Triple-A Plowed Under, one of the FTP’s first New York productions, showed that Flanagan and Washington, D.C., were not necessarily going to see eye-to-eye. The production was a Living Newspaper presentation that offered a plea for the nation’s farmers and an indictment of the Supreme Court’s nullification of Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Where Flanagan saw information, however, others saw propaganda. Several newspapers denounced the production as ‘red’ and ‘Communistic,’ while a Republican congressman labeled it ‘pure and unadulterated politics.’ Alarmed WPA officials dashed to New York, although Flanagan was able to keep them from closing the show.

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Not all of the FTP’s New York productions were so controversial. There was nothing pink about the production of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, and the New York Times hailed the Welles-Houseman all-black Macbeth as ‘a triumph of theater art.’ Macbeth’s Manhattan run sold out, and the play then traveled to FTP theaters in eight other cities. Even Chalk Dust, another muckraking production about abuses in public schools, appeared free of the taint of propaganda.

Which brings us back to that dinner party . . .

Also present that night was a young composer named Marc Blitzstein; indeed, he was the evening’s central attraction. Born in Philadelphia in 1905, Blitzstein had been a child prodigy and a student of renowned composers Arnold Schoenberg and Nadia Boulanger. Early in his career, Blitzstein produced thorny, dissonant works that he freely admitted were only for cognoscenti. By the 1930s, however, he had embraced the aims of then-fashionable proletarian art, avowing that ‘music should have a social as well as artistic base; it should broaden its scope and reach not only the select few but the masses.’ ‘Composers,’ he said, ‘must fight the battle with other workers.’ On this particular evening Blitzstein was auditioning his newest composition for the FTP’s next New York project. It was his greatest piece of social awareness, an ‘opera of labor’ called The Cradle Will Rock.

As his small but select audience raptly listened, Blitzstein played the piano and sang every part in the score. His work had a familiar Depression-era theme. It was a’strike play’–a drama illustrating the struggles of labor unions to gain legitimacy and power through the weapon of the strike. The most celebrated strike play was Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, which recounted the woes of taxi drivers; it had clearly influenced Blitzstein, as had the leftist theater pieces of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. The characters in these plays were one-dimensional and symbolic–the heroic striker, the grasping capitalist, the suffering spouse, the corrupt politician–and so it was with The Cradle Will Rock, in which the very characters’ names revealed that they were nothing more than types. The gallant worker was Larry Foreman, the factory owner was Mister Mister, the newspaperman was Editor Daily, and so on.

Blitzstein’s plot was as one-dimensional as his characters. Mister Mister, the mighty potentate of Steeltown, had corrupted the Church, the Press, the Arts, and the Universities. The shining heroes were union organizer Larry Foreman, the Moll (the clichéd good-hearted prostitute), and an immigrant couple killed in Mister Mister’s anti-union violence. Mister Mister tries to buy off Larry but is rebuked with the not-so-veiled threat (in song) that ‘when the storm breaks, the cradle will fall.’

Unlike his plot, Blitzstein’s music was vigorous, imaginative, and–in songs like ‘Nickel Under the Foot,’ ‘Honolulu,’ and the parodistic ‘Croon Spoon’–catchy. Considering that 1937 saw the Broadway debuts of musicals by Rodgers and Hart and by Harold Arlen, it’s clear that Blitzstein would not make the A-list of the era’s theater composers. Yet few works by those more melodically gifted tunesmiths matched Blitzstein’s passion, commitment, and timeliness.

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