/107/1820717/10542040051058735.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021  Acts of Service, Spontaneity, Commitment, Tradition in the Nonscripted Theatre. New Paltz, NY: Tusitala Publishing. Howarth, Peter  “Origins of Psychodrama, The Living Newspaper (Lebendige Zeitung).” Journal of the British Psychodrama Association, ,  (Spring):–. Large Door Productions  The Reel Truth. Channel  (London) TV. Large Door Productions Ltd,  Tunstall Road, London, SW BN. Leach, Robert  Revolutionary Theatre. London: Routledge. Marineau, Réne  Jacob Levy Moreno ‒. London: Tavistock/Routledge. Moreno, Jacob Levy  Das Stegreiftheater. Berlin/Postsdam: Kiepenheuer Verlag.  Rede vor dem Richter. Berlin: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag.  [] The Theatre of Spontaneity. Ambler, PA: Beacon House Inc.  [] Psychodrama, First Volume. Ambler, PA: Beacon House Inc. Moreno, Zerka  Personal communication with author. Salas, Jo  Improvising Real Life: Personal Stories in Playback Theatre. Dubuque, IA: Kendal/Hunt. Sayler, Oliver M.  The Russian Theatre. New York: Brentano’s. Schutzman, Mady and Jan Cohen-Cruz  Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism. London: Routledge. Stourac, Richard, and Kathleen McCreery  Theatre as Weapon: Workers’ Theatre in the Soviet Union, Germany and Britain, ‒. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Styan, John Louis  Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, : Expressionism and Epic Theatre. Lon- don: Cambridge University Press. Wiener, Ron  Personal communication with author. Yablonsky, Louis  Psychodrama. Stuttgart: Kleet-Cotta.

John W. Casson is a dramatherapist and psychodrama psychotherapist trainer. He is also a founding member of both the Northern School of Psychodrama and Northern Trust for Dramatherapy.