Adelaide Bean

Adelaide Bean was an American actress, journalist, and member of the Communist Party of the United States of America, born in Connecticut. She studied music and voice at the Oxford School in Hartford, graduating in 1928. Her earliest theatrical work came through the traveling Jitney Players, for whom she played piano. Before pursuing acting full time, Bean spent two years teaching music in Sarasota, Florida, after which she relocated to New York City.

Her Broadway career spanned 1932 to 1933 and included two original productions. She appeared in The Late Christopher Bean and in Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!, both of which marked her first significant acting roles in New York. Following those productions, Bean served as assistant to director Herman Shumlin on The Children's Hour. She subsequently produced the original Broadway production of Let Freedom Ring, written by Albert Barne, a play depicting textile strikes in the South.

In 1935 and 1936, Bean produced Who Fights This Battle, a play about Spain written by Kenneth White and directed by Joseph Losey. The production was written and staged in ten days, featured sixty actors — at least fifty of whom were employed through the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project — and ran for three performances. Bean joined the Communist Party in March 1936, and she and a number of colleagues became active in the rank and file movement of the Actors' Equity Association.

Who Fights This Battle gave rise to the Theatre Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, which eventually became the Theater Arts Committee, known as TAC. Bean served as TAC's executive secretary and produced the TAC Cabaret in 1938 at the Firehouse Theater. The program featured political works including Joe Hill, Peat Bog Soldiers, and Strange Fruit, and proceeds supported war relief in Spain. The TAC Cabaret also contributed to the formation of the Actors Front to Win the War, an effort connected to Charlie Chaplin.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Bean performed in numerous New York venues, among them the Pulitzer Prize Playhouse, Celanese Theater, and Hallmark Hall of Fame, and she accumulated television credits during this period as well. In 1953, another actor reported that she had attempted to recruit him to the Communist Party, and Bean was subsequently blacklisted from the television industry. She then left New York for Chicago, where she continued working in theater alongside other employment. During the 1957 summer season she was an acting member of the Resident Company of the Cherry County Playhouse in Traverse City, Michigan, and she also collaborated with Barrie Stavis on his play Joe Hill.

In the early 1960s, Bean co-authored Bless the Child with Bernice Blohm, a play centered on women workers at a Chicago electrical parts factory. The work premiered at Karamu Theatre in 1963, directed by Reuben Silver, with music by Irma Jurist. Bean served as co-editor of Labor Today from 1971 to 1974. That year, Communist Party chairman Gus Hall invited her to become arts editor of the party's newspaper, The People's Daily World. She accepted and returned to New York City, contributing to the publication into the late 1980s. Her papers are held at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University.