Opening night
The Venice Theatre, 6/16/37

The Cradle Will Rock was written "at white heat," according to Marc Blitzstein; it took
him five weeks. Our image of Blitzstein in this period is of an artist possessed,
mourning the recent death of his wife Eva Goldbeck, driven by conviction to
abandon the intellectual experimentalism of his earlier compositions and create
something with the audience in mind. The score he fashioned would fuse his avant
garde sensibility with the popular song forms of jazz and Broadway, because that
was the way his political message would reach a real audience, outside the insular
confines of the theatre and music intelligentsia.

The first thing Blitzstein wrote for Cradle was "The Nickel Under the Foot," though he
didn't yet know this "song sketch" would become the basis for an opera. It was just a
little idea he had: A prostitute, who sells her body for money because she's hungry,
thinks she sees a nickel on the floor, but it turns out there's no nickel there at all.
Before Eva's death, the couple had met Bertolt Brecht. (Eva was working on some
Brecht translations, including Threepenny Novel; significantly, Marc would go on to
translate The Threepenny Opera later in his career.) When Blitzstein played through
the prostitute's song, Brecht suggested that this could be used as the centerpiece of
a play about figurative, as well as literal, prostitution.

Originally, Cradle was to be directed by Orson Welles under the auspices of the
Actors' Repertory Company; this fell through, perhaps due to the play's incendiary
themes. "Apparently," Blitzstein wrote to his father, "I've turned out a firebrand which
nobody will touch."

Welles and John Houseman decided to include Cradle in the 1937 season of
Federal Theatre Project 891. They had just scored multiple successes: the farce
Horse Eats Hat; Faustus with Welles in the lead; and the legendary "voodoo
Macbeth," set in Haiti and staged in Harlem with an all-black cast. Welles and
Houseman arranged for Blitzstein to play through Cradle for Hallie Flanagan, the
dynamic head of the Federal Theatre. The next day, Cradle was officially added to
Project 891's lineup.

As designed and directed by Orson Welles, The Cradle Will Rock was a
complicated, spectacular affair. According to some accounts, Blitzstein was
concerned that his social message would be lost under the weight of Welles' epic
sets, illuminated glass-bottomed carts, and hundreds of lighting cues. During the
finale, the stage itself was to literally rock.

Throughout the long rehearsal process, it was obvious to all concerned that Cradle
was in the unique position of becoming more timely than it had been when it was
written. There were strikes and riots in several northern industrial cities; there was
lethal police brutality during a labor march organized by Republic Steel workers in
Chicago; there was increased friction between the old-school, A.F.L. style of
unionism -- in which unions divided workers by specialty -- and the new, progressive
approach advocated by the C.I.O., which argued that workers would only have
bargaining leverage with their bosses if they united as one organization.

The labor movement -- like all progress -- was fiercely fought and condemned by the
conservative, wealthy side of American society. The world of wealth and power was
deeply suspicious of labor unions, and also of Roosevelt's Works Progress
Administration. The WPA arts programs were seen as particularly expendable.

In Run-Through: A Memoir, John Houseman writes:

"Rumors of cuts and pink slips filled the air. These were denied by administrators who still hoped
against hope to preserve at least a part of the work-relief structure they had so devotedly and
conscientiously erected and by those who, like Hallie, sincerely believed that the Federal Theatre,
through its good work, had earned the right to live on as a form of national theatre. But they
brought panic to those who, on WPA (some for the first time in their lives), held steady jobs and
enjoyed a sense of belonging, and who now faced the prospect of being thrown back into the
despair of unemployment and local relief. YOU WON'T DIE TODAY, said the handbills. BUT HOW
LONG CAN YOU LIVE WITHOUT YOUR JOB? Fanning the fear and the anger were the extremists
on both sides. On one hand, there were those, in and out of Congress, who had never ceased to
feel that relief workers were bums, encouraged by a 'socialist' administration to believe that the
world owed them a living, and who regarded the Arts Projects as a particularly dangerous form of
Trojan horse, loaded with screwballs and Reds. On the other, there were those for whom the
projects and their human problems had, from the first, formed useful beachheads for political
action -- those who now saw in the relief reductions a weapon of agitation and propaganda of
which they were determined to make the widest possible use."

In its earliest incarnation, the House Un-American Activities Committee -- perhaps
the most destructive force in twentieth-century American culture -- emerged to
combat the New Deal. Representative Martin Dies was McCarthy before McCarthy. In
early June, the right-wing Committee had exerted sufficient influence for the federal
government to announce an immediate thirty-percent cut in the New York Federal
Theatre Project budget. Seventeen hundred workers were dismissed. On June 12,
the Federal Theatre Project issued a memorandum prohibiting, "because of
impending cuts and reorganization, any new play, musical performance, or art
gallery to open before July 1." The Cradle Will Rock was to open in previews on
June 16.
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