The Theatre for Peace (1966-1972)

[For a long time, I’ve been trying to gather enough material to write an article on the Theatre for Peace, an anti-war organization that existed during the Vietnam era.  So far—and I’ve been searching on and off for information on the TFP since the mid- and late 1990s—I haven’t had a lot of success.  

[Part of the problem has been that the TFP was in operation long before there was an Internet—and so far, no one has posted a memoir or history of the organization.  It only seems to have existed for about six years and its press coverage included mostly reviews of the productions it supported and occasional announcements of its programs and workshops.

[Another difficulty with this research is that during the Vietnam-protest period, there were hundreds of groups with the same or analogous aims and agendas, many of which had higher profiles than the Theatre for Peace.

[There are, unfortunately, also dozens of modern-day organizations with names similar to the Theatre for Peace, most of them abroad.  When there’s a pertinent site that might provide facts about the TFP which I’m researching, it gets buried in the pile of like-named programs than can number in the hundreds.

[Nonetheless, I’m going to put down what I’ve learned.  Maybe some reader will have some pertinent facts or a lead I can follow.]

The Theatre for Peace was an anti-Vietnam war activist group that operated in New York City from about 1966 to the end of U.S. combat in Southeast Asia in 1972.  Comprised mostly of theater and performing artists, TFP produced plays and other theatrical events and participated in or organized other activities whose aim was to protest—by theatrical means—United States policy in Southeast Asia.

A project of the Committee of the Professions to End the War in Vietnam, which was founded in 1965 by New York psychiatrist Oscar Sachs, who served as chairman, as a political and social action organization (it actively supported the 1968 candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy [1925-68] for president as early as 1966—before the New York senator even declared), the TFP produced plays in and around the city and the Tri-State area, often in union halls and on university campuses.

The Committee of the Professions, as it was commonly known, ran many advertisements, usually signed statements, opposing President Lyndon B. Johnson’s (and then President Richard M. Nixon’s) policies in Vietnam, most vociferously, the military involvement in the war that started under the French in 1940 (First Indochina War); the United States took over in 1955.

On 5 June 1966, for example, the Committee of the Professions co-sponsored a three-page ad in the New York Times at a cost of $20,880 (equivalent to just under $195,000 today).  There were 6,400 signatories to the ad from the faculties of such colleges and universities as Columbia, Harvard, City College of New York, New York University, and the University of California, Berkeley.

The organization also held rallies, “speak-outs,” and demonstrations.  By 1966, the Committee of the Professions had about 750 “affiliates,” according to the New York Times.

The founder of the Theatre for Peace was Gary Pogrow (1941-2010), a graduate of New York’s City College, a teacher of theater, a writer and publisher, and a Freedom Rider in the Civil Rights Movement.  He served as artistic director of the TFP. 

Other founding members included such luminaries in the arts and letters as Swedish-American stage, film, and television actor Viveca Lindfors (1920-95); theater director, actor, playwright, and theater theoretician Joseph Chaikin (1935-2003); theater critic, playwright, editor, and translator Eric Bentley (1916-2020); and actor and director Alvin Epstein (1925-2018), among others. 

The TFP declared that its aim was to develop and stage theater pieces whose purpose was to end the Vietnam war.  (One of these productions was 1967’s Brother, You’re Next, the street musical co-created by Leonardo Shapiro, the avant-garde director about whom I’ve blogged often on Rick On Theater; see my post on 26 January 2010.)

The Theatre for Peace espoused a commitment “to a theater of propaganda in the best sense of the word.”  In a casting notice in Back Stage, the theatrical trade paper in New York, the TPF explained that their productions were “a dramatic way that committed professional theatre people may express opposition to [the] Vietnam war.”

In addition to providing opportunities for artists dissenting from the war in Vietnam “through their own medium,” the TFP’s self-declared mission included reaching “new audiences by performing in churches, community centers, homes, parks, and on the streets,” seeking out, especially, “bookings in universities and in areas of cities which rarely see live theatre.”

Like Brother, You’re Next, which was composed by Shapiro, Stephen Wangh, Chris Rohmann, and Robert Reiser based on Bertolt Brecht’s anti-military play Man Is Man, some of TRP’s offerings were presented in theaters or spaces like auditoriums and meeting halls and had a published schedule. 

Other shows were street theater, as Brother was outside its one indoor mounting, and were guerilla performances, popping up on sidewalks and in parks unannounced, playing for whoever stopped to watch or were attracted to the spectacle.

The scheduled theater performances catered to a paying audience who bought tickets, though the cost was minimal, and the street shows were free, though the performers probably passed a hat before departing for the next venue. 

A third form for TFP shows, as suggested above, was bookings by organizations, such as the schools mentioned or anti-war groups, for their members and those to whom they reached out.  For those performances, TFP charged a fee to cover the cost of transportation and room and board.

The Theatre for Peace (some publications spelled the troupe’s name “Theater for Peace” or called it “Theatre of Peace,” making it hard to locate all the coverage of TFP in databases) also participated in festivals relating to their philosophy.  In 1967, for instance, the theater was part of Angry Arts Week in New York City, 26 January to 5 February. 

The full, official title of the event was Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam (though some publications and archives referred to this event as the Week of the Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam), and The Militant, an international socialist newsweekly connected to the Socialist Workers Party, labeled it “a unique antiwar project.”  The New York City-based paper described the event thus:

There will be protests against the war by members of all the arts—music, painting, theater, poetry, dance, film and combined forms.

The participating artists have slated a multitude of activity to express their revulsion for this war.  Among the programs scheduled are four evenings of theater, two dance concerts, a folk music concert and five film showings.

In addition, caravans of poets and musicians will present 20-minute performances on street corners throughout the city.  Other street protests will take the form of “play-ins” in lobbies of public buildings and dramatic presentations in supermarkets and laundromats.

The New York Times quoted Robert Reitz, a greeting-card designer who was chairman of the Angry Arts organization—which mounted similar events all around the Tri-State region and the Theatre for Peace appeared at many of them as well—that “many artists have wanted to voice their dissent nonviolently and nonpolitically against the war in Vietnam.”

Among the artists and literati who appeared at Angry Arts’ first event were actor Alan Alda, actor Ruby Dee, storyteller and radio show host John Henry Faulk, cartoonist and author/playwright Jules Feiffer, actor Diana Sands, and Hungarian-born writer and theatre director George Tabori (husband of Viveca Lindfors).

At the time of Angry Arts Week, the Theatre for Peace was presenting Happy Hunting, a satirical musical by Academy Award-winning songwriter Lewis Allen about the effects of the Vietnam war and draft on family life.  It was the play TFP performed at the protest event (and several other incarnations of Angry Arts, such as one in Philadelphia in January 1968. 

“It is becoming more difficult to speak and more painful to be silent,” lamented actress Anne Allen (wife of Lewis Allen) at the opening of the play at a subsequent protest event at the University of Hartford in Connecticut, a performance on 19 August 1967.  As characterized by Robert A. Horwitz in the Hartford Courant, these lines

were said without any of the difficulty to which Mrs. Allen referred.  They were said with compassion, with conviction, with love, by experienced, highly professional New York actors who had volunteered an evening without pay to present the Hartford audience a message which they believe deeply: that war is wrong, that the present war is especially senseless, that the official statements which try to justify that war are empty, meaningless words, that man must strive with all his being to achieve peace.”

Horwitz described the performance:

The production which the Theatre for Peace actors staged is called “Happy Hunting.”  It consists of three parts: a dramatic reading of anti-war poetry compiled by the poet Walter Lowenfels [1897-1976; poet, journalist, and member of the Communist Party USA]; a selection of witty nursery rhymes by Lewis All[e]n . . . called “Light Verse, Not to Be Taken Lightly”; and a short playlet with satirical songs, also by Lewis Allen, called “Happy Hunting: A Primer for Primates.”

The message the actors present is not a new one.  War has been decried by writers and artists for centuries; love has been celebrated since the beginning of time.  But the script and the acting is unusually touching in this production.  And the old message takes on a new vitality.

The anti-war poems which began the production are touching because they concern the people, the individual, suffering people involved in war, not merely the politics of it all.

There is the mother who pines for her son in the army: “When will my son return?  He was always a man of peace, and he played baseball in the sun.”

There is the little girl, seven years old, who speaks from her grave in Hiroshima: “I’m a little girl that’s dead.  I’m knocking at your door.  Please hear me and give me just one gift, that you won’t kill any more babies.”

The light verses, short and clever, offered some pithy comments on the current American scene: “The Grand Canyon on a political map/Would be renamed the credibility gap,” and a little ditty about poor old Humphrey Dumphrey [an allusion to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey] who fell all to pieces and couldn’t be put back together again, even by “all Johnson’s horses, all Johnson’s men.”

But it is the playlet “Happy Hunting” which really touches the soul, for here, in a few dramatic minutes, are presented all the ingredients of America suffering in war: the young boy who is drafted, the mother who doesn’t understand why he has to go and cries “Why, why, why” when his casket is later brought in, the “voice of authority” which rationalizes all the horror with rhetoric about the nation’s “commitment to a commitment to a commitment.”

Reporter and reviewer Horwitz remarked, “There are many anti-war plays which, for lack of subtlety, sophistication, or directness, simply fail to convey their intended message.  But ‘Happy Hunting’ . . . is a superior anti-war production.  Its message comes across with poignancy.”

Along with Happy Hunting, the earliest TFP production for which I found a record, the protest troupe produced Near the Wall of Lion Shadows, a “choreodrama” composed of slides, poems, and dances choreographed by Ann Wilson based on poems by Ruth Lisa Schechter; Brother, You’re Next; The Ballad of Joe Smith by Thomas Donlon and directed by Robert Kya-Hill, depicting several levels of army life; Brecht on War, directed by Lindfors; Lysistrata directed by Lenard Rosen, an ancient Greek anti-war comedy by Aristophanes (c. 446-c. 386 BCE), originally performed in Athens in 411 BCE; and Childermas, a choreodrama based on the biblical Slaughter of the Innocents, with a book by Robert Summers and music by Harold Boatright, choreographed by Joan Kerr.

The TFP’s basic plan included “to create, prepare, and present theatrical works aimed at ending the war in Vietnam.”  It also held workshops (one weekly session was conducted by Joe Chaikin) and developed improvisational playlets on Vietnam, welfare, and racism.

One planned workshop, headed by Lindfors with Canadian-born actor Dino Narrizzano, Chaikin, stage director Gladys Vaughan, songwriter and theater director Jacques Levy, Eric Bentley, historian and teacher Stan Steiner, conceptual artist David Rothenberg, and Alvin Epstein, was intended to develop scripts for distribution to student and peace groups around the U.S. and to make films or tapes of well-known artists performing or otherwise demonstrating their feelings about the war in Southeast Asia.

The program was also intended to develop mobile troupes of performers to travel the country to play wherever there was a demand.  There were also plans for a writers’ workshop.    

The troupe’s overall aim, in addition to providing “an artistic forum for opposition to the war in Vietnam,” was to perform for people who ordinarily might not “come to grips with the issues” of the conflict by presenting their work in neighborhood spaces and open venues. 

Jane Speiser, the review-writer for West Side News, who attended the 1968 indoor production of Brother, You’re Next, asserted that TFP had carved out “a difficult job, [but] has attacked it with an uncompromising sense of what makes for dramatic excitement as well as what makes for political commitment.”

[When I first wrote about Brother. You’re Next, years before I created the ROT post of 2010, I saw it only as Leonardo Shapiro’s first public New York effort and the earliest step in the evolution of what would be his life’s principal endeavor, The Shaliko Company (1972-93).

[Later, when I researched Shapiro’s next out-of-school project, the New York Free Theater (1968-71; see my post on 4 April 2010), I saw it as an outgrowth of Brother and Shapiro’s next step toward Shaliko.

[Compiling this profile of the Theatre for Peace, I now see something that I may not have spotted because I hadn’t looked into the work of the TFP beyond the fact that it produced Brother—a one-off, discrete association with Shapiro and his Brother/NYFT colleagues and collaborators.

[Here’s the hypothesis: I think there’s a good chance that the TFP influenced the founders of NYFT when they came up with their agenda for the new street-theater troupe.  Here’s why I suspect this:

[First, look at what the TFP proclaimed as their mission and philosophy.  In addition to their central emphasis, opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, the Theatre for Peace also focused their efforts on fighting racism, specifically, and, more generally, other societal ills, such as poverty.

[Next, the leaders of the organization made a point of performing their shows in accessible places, including the streets and parks of the cities where the TFP appeared, and bringing their performances to people who didn’t often (or ever) get to see live theater.

[The troupe offered workshops to teach others with similar agendas how to promote their ideas all across the country.  It also gave its performances and provided their developmental classes at minimal or no cost because the message and the information was more important than raising money.

[Now, Brother, You’re Next was already developed when Shapiro and his collaborators, who, except for Chris Rohmann, were all NYU undergrad theater students, came together with the Theatre for Peace and the Committee of the Professions.  But the fit was nearly perfect. 

[I think what happened was that once on board with the TFP, working with Lindfors, Tabori, Chaikin (with whom Shapiro was already acquainted from his pre-NYU teen experience with the Living Theatre—see “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 2,” 19 April 2023)—et al., their nascent leanings and proclivities coalesced and gelled into mandates.

[Brother was adamantly anti-war, and the collaborators/creators of the street musical were committed to dissent and opposition.  That wasn’t especially unusual for college students in the mid- and late ’60s; I had the same tendencies down south in central Virginia.  But when those same young actors and directors morphed into the founders of the New York Free Theater, after the encounter with the TFP, ad hoc ideas that they’d applied to Brother, You’re Next evolved into a framework for an activist street troupe.

[Racism was at the top of NYFT’s list of targets, having formed the group because of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on 4 April 1968, but they soon spread out to treat other societal ills such as poverty and consumerism.

[Performance was the main medium for the troupe’s messaging, but they soon added community workshops “intended to aid participants in directing neighborhood programs relating to racism, narcotics and violence” as additional ways to reach out to New Yorkers. 

[NYFT was conceived as a street theater, setting up on sidewalks and in parks, but a spokesperson for the troupe emphasized: “The Free Theater brings radical arts festivals into forgotten, oppressed communities,” just as the TFP did.”

[The pattern of operation for the two organizations is nearly identical.  Now, I suppose that this kind of organizational model was fairly common in the ’60s, with the proliferation of street theaters in New York City and elsewhere, but the close contact between the team that created Brother, You’re Next and then went on to found the New York Free Theater and the artists who formed the Theatre for Peace, even for a short time—especially so close to the emergence of NYFT—leads me to suspect very strongly that there was cross-pollination.]