https://www.amazon.com/Tim-Buck-conscience-Oscar-Ryan/dp/0919396267/?tag=2022091-20
1975
(Eight Men Speak had been written and staged on behalf of ...)
Eight Men Speak had been written and staged on behalf of the campaign to free Buck by the Canadian Labour Defence League, the public advocacy group of the CPC. In its theatrical techniques, incorporating avant-garde expressionist staging, mass chant, agitprop and modernist dramaturgy, Eight Men Speak exemplified the vanguardist aesthetics of the Communist left in the years before the Popular Front.
https://www.amazon.com/Eight-Men-Speak-Literature-Collection-ebook/dp/B017HWAOZY/?tag=2022091-20
1976
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0919888283/?tag=2022091-20
1980
Oscar was born on June 27, 1904, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His parents were of Jewish descent and had immigrated to Canada. He is the son of Adolph Weinstein (a bookkeeper and peddler of small wares and religious sundries) and Sarah (worked in tobacco and clothing factories; maiden name, Rein).
As a youth Oscar worked variously, including jobs in a hotel, grocery story, country club, factories, as well as in the fur industry and as a shipper. Later he worked in a wood-working shop, with pulp-magazine publishers, and in freelance advertising and copywriting for retail stores.
He became a speaker at numerous events at the Young Communist League during 1928-29. He was a publicity director at the Canadian Labour Defence League in 1930.
In 1931 he founded Progressive Arts Club. Oscar was a cofounder and editorial board member of publication Masses during 1932-33. Besides, he was a staff member of the Worker and the Daily Clarion in Toronto since 1930.
Ryan published poetry and began to edit various publications, including Young Worker, the children’s magazine Always Ready, Canadian Labour Defender, and the Winnipeg Voice of Labour. During the 1930s he began a column on stage news and commentary called “Footlight Footnotes” that published in the Clarion; it was revived in 1983 by the Canadian Tribune. Ryan also used his working-class background and his leftist politics to form the basis for a theater of political protest in Canada - a theater that diverged from both U.S. and British models. The group he founded, the Progressive Arts Movement, also “felt that too few artists were engaged in social questions,” the Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor concluded, “and that many ignored their role as cultural workers in relation to social struggles.”
In 1933 Oscar wrote Eight Men Speak. The play was written in response to the events surrounding the arrest, conviction, and incarceration of Tim Buck, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Canada. “The plot of Eight Men Speak, however, goes much further than the actual circumstances of the trials in the range of issues that it succeeds in addressing,” remarked Adams, detailing: “Eight Men Speak talks about workers’ history, the unemployed, and immigrants in Canada... (and also) exposes the media as a source of distortion and accuses government of being removed from the lives of ordinary people.” “The play is compelling,” judged Adams, “and engages its audience through its use of many different styles and techniques...''
Oscar went through military service: Queen’s Own Rifles (reserve battalion). He also served in Toronto during World War ll.
Oscar Ryan has been known for over fifty years as a Canadian theater director, writer. He is also famous as a playwright and social activist, that he has earned a unique place in Canadian cultural history. During the Great Depression, Ryan helped found the Canadian workers theater movement, which revolutionized Canadian theater arts and created an indigenous working-class theater of protest. Ryan’s most famous politically oriented play was Eight Men Speak.
(Eight Men Speak had been written and staged on behalf of ...)
1976In 1941 Oscar married Toby Gordon (an actress and co-founder of Workers’ Theatre, Theatre of Action, and the Toronto Play Actors). They have a child, Sandy Ellen.
