Living Newspaper

Living Newspaper, form of stage production which employed documentary sources to present subjects of current social importance, usually in a sequence of short scenes with individualized dialogue alongside more abstract, often didactic, presentation. The term is primarily associated with a unit of the Federal Theatre Project, whose members were theatre and newspaper workers. Together they produced six Living Newspapers, of which the first, Ethiopia, a montage of newspaper reports about the current war in Abyssinia, was cancelled before its public showing under strong pressure from the US State Department. Others included Triple-A Plowed Under (1936), which dealt with farming conditions during a widespread drought and profiteering from food distribution during the depression; Power (1937), which advocated government ownership of the electrical power industry to save it from the menace of financial manipulation; and One-Third of a Nation (1938), which advocated federal and state development of low-cost housing. Following the example of the Unit, other Federal Theatre companies outside New York wrote and presented their own Living Newspapers, often with local or regional relevance. The outspokenness of the Living Newspaper productions was among the complaints made against the Federal Theatre Project as a whole, and one of the main causes of its being disbanded by the Government in 1939. The techniques influenced other companies and productions, and during the Second World War the British army used them to keep the troops informed about the wider issues of the conflict and conditions at home. Post-war documentary theatre also owes a considerable debt to the form.