Living Newspaper: Theatre and Therapy

Author(s): John W. Casson

Source: TDR (1988-) , Summer, 2000, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 107-122
Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1146850

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TDR (1988-
)

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Living Newspaper

Theatre and Therapy

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, 1913-1915
In 1915 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 1995:2o). 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
1995:21)

In an earlier manifesto (1913) 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

The Drama Review 44, 2 (Ti66), Summer 2000. Copyright ? 200ooo

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Io7

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
io8 John W. Casson

Bulgars [...] instructive, satirical pantomimes [...] a more or less amusing news-
paper" (172-73).

Soviet Russia, 1919-1928

In I919 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
amongst the illiterate (Cosgrove 1982:7). 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 1994:82). In 1919 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 1920 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 infor-
mation and it evolved its own forms of Living Newspaper [...]. (Bradby
and McCormick 1978:46)

Pustynin later worked for the Blue Blouse Theatre.

Between I919 and 1922 Vladimir Mayakovski, a leading exponent of the
Russian futurist group, had drawn some 400 Rosta posters (Bradby and
McCormick 1978:46). In 1921 Mayakovski wrote a Living Newspaper that
was directed by Nikolai Foregger at Terevsat's Moscow Studio (Leach
1994:84). Sergei Eisenstein "was a keen follower of Marinetti's futurist ideas"
(Bradby and McCormick 1978:47). 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 1986:21).'
Eisenstein acknowledged Vsevolod Meyerhold and Vladimir Mayakovski
as fellow futurists (Drain 1995:87). Meyerhold utilized the genre of Living
Newspaper in Give Us Europe (in Stourac and McCreery 1986:16).2 Blue
Blouse's inspiration was drawn from the futurist interest in music hall and va-
riety theatre, and from the experimental work of Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and
Nikolai Forreger.
In 1923 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 ma-
terial from papers and magazines. He staged them in revue style, per-
forming in factories, workers clubs and in the open air. (Drain I995:I83)

Living Newspapers kept their illiterate audiences in touch with the is-
sues of the day. The subjects were by no means always topical or politi-

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Living Newspaper Iog09

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 1994:84, 169)

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
Blouse offered a model on which countless variations have been devised
by agit-prop and guerilla theatre groups ever since. (Drain 1995:157)

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 audi-
ence. 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 1994:84)

The Blue Blouse group was hugely successful: "In its first two months of
existence Blue Blouse performed to 8o0,00ooo people" (Stourac and McCreery
1986:39).

Other groups started up on the same pattern [...] eventually more than
five thousand Blue Blouse groups were active, with a membership of
00,000ooo. [...] In 1927 Blue Blouse visited Germany, where the workers'
theatre movement was already practising similar techniques [...]. (Drain
1995:183)

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" (1994:169). It even spread to Japan by
1929: 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 1982:26).
Such spontaneity and creativity was not, however, attractive to Stalin: within
a year of their successful 1927 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, cliches, and poor quality of this agitprop
theatre (Stourac and McCreery 1986:42, 70). In fact they were out-maneuvered
in the artistic politics of the development of Stalinist Social Realism (63-64).

Moreno in Vienna, 1922-1925

In 1922, 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 1924. One of the
methods for promoting spontaneity Moreno used was to base improvisations on

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
I o John W. Casson

the day's news: in 1925 he called this the "dramatized newspaper" (in the 1947
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 the-
atre from the news in 1923 or even from 1921 (see Marineau 1989:70-72).
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
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 re-
hearsed. 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 1997). Jonathan
Fox points out that the Russian Theatre was known in Vienna: the 1924 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 1994) 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 1906 Stanislavski's theatre concerned with
psychological truth, the Moscow Art Theatre, had toured the cities of Ger-
many and Austria (Sayler 1922:65; Casson 1999).
Rene Marineau states that Moreno "also toured Germany with his group"
(1989:77-78): this must have been in 1923/24, three or four years before Blue
Blouse's German tour, when "the workers' theatre movement were already
practicing similar techniques" (Drain 1995:183). 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
1925, 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 [1946] 1985:356; 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 12 months (1923/24),
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 ex-
periment 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 spontane-
ity 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 [1946] 1985:356).
My research for this article reveals that the truth was the other way round.
His earliest published term is Die Dramatisierte Zeitung (Moreno 1925). 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,

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Living Newspaper III

sondern vom Triebwerk der Interessen gelost" (1924:66). 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 1983:77)

The heading "The Living Newspaper" on this page in the later version is not
in the 1924 original German edition. Only in 1947 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 meth-
ods: 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 '2os, 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 go-
ing 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. (1997)

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. ([1946] 1985:356-57)

"Impromptu" was the word used to name Moreno's spontaneous theatre in

the U.S.A. from 1925: "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
[I947] I983:79).

The U.S.A., 1927-1939

It was in 1931I 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

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
112 John W. Casson

words "living newspaper." The words used to describe his performances sug-
gest that Moreno was calling his work "impromptu" and "dramatized news-
paper." In the New York Evening World Telegram, 28 March 1931: "To obviate
the suspicion of previous rehearsals Dr. Moreno's troupe will dramatize news
events of the day." In the New York Times, 6 April 1931: "a newspaper
drama." In the New York Morning Telegraph, 7 April 1931: "The impromptu
players will present a spontaneous dramatization of a newspaper" (in Moreno
[1946] 1985:357-58).
The idea of the Living Newspaper had in fact already arrived in the U.S.A.
As early as 1927 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 1982). In the early
1930S 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 1982:38-39). From 1935 to 1936 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, 1935-1943) created after the 1930s
Great Depression. It was Hallie Flanagan who suggested the idea: "I suggested
the plan of dramatizing contemporary events in a series of living newspapers"
(1969:20). She had traveled to the Soviet Union in 1926 and seen Blue Blouse
(Cosgrove 1982). Joseph Losey, a film director, claimed it to have been his own
concept (Styan 1996:179). The playwright Elmer Rice is also credited with hav-
ing introduced the concept of the Living Newspaper (Styan 1996:11I). He was
the state director of the Federal Theatre Project in New York in 1935. Elmer
Rice had twice traveled to study theatre in the Soviet Union (Styan 1996:11I)
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 1930s (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 1935 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
1969:167)

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 1978:108). The Federal Theatre Project was closed
by an act of Congress in 1939.
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, some-
thing which will mean a tremendous amount in the future, socially, and

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Living Newspaper 113

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 1969:222)

Styan has a photograph of this play, showing a very substantial realistic set of a
tenement building (1996:180).
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
again, and thus become "cultural conserves"--scripts that are still available and
have been performed as recently as 1984 (Brown 1989: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 ([1946] 1985:358). 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 19th century. The
March of Time was heir to experiments to recreate news that began in the I89os
with actors used to film scenes from the Dreyfus scandal. The film company of
Charles and Emile Pathe staged a fond farewell between actors impersonating
Dreyfus and his wife before he was sent to Devil's Island (1894); they filmed
actors in reconstructions of the Boxer rebellion in China (19oo); and replicated
the sinking of the Lusitania (I915; Large Door Productions 1997). 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 (1925) 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 1922). Russian and German theatre cre-
ators had emigrated to the U.S.A. in the 1920o and '3os 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, 1935-1956
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
1935. 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 1989:41).
The Unity Theatre, formed in 1935 as the first "relatively stable Labour
movement theatre group" (Bradby and McCormick 1978:98), 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 24
hours or even 24 days" (Chambers 1989:141). This reveals the gulf between
Arendt and Moreno's ideas.

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
114 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 news-
reel from America [...].
The style of the production owed much to the work of German the-
atre-Piscator, Kaiser, Toller-and was explicitly non-naturalistic. The
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. (141-43)

As Arendt had said, such a complex production took time to make and
Busmen was performed in 1938, 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, 1938. The script, which tried to bring out
Britain's possible role as peace keeper, changed from day to day accord-
ing 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 DSo each. (Bradby and McCormick 1978:Ioo)

Moreno knew spontaneity was a powerful force, regarded by those inter-

ested in the status quo as subversive. It is interesting to note that in Russia
(1928), America (1936-1939), Germany (1933), Japan (I930s), and Britain
(1939), the authorities put a stop to Living Newspapers by censoring the pro-
ductions or simply closing down the theatres.
The Unity Theatre continued creating Living Newspapers in postwar Brit-
ain: Black Magic (1947, on the need for recruits for the coal industry) and
World on Edge (1956, on the situation in Hungary). The form inspired Joan
Littlewood's Theatre Workshop productions culminating in the famous Oh
What a Lovely War! (1963).

Aloke Roy in India, 1967 onwards

A painter who turned to theatre as a more relevant means of communica-

tion, Aloke Roy founded Jagran (which means "awakening"), a clown/panto-
mime theatre, in 1967. 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

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Living Newspaper 1 5

nutrition, disease, and human and legal rights. By celebrating the peoples' suc-
cess stories (Black Marketeer [i980] 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, 1979

Boal developed his own Newspaper Theatre in Peru, within a literacy program:

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 1994:I07, n. 2)

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 1979).

Can Living Newspapers Be Therapeutic?

Revolutionary, artistic, educational, and political theatres aim to change soci-

ety 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 1978:47). 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" (46) these characters were
caricatures. "No attempt at individual psychological delineation was attempted"
(Bradby and McCormick 1978:46). While up-to-date information may em-
power, 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 1978:47). 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, 1925; in Stourac and McCreery 1986:41)

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-

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
S16 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 1938:

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 1978:22)

In their book on People's Theatre, David Bradby and John McCormick de-
scribe 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 situ-
ation 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.
(1978:Io8)

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 perfor-
mance that must have taken place between 1922 and 1924. Moreno writes:

One elusive night a Theatre of Spontaneity [turned] into a Therapeutic

Theatre. [...] We had a young actress, Barbara, who worked for the the-
atre 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 re-
mained 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 hap-
pened?" 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

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Living Newspaper 1 17

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
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 en-
counter, 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 contin-
ued 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, re-
sembled 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

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
S18 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 de-
velopment of their psychodrama, session after session, and told them the
story of their cure. ([1946] 1985:5)

The bad news is that Barbara and George separated soon after they had
worked with Moreno and five years later George killed himself (Marineau
1989:77). The good news is that Moreno learned much from their work with
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 1991 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 1994:103-04).
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 1961 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 them-
selves 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 ca-
tharsis within the group and the expression of hidden feelings about the
catastrophe that up until then had been festering in the souls of the par-
ticipants. (1978:182)

Living Newspaper was used in a therapy group for women survivors of

sexual abuse in 1989. 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 maga-
zines 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 1990:49)

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-

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Living Newspaper I 19

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
(1995:169-85). 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-
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 fan-
tasy 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 ex-
press 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 psy-
chodrama and woke feeling a sense of integration. Living Newspaper had pro-
vided 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 news-
paper 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 1982:13). Jacques Prevert, who
worked with Le Groupe Octobre, a French theatre using Living Newspaper
in the 1930s, insisted that the shows be fun and encouraged farce, suggestive
humor, and laughter (Bradby and McCormick 1978:88-89). 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 I987:17).

Living Newspaper and Empowerment

Sociodramatist Ron Wiener writes of a Living Newspaper performed at a

community arts day in Leeds, 1997:

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
120 John W. Casson

Does a living newspaper have anything to offer at the end of the twenti-
eth 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 ses-
sion finishes with an appreciative round of applause-the newspaper still
lives! (Wiener 1997)

We are passive consumers of endless news programs from multiple news

media. Actively participating in making and interacting with the news can en-
able 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 them-
selves. (in Schutzman and Cohen-Cruz 1994:192)

Later in the workshop, "to nurture a renewed sense of vision and inspire dis-
cussion 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 inte-
gration of thinking, feeling, and physical awareness. It enabled women to
articulate and combine their political and personal values into an image
of social change. (193-94)

In a public theatre in 1994 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 2001. 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-

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Living Newspaper I2

paper" (his own preferred title) to distinguish it from the scripted "living
newspaper." It seems that the Living Newspaper movement, which from 1919
to 1940 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 1919 to 1921. S. Cosgrove, (1982) who
has written the most thorough history of Living Newspapers, does not men-
tion Moreno at all. Jonathan Fox concludes:

Moreno was correct to distinguish his version from the Russian variety:
he was not interested in a recitation of official reports, but of the
dramatisation of "life itself"; he was not concerned to impart informa-
tion, 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 1994:15-16)

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 the-
atre: a dramatized newspaper for the people's stories (see Fox 1986; Salas
1993). 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

I. Stourac and McCreery are quoting from the Blue Blouse Magazine, 1925, 23/24:8-9.
2. Stourac and McCreery cite this as reported in the Blue Blouse Magazine, 1925, 23/24:5.

References
Bannister, Anne
1995 "Images and Action." In Dramatherapy with Children and Adolescents, edited by
Sue Jennings, 169-85. London: Routledge.

Boal, Augusto
1979 Theatre of the Oppressed. New York: Urizen Books.
Bradby, David, and John McCormick
1978 People's Theatre. London: Croom Helm.
Brown, Lorraine, ed.
1989 Liberty Deferred and Other Living Newspapers of the 1930s. Fairfax, VA: George
Mason University Press.

Buer, Ferdinand, ed.

1994 Jahrbuch fur Psychodrama, psychosoziale Praxis & Gesellschaftspolitik 1993.
Opladen, Germany: Leske & Budrich.

Casson, John
1999 "Evreinoff and Moreno: Monodrama and Psychodrama, Parallel Develop-
ments or Hidden Influences?" Journal of the British Psychodrama Association 14,
1/2:20-30.

Chambers, Colin
1989 The Story of Unity Theatre. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Cosgrove, S.
1982 "The Living Newspaper: History, Production and Form." PhD diss., Hull
University.

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
122 John W. Casson

Corti, Pamela, and John Casson

1990 "Dramatherapy into Psychodrama." Journal of the British Psychodrama Associa-
tion 5, 2 (Winter):37-53.

Drain, Richard
1995 Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge.

Flanagan, Hallie
1969 Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre. New York: Limelight Editions.

Fox, Jonathan
1986 Acts of Service, Spontaneity, Commitment, Tradition in the Nonscripted Theatre.
New Paltz, NY: Tusitala Publishing.

Howarth, Peter
1987 "Origins of Psychodrama, The Living Newspaper (Lebendige Zeitung)."
Journal of the British Psychodrama Association, 2, 2 (Spring):I4-I7.

Large Door Productions

1997 The Reel Truth. Channel 4 (London) TV. Large Door Productions Ltd, 2
Tunstall Road, London, SW9 8BN.

Leach, Robert
1994 Revolutionary Theatre. London: Routledge.
Marineau, Rene
1989 Jacob Levy Moreno 1889-1974. London: Tavistock/Routledge.
Moreno, Jacob Levy
1924 Das Stegreiftheater. Berlin/Postsdam: Kiepenheuer Verlag.
1925 Rede vor dem Richter. Berlin: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag.
1983 [1947] The Theatre of Spontaneity. Ambler, PA: Beacon House Inc.
1985 [1946] Psychodrama, First Volume. Ambler, PA: Beacon House Inc.

Moreno, Zerka
1997 Personal communication with author.

Salas, Jo
1993 Improvising Real Life: Personal Stories in Playback Theatre. Dubuque, IA:
Kendal/Hunt.

Sayler, Oliver M.
1922 The Russian Theatre. New York: Brentano's.

Schutzman, Mady and Jan Cohen-Cruz

1994 Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism. London: Routledge.

Stourac, Richard, and Kathleen McCreery

1986 Theatre as Weapon: Workers' Theatre in the Soviet Union, Germany and Bri
1917-1934. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Styan, John Louis

1996 Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, 3: Expressionism and Epic Theatre. L
don: Cambridge University Press.

Wiener, Ron
1997 Personal communication with author.

Yablonsky, Louis
1978 Psychodrama. Stuttgart: Kleet-Cotta.

John W. Casson is a dramatherapist and psychodrama psychotherapist trainer.

also a founding member of both the Northern School of Psychodrama and Nort
Trust for Dramatherapy.

This content downloaded from

81.98.9.240 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:13:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms