Critical Moments

“Stevedore,” the play by George Sklar and Paul Peters, which will open this evening at the Civic Repertory Theatre, was written in great part out of the experiences of one of the authors–to wit–Paul Peters, but before telling you about him, through the courtesy of the Theatre Union Press department, I would like to say a piece about the other collaborator–George Sklar.

The last named is a very young man, in fact he is but 25. Born in Meridian, Connecticut, he was brought up in a family in which the father was a worker in a munitions factory. Perhaps this accounted for Sklar’s authorship of the pacifistic play “Peace On Earth.” He attended Yale University Drama School and has been active in theatrical circles ever since. He is Jewish, short, wears glasses, is stocky and concerns himself with the social and economic problems of today. He is intense but diffident and believes the stage a fine medium for the advancement of social ideas.

But to return to Paul Peters. This young man has had perhaps the broadest background of experience in American life of any playwright of today. He spent a full year working on the Stuyvesant wharf in New Orleans. The docks, the negro lunch room and homes, and the alley down which no white man would dare to pass are all reproduced in “Stevedore.”

FAMILIAR EVERYWHERE

Peters has had so many working experiences that there is scarcely a field with which he is not familiar.

He was a child worker, then a university man, a teacher, a newspaper reporter. In his late twenties he threw his literary prospects overboard and plunged back into the life of a common laborer. For nearly five years he worked in heavy industry, hitchhiking and bumming his way from one section of the country to another; deliberately starting in each new plant–not in the inside jobs his training qualified him for, but on the pick and shovel crew.

He was a deck hand on an oil tanker, and jumped boat at San Pedro to work on a Los Angeles power project. The day after he got the job the dam burst and five hundred laborers and settlers were drowned. Fifty men in the crew happened to be working above the dam when it went out. He was one of the fifty and spent most of the rest of 1927 salvaging bodies and cleaning up the mess.

In Knoxville, Tennessee, he was a pipe fitter in a textile factory. He worked in steel mills around Pittsburgh, as a laborer on the maintenance crew, as repair man on a blast furnace, as “slagger” on the open hearth. For a year he was a hired man on a farm in Wisconsin. He was a “checker” on the wharf in New Orleans–the nearest he came to a “soft” job in the five years.

ALWAYS A WRITER

As a writing man Peters could not help taking notes on what he saw and felt during those years. He wrote articles at night when his unaccustomed muscles were so tired that he fell asleep over his table. As he toughened to the work he made outlines of plays, but the life of a working man never allowed him enough surplus energy to complete one. So he knocked off for a few months each summer and wrote a play. The original version of “Stevedore” was one of these.

It is his first play to reach production–possibly because a producing group like the non-commercial Theatre Union has not existed before in America. He was one of its founders, and believes thoroughly in its policy of producing “social” plays at low prices, for audiences composed mainly of working people.