1. Cohen, Deb, “Dialogues with ‘The Other’: Mexican Voices in Performance,” Latin American Research Review 31.2 (1996): 263–73Google Scholar, at 268.

2. Mary Virginia Farmer, interview by Lorraine Brown, 11 August 1976, Box 4, Folder 12, Works Progress Administration Oral Histories Collection, Special Collections & Archives, George Mason University Libraries (hereafter WPA Oral Histories, GMUL), George Mason University, Fairfax, VA.

3. Flanagan, Hallie, Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre (New York: Limelight Editions, 1985), 283Google Scholar.

4. Farmer interview. Farmer does not directly discuss the leftism of the Group or the Theatre Collective. For historical accounts of these and other theatres of the 1930s, see Goldstein, Malcolm, The Political Stage: American Drama and Theater of the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

5. Farmer interview.

6. According to Goldstein, the Theatre Collective, a branch of the Workers Laboratory Theatre, halted production during the 1934–5 season because of a lack of “suitable scripts” and opened a studio to instruct young actors (39). Farmer was a member of the teaching faculty, as were Clifford Odets, Morris Carnovsky, Lee Strasberg, and others (ibid.).

7. Donald Murray, interview by Karen Wickre, 20 July 1977, Box 8, Folder 2, WPA Oral Histories, GMUL. SWTU actor Theodore Pezman discussed his participation in these theatres in 1977; see Theodore Pezman, interview by Karen Wickre, 26 October 1977, Box 8, Folder 10, WPA Oral Histories, GMUL. See also Farmer interview. For an explanation for New York's troubled ticket sales in the early half of the 1930s and the role that movies played in this slump, see Goldstein, particularly chap. 6, “Broadway: The Independent Stage 1930–1935.”

8. Farmer interview.

9. Charles Elson and Diana Rivers, interview by Lorraine Brown, 1 December 1976, Box 4, Folder 10, WPA Oral Histories, GMUL.

10. Pezman interview.

11. Murray interview.

12. The 1936 New York production of Class of ’29 provoked cries of communism before it even opened. Rehearsals were conducted behind closed doors, prompting a New York Sun critic to write that “directors of the Project have been loath to permit the public to see it, realizing that its philosophy is so Communistic and at the same time anti-administration, that violent attacks from Washington as well as from taxpayers would result.” Anonymous reviewer, “New WPA Play May Not Show: Class of ’29 Deeply Dyed in Red, Is Not Likely Ever to See the Boards,” 17 March 1936, B4. However, the play never promoted communism as a viable alternative to capitalism. It was subsequently produced in at least six other cities by the Federal Theatre, including Los Angeles. My survey of archived scripts for the different cities found that only the Los Angeles script seems to have performed the full version of the original play. Scripts and production books for Class of ’29 can be found in boxes 616 and 992–3 of the Federal Theatre Project Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter FTP Collection, LoC).

13. In his interview, Murray described all four plays; his interviewer, Karen Wickre, corroborated his information. The plays are listed as being performed by the “Los Angeles Federal Theatre” in George Mason University Fenwick Library, The Federal Theatre Project: A Catalog-Calendar of Productions (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).

14. Murray and Pezman briefly discussed working on all three plays, although their interviews focus on The Sun Rises in the West.

15. Murray interview. Kazacoff, George, Dangerous Theatre: The Federal Theatre Project as a Forum for New Plays (Bloomington, IN: XLibris Corporation, 2011), 364Google Scholar.

16. Kazacoff, 269. There is scant evidence of the San Francisco performance: Murray interview; “Playbill,” Box 1078, FTP Collection, LoC; Rena Vale testimony, “Report Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California to California Legislature,” Prelinger Library, San Francisco, CA, 147. Date of performance's opening night confirmed in Steinbeck: A Guide to the Collection of the Salinas Public Library (Salinas Public Library, 1979), 28.c

17. Ralph Freud, interviewer unknown, 1 November 1961, MP3 format, WPA Oral Histories, GMUL. Freud, director of the San Francisco Federal Theatre during 1937–9, became the head of the Theater Arts Department of the University of California Los Angeles in 1947. In this interview Freud calls The Sun Rises in the West a play of “extreme social consciousness” at the 23:37 mark.

18. Ibid. Biographical information on Freud can be found in the Finding Aid for Ralph Freud Theatre, Motion Pictures and Television Interviews, 1961–1970, UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.

19. In her interview, Farmer discusses Vale's experience with the Los Angeles Federal Writers' Project. Vale's byline was removed from both copies of the script of The Sun Rises in the West in the Federal Theatre Project Collection at the Library of Congress (box 779), but a note states that it was Vale's wish to have it removed. Interestingly, her name remains on the 1938 playbill for the performance at the Mayan Theatre in Los Angeles.

20. Parts of the report with Vale's testimony are reprinted in Appendix II of Vaughn, Robert, Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting (New York: Putnam, 1972), 293–313Google Scholar.

21. Farmer interview. Vale's fearmongering continued in other media in 1940. Vale wrote an editorial that was published in the Los Angeles Times on 29 March 1940 as “Stalin over California.” She does not mention the SWTU or any of its members by name in the editorial, choosing instead to lambast California governor Culbert Olson and other Democratic California politicians for bringing “a flock of Popular Fronters” to the state capital (A4).

22. Pezman interview; Murray interview.

23. Donald Murray, Mary Virginia Farmer, and Theodore Pezman compared the SWTU to the Living Newspapers in their interviews. For further reading on the style and technique of the Living Newspapers, see Arent, Arthur, “The Technique of the Living Newspaper,” Theatre Arts 22.11 (1938): 820–5Google Scholar; Vacha, John E., “The Federal Theatre's Living Newspapers: New York's Docudramas of the Thirties,” New York History 67.1 (1986): 67–88Google Scholar; and McDermott, Douglas, “The Living Newspaper as a Dramatic Form,” Modern Drama 8.1 (1965): 82–94Google Scholar.

24. “Research for the Theatre of the Southwest,” Box 119, Folder 2.2.17, FTP Collection, LoC; Anderson, Sherwood, Puzzled America (New York: Scribner's, 1935)Google Scholar; Baker, Howard, Orange Valley (New York: Coward–McCann, 1931)Google Scholar.

25. “Research for the Theatre of the Southwest.”

26. Pezman interview.

27. Ibid.

28. In his book, Kazacoff explains in more depth (271) that Los Angeles critics were very supportive of the Federal Theatre Project.

29. “Los Angeles Sees Red,” Herald Express (Los Angeles), 2 July 1938; “Federal Theatre Review,” Hollywood Variety (Los Angeles), 2 July 1938.

30. “Los Angeles Sees Red,” Herald Express (Los Angeles), 2 July 1938.

31. Untitled review in Hollywood-Citizen News (Los Angeles), 2 July 1938.

32. Theodore Pezman and Donald Murray [et al.], The Sun Rises in the West, box 779, FTP Collection, LoC, 1.1.5. References are to act, scene, and page number within each scene. (In both copies of the script at the Library of Congress, the page numbers start over at the beginning of each scene.) Subsequent citations of pages from this play are given parenthetically in the text.

33. Donald Murray, interview by Karen Wickre, 20 July 1977, Box 8, Folder 2, Special Collections & Archives, GMUL.

34. Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. Lavers, Annette (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 121Google Scholar.

35. Jiang, Tsui-fen, The American Dream in African American, Asian American, and Hispanic American Drama: August Wilson, Frank Chin, and Luis Valdez (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2009), 7Google Scholar.

36. Stein argues that the federal government did not give the migrant problem serious attention until after the publication of The Grapes of Wrath. See Stein, Walter J., California and the Dust Bowl Migration, repr. ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), 140Google Scholar. See also Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 259Google Scholar. For a filmic treatment of Steinbeck's novel, see The Grapes of Wrath, directed by John Ford (Twentieth Century Fox, 1940).

37. Denning, 259.

38. Pezman interview.

39. Lange, Dorothea and Taylor, Paul Schuster, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939)Google Scholar; Woody Guthrie, The Dust Bowl Ballads, LP recording (Victor, 1940); The Plow That Broke the Plains, directed by Pare Lorentz, U.S. Resettlement Administration, 1936.

40. Cunningham, Charles, “‘To Watch the Faces of the Poor’: Life Magazine and the Mythology of Rural Poverty in the Great Depression,” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 29.3 (1999): 278–302Google Scholar, at 280.

41. Stryker quoted in Meltzer, Milton, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1978), 176Google Scholar. Thanks to Charles Cunningham for bringing Meltzer's work to my attention.

42. Cunningham, 280.

43. Steinbeck quoted in Denning, 267; Steinbeck, John, In Dubious Battle (1936; New York: Penguin Classics, 2006)Google Scholar; Steinbeck, John, Their Blood Is Strong (San Francisco: Simon J. Lubin Society of California, 1938)Google Scholar. Their Blood Is Strong may have been distributed during a subsequent production of The Sun Rises in the West in San Francisco; see Goldstone, Adrian H., John Steinbeck: A Bibliographical Catalogue of the Adrian H. Goldstone Collection (Austin: Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, 1974), 42Google Scholar.

44. Weber, Devra, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 48–9Google Scholar.

45. Leung, Peter C. Y. and Ma, L. Eve Armentrout, “Chinese Farming Activities in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta: 1910–1941,” Amerasia 14.2 (1988): 1–18Google Scholar, at 2–3.

46. McWilliams, Carey, Factories in the Fields: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (1939; repr., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

47. Denning, 262; Hughes, Langston, One-Way Ticket (New York: Knopf, 1949)Google Scholar; Wright, Richard, 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (New York: Viking Press, 1941)Google Scholar.

48. Wyman, Marilyn, “Affirming Whiteness: Visualizing California Agriculture,” Steinbeck Studies 16.1 and 2 (2005): 32–55Google Scholar, at 37.

49. Ibid., 38–9.

50. See Galarza, Ernesto, Man of Fire: Selected Writings, ed. Ibarra, Armando and Torres, Rodolfo D. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013)Google Scholar for some of Galarza's key writings on Mexican labor in the United States, his labor organizing strategies, and his role in the founding of the United Farm Workers Union.

51. Shindo, Charles J., Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 2Google Scholar.

52. Shindo, 2.

53. Gregory, “James N., American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 243Google Scholar.

54. Shindo, 7.

55. Johnson, Kevin R., “The Forgotten ‘Repatriation’ of Persons of Mexican Ancestry and Lessons for the War on Terror,” Pace Law Review 26.1 (2005): 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Johnson refers to Depression-era repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans as “forgotten” because of the lack of attention it receives in public discourse (1). He also writes that while “repatriation” is a term usually reserved to describe the removal of foreign-born peoples from the United States, the “Mexican” repatriation of the 1930s also removed several American citizens of Mexican ancestry (4). See also Balderrama, Francisco E. and Rodríguez, Raymond, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

56. Kanellos, Nicolás, “An Overview of Hispanic Theatre in the United States,” in Hispanic Theatre in the United States, ed. Kanellos, Nicolás (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1984), 7–13Google Scholar, at 10.

57. John C. Miller, “Contemporary Hispanic Theatre in New York,” in Hispanic Theatre in the United States, ed. Kanellos, 24–33, at 24–5.

58. Kanellos, 11.

59. Miller, 24.

60. Kanellos argues that the “restoration” of Latin American theatre began just after World War II throughout the Southwest and Midwest (12). For a discussion of Latin American theatre and performance in its many permutations before and after the 1930s, see Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/o America, ed. Taylor, Diana and Villegas, Juan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

61. Denning, 261.

62. “Director's Report,” Production Bulletin 1938, Box 1078, untitled folder, FTP Collection, LoC.

63. “Audience Reactions,” Production Bulletin 1938.

64. Ibid.

65. “Federal Theatre Review.”

66. Flanagan, 272.