Daniel Aaron's chapter on Dos Passos, footnote 10
10. Dos Passos, *NR*, LXVI (April 1, 1931), p. 175. John Howard
Lawson, Mike Gold, Em Jo Basshe were his associates in the New
Playwrights Theatre. Persuaded by Mike Gold, the philanthropist Otto
Kahn donated $30,000 to finance the group ("dubbed the 'revolting
playwrights' by Alexander Woollcott," according to Harold Clurman),
and then proceeded to produce a half-dozen much-criticized plays.
References to the group can be found in Clurman's "The Fervent
Years" (N. Y., 1945) and in *NM*, III (Jan. 1928), p. 27, (March
1928), p. 23, (April 1928), p. 27. Dos Passos's remarks on the New
Playwrights and his observations on the problems and possibilities of
the revolutionary theater are stated in his introduction to his *Three
Plays* (N. Y., 1934), pp. xi-xxu, and in *NM*, IV (Aug. 1929), p. 13,
III (Dec. 1927), p. 20. By "revolutionary," he meant a theater that had
broken with the current theatrical practices, not the theatrical
tradition: "It must draw its life and ideas from the conscious sections
of the industrial and white collar working classes which are out to get
control of the great Tabby mass of capitalist society and mould it to
their own purpose. In an ideal state it might be possible for a group to
be alive and have no subversive political tendency. At present it is not
possible." *NM*, III (Dec. 1927), p. 20. Dos Passos's highly jaundiced
afterthoughts about his New Playwright friends and Lawson in
particular are contained im his rather mediocre novel *Most Likely to
Succeed* (N. Y., 1954).
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