Living Newspaper

Living Newspaper is a term for a theatrical form presenting factual information on current events to a popular audience. Historically, Living Newspapers have also urged social action (both implicitly and explicitly) and reacted against naturalistic and realistic theatrical conventions in favor of the more direct, experimental techniques of agitprop theatre, including the extensive use of multimedia.

Though Living Newspapers originated in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution, the English term is most often associated with the Living Newspapers produced by the Federal Theatre Project. Part of the federally funded arts program established under the Works Progress Administration in the United States of the 1930s, the Federal Theatre Project wrote and presented a number of Living Newspapers on social issues of the day, including Triple-A Plowed Under, Injunction Granted, One-Third of a Nation, Power, and Spirochete. Controversy over the political ideology of the Living Newspapers contributed to the disbanding of the Federal Theatre Project in 1939, and a number of Living Newspapers already written or in development were never performed, including several that addressed race issues.

…the [Living Newspaper] seeks to dramatize a new struggle – the search of the average American today for knowledge about his country and his world; to dramatize his struggle to turn the great natural and economic forces of our time toward a better life for more people.

The Living Newspaper program began very shortly after the establishment of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). Following her appointment as National Director of the FTP in July 1935, Hallie Flanagan, a professor and playwright at Vassar College, and playwright Elmer Rice set to work planning the organization and focus of the FTP. The New York Living Newspaper Unit came from this meeting; allied with the American Newspaper Guild, this first and most active of the Living Newspaper Units employed out-of-work journalists and theatre professionals of all types, providing hourly wages for many reporters and entertainers left unemployed by the Depression.

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