Let’s start from the beginning. In 1908, William Lubovsky was born in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants. His father, a bookbinder, lost his job due to economic changes. Will Lee came to adulthood during the Great Depression. He worked odd jobs in New York City and absorbed the intellectual atmosphere of Greenwich Village, an enclave of avant-garde culture where small presses, art galleries, and experimental theater thrived.
It was a chance event that led Will Lee to become an actor. He recalled eating in a New York restaurant when a regular invited him upstairs to join a theater company. Intrigued, but not serious, he sat down with the group. He was asked to improvise, “It’s raining, you’re hungry, you’re cold, you’re walking on Third Avenue and you pass by a bakery.” Since he was always broke and hungry, the part came easy to him. “I did it,” Lee remembered. “They were shocked. They said, ‘Is this the first time you ever did anything like this?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I sat down… As my ass hit the floor, I said to myself, ‘This is the work I want to do.’”
By 1930 he was a full-fledged member of the Worker’s Laboratory Theater, a collective that performed experimental works, often with communist or other political overtones. Later in the 1930s, Lee co-founded the “Theatre of Action,” a socially-conscious mobile theater that performed in every conceivable type of arena, indoor or outdoor.
Why this attraction to communism? During the Depression, it appeared that capitalism had failed. Some in the U.S. began looking elsewhere to ease the economic misery. The Communist party took on fights not just for better wages and working conditions but also in social justice issues. For example, in the Deep South, the battle for freedom for the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers falsely accused of rape in 1931, was led by the International Labor Defense, a legal arm of the Communist Party U.S.A. The Communist party was seen by some Americans as defenders of the working-class and the downtrodden.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration established the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) in 1935 as part of the Works Progress Administration, Will Lee signed up, excitedly declaring the program as a “national theatre renascence in America.” The FTP employed out-of-work artists, writers, directors, and theater workers. Lee was part of its most well-known program, Living Newspaper, which were plays based on current events, often hot button issues like farm policy, syphilis testing, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. FTP ended in 1939 when Congress canceled its funding due to the left-wing political tone of some of its productions.
