The romantics of theater in wartime have often gripped the imagination: from Susan Sontag’s production of Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo, to the Freedom Theater in Jenin, or a recent Hamlet in Yemen. While these exceptional performances are widely lionized, left unsung is the heroically everyday theater that advances social consciousness and raises up its audience along with its art. Yet, as entertainment writers strike — making a last stand for creative content in the face of the oblivion of formulaic and sterile corporate products — it’s high time to recall a moment in America when theater, activism, and the union movement were branches of the same tree.

Traces of worker solidarity and capitalist critique can be found all over trailblazing experiments of the 1930s. Such were the cases of the Group Theater, the Federal Theatre Project, the succès de scandale of Marc Blitzstein’s proletarian musical The Cradle Will Rock, and Clifford Odets’s “strike play,” Waiting for Lefty. Brief but blazing, this moment of theater collectivism and activism tilled a soil rich in nutrients out of which emerged the greatest film ever produced by Hollywood, Citizen Kane, and the dominant force in American drama in the postwar era, the Actors Studio.