Class Divisions on the Broadway Stage ― The Staging and Taming of the I.w.w.

Examining twenty-five years of theatre history, this book covers the major plays that feature representations of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), or "Wobblies". American class movement and class divisions have long been reflected on the Broadway stage and, through the lens of the I.W.W., Michael Schwartz presents a fresh look at the conflict between labor and capital. From O'Neill's The Hairy Ape; Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted; John Howard Lawson's Processional; Harold Hickerson and Maxwell Anderson's Gods of the Lightning; and Upton Sinclair's Singing Jailbirds in the 1920s to O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh in 1946, Schwartz traces the plays' impact of I.W.W. as an actual agent for workers' rights and social change as well as the popular image of the Wobbly - how audiences "saw" Wobblies and what role they played in audience imagination.

Michael Schwartz is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA and the author of Broadway and Corporate Capitalism: The Rise of the Professional Managerial Class 1900-1920 (2009).