Can You Hear Their Voices?

Can You Hear Their Voices?
Written by	Hallie Flanagan and Margaret Ellen Clifford
Date premiered	May 2, 1931
Place premiered	Vassar College
Original language	English
Genre	Drama
Setting	England, Arkansas, and Washington, DC, during the Great Depression

Can You Hear Their Voices? A Play of Our Time is a 1931 play by Hallie Flanagan and her former student Margaret Ellen Clifford, based on the short story "Can You Make Out Their Voices" by Whittaker Chambers. The play premiered at Vassar College on May 2, 1931. It ran most recently Off Broadway June 3–27, 2010.

This play is one of the earliest examples of Agitprop theatre in the U.S. It also is a forerunner of the "Living Newspaper" theatrical form in the U.S.--which Flanagan herself championed as head of the Federal Theatre Project later in the decade. (Proletcult Theatre influenced both Agitprop theatre and Living Newspaper; Proletcult thus influenced all three.) "Can You Hear Their Voices, which Flanagan produced in Vassar's experimental theater, became the prototype for Living Newspapers."

Chambers described the story's impact in the 1930s in his memoirs:

It had a success far beyond anything that it pretended to be. It was timely. The New York World-Telegram spotted it at once and wrote a piece about it. International Publishers, the official Communist publishing house, issued it as a pamphlet. Lincoln Steffens hailed it in an effusion that can be read in his collected letters. Hallie Flanagan, then head of Vassar's Experimental Theater, turned it into a play. In a few months, the little story had been translated even into Chinese and Japanese and was being played in workers' theaters all over the world.

In 2010, Broadway World noted: "Chambers' true tale of desperate tenant farmers inspired a play that was ahead of its time: it predates John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath by eight years and Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty by four.

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