New Deal Theater (PDF)

Ilka Saal teaches Drama & Theater and American Studies at the University of Richmond.

Winner of the2008 SAMLA Studies Award!

"Thisstudy will be a very important contribution to the field. What Saal does so well is to identify an American tradition she calls vernacular theater. It has often been described as a naive American theater tradition unworthy of comparison to its more sophisticated European contemporaries. Saal successfully identifies the complex and sophisticated reasons why the American stage chose a vernacular route, in the process of explaining its strengths and weaknesses with an intellectual sophistication that supports her sympathetic predecessors who have been less than fully successful at articulating the movement's roots, successes, and justifications.She is, in short, presenting what I would suggest is the final word on what has oft been thought but never so well expressed. This book is likely to find both a sympathetic readership while at the same time converting those among the scholarly theater community who have frequently turned away from American theater to study and engage European traditions often seen to be more interesting, dynamic, and politically/aesthetically engaging." - William W. Demastes, Louisiana State University

"For Saal, these theatrical movements - themselves tied to the political movements: the United Farm Workers and antiwar organizing - meld the American vernacular traditions with avant-gardist stagings, offering another way of conceiving modernism and arguing against U. S. government intervention into art." - Theater Survey

"Saal's analyses comprise rich material from rarely researched areas and will be important to the understanding of American political theater as well as to comparative approaches in theater studies of that subject" - Buchbesprechungen Book Reviews

"[A] superb study...It will certainly be of interest to both scholars of interwar theatre and drama and those who grapple with the vagaries of political theatre" - Theatre Journal

"New Deal