Every Labor Day for years, I asked: Where are the American plays about workers, workplaces and unions? What began as a rhetorical question became an annual update. Last year, instead of answering the question myself, I turned to Colm Summers, who had recently taken over as artistic director of Working Theater, a New York company that was about to launch its fortieth season as (in the words of their mission statement) “a professional theater for, about and with working people” – the only such theater in New York. The conversation was wide-ranging and surprising, so I turned to him again for this Labor Day, which is a legal holiday created by Congress in 1884 to celebrate not the American barbecue but the American labor union movement. This year’s conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Photos clockwise from top left: “Real Women Have Curves” on Broadway; production of The Garbologists regionally; Skeleton Crew (pictured on Broadway in 2022 ), Scene from La Dureza, part of Working Theater’s Stage Left festival;. regional production of fire work; “In The Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot” Off Broadway
Jonathan Mandell: What is the state of labor and the labor play on this Labor Day, and how does it differ (if it does) from last Labor Day, when I last asked you this question?
Colm Summers: For us, the labor play is at its most successful when it speaks directly to the movement, and from within it — when it involves workers, the stories of workers, and the labor leaders who organize them. I’m glad to say that our inbox is full with more plays than ever before, with new writing focused on the labor movement and its history, and plays that tackle issues facing contemporary labor.
But I know this is just a small part of the larger landscape, which remains focused on spectacle, star vehicles and revivals of known titles.
The important thing to realize is that the issue is not merely the prioritization of working class artists, but of working class audiences. I’m a firm believer that theater by working class artists can serve this untapped constituency and redress the problem of dwindling audience numbers that has haunted the industry since the pandemic.
As for the state of labor, my sense is that the “Big Strike Summer” energy which began in 2023 has shifted into something steadier. Support for the Union movement is at a decades-long high. The Zohran Mamdani phenomenon in New York City is indicative of a major turning point. There is an urgency to organize around the Trump administration’s rollback of worker rights and attacks on immigrant labor. There is enormous energy out there, and that energy needs to be aided and abetted by cultural workers.
JM: Over the past year, Working Theater celebrated its 40th season. This included your mini festival “Stage Left” that presented six labor-related plays, starting with La Dureza, about bicycle messengers, which I saw and enjoyed. What kind of response did you get to the festival and to the season?
CS: Stage Left was the climax of our 40th Season. We wanted to mark the anniversary with something on a scale we had never done before. The premise was this: what if theater could create a context for organizing? Each play was paired with an advocacy partner: gig workers, delivery cyclists, garbage collectors, incarcerated elders, musicians in the streaming economy. Over two weekends, 6 plays, 7 panels, 3 co-producers. 60 artists, and more than 20 organizers and advocacy organizations packed the space at Playwrights Horizons, all in conversation with art as action.
But the rest of our season was also jam-packed. We rang in a new year of the MPCF, our commission for Working Class writers, and one of the only programs providing mentorship at such a high level to artists without inaccessible MFA training. We added a new cohort of our education program, TheaterWorks, which trains union members in theater skills, in partnership with Cornell University. Meanwhile, our Spanish language edition of the program returned for a second year, as we continue to focus on language justice as a form of access building. We continued developing plays as part of Five Boroughs One City. We forged new community engagement initiatives with theaters like Playwrights Horizons. We launched new partnerships.
JM: There are a handful of plays each season that could reasonably be considered workplace dramas, but as I point out every year, it’s rarely been more than that since their heyday nearly a century ago. (But even in Entertainment Weekly’s 2013 list of the 50 best plays of the past 100 years, only Arthur Miller’s 1949 “Death of A Salesman” and Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 “Machinal” give us any sense of what working life is like in America.)
Over the past season in New York, I saw “Real Women Have Curves” on Broadway, which was a musical about mostly undocumented immigrant women working in an L.A dress factory; it ran for just two months. Off Broadway, I saw In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot,” a play about a group of itinerant Amazon warehouse workers in a dystopian future, which ran for a month. More obscurely, Mint Theater Company produced a century-old play called Garside’s Career about a mechanic who becomes a politician. I don’t remember anything else, outside your company, that involved workers or workplaces or unions. “Joy,” a musical Off-Broadway, is about the manufacture of a mop, but it’s really a business story told from the point of view of the entrepreneur, Joy Mangano, a single mother who has a knack for inventing and marketing household products.
What have I missed? Is this enough?
CS: I think you named most of the headline examples. I would add: The Garbologists by Lindsay Joelle has resurfaced again and again regionally, reminding audiences that sanitation is labor we literally can’t live without. fire work, a magical play about child labor by Mary Glen Fredrick, has had a rolling world premiere. American Steel by Alex Lin, commissioned by Working Theater, has gone on to be further developed at the Atlantic (a theater refreshed by recent labor victories backstage). cullud wattah, which was recently at Mosaic in DC, took on Flint’s poisoned water as both an environmental and a labor crisis. Dominique Morisseau’s “shop-floor plays” like Skeleton Crew, and Sweat by Lynn Nottage, continue to be revived across the country.
Is any of this enough? No. While it’s heartening that some of these projects are seeing mainstream success, labor, and the voices of working class artists, remains a small slice of the repertory. The audience is ready for more.
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