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The
Federal Theatre Project
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INTRODUCTION
During the late 1920's and early 1930's, an important
theatrical movement developed: The Workers' Theatre Movement (clicking
here will take you to a page describing
significant aspects of that movement.). It eventually diminished in
importance around the middle of the 1930's, and one of the developments
aiding the decline of the Workers' Theatre Movement, by using many
of its methods and theatrical devices, was the formation of the Federal
Theatre Project. Once the government took on the task of putting people
to work producing theatre, it was able, in part, to subsume the movement.
The Federal Theatre Project attempted to put unemployed theatre workers
back to work (popular radio and talking movies has virtually replaced
vaudeville as America's favorite forms of entertainment, and most
vaudevillians saw their jobs disappear); the FTP tried, further, to
present theatre that was relevant--socially and politically, was regional--reflected
its local area, and had popular prices--many of the shows were free.
Most of its famous productions, although not all of them, came out
of New York City: New York had a classical unit, Negro unit, and units
performing vaudeville, children’s plays, puppet shows, caravan productions,
and the new plays unit. The Federal Theatre
Project was the only fully government-sponsored theatre ever in the
United States.
BACKGROUND
The decade of the 1920s was an era of apparently
prosperous but in fact endangered economy; weaknesses in the agricultural
system and the dependence on an industrial urban machine lead to the
stock-market crash and Great Depression in October 1929. By winter
1930-31, 4 million were unemployed; by March 1931, 8 million. Herbert
Hoover did apparently little, thinking prosperity was just around
the corner. By 1932, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected, the
national income was half that of 1929; there were 12 million unemployed
(one of four). Within two weeks of his inauguration, in 1933, FDR
reopened three-fourths of the Federal Reserve Banks and continued
to try to fix the economy.
Many called FDR's administration "the Alphabetical
Administration"--it was often ridiculed because it seemed to
have so many different organizations designated by different groups
of letters. For instance, the C. C. C., the Civilian Conservation
Corps, started in 1933 and found jobs for over 250,000 men. Further,
The National Recovery Administration, or N.R.A., also started in 1933
and put 2 million people to work in forest preservation. The Federal
Emergency Relief Act, or F. E. R. A., started in 1933, headed by Harry
Hopkins, who was a friend and former campaign manager of FDR,
put $500 million back into circulation. By 1933
the economy had recovered a bit, but reforms quickened the recovery
even more. One of those reforms was the W.P.A.
The
W. P. A., or Works Progress Administration,
was started in 1935 to give jobs to unemployed people in their areas
of skill; this was also headed by Harry Hopkins. There
were four arts projects formed for white-collar workers: Art,
Music, Writers,
and Theatre. The four arts projects spent less than 3/4 of 1 percent
of the total WPA budget, yet were blamed for being un-democratic and
wasteful. Most blame fell on the Federal
Theatre Project [this
link takes you to the American Memory, New Deal Collection page
at the Library of Congress]--formed August 27, 1935, with its first
production in 1936, it remained in existence until 1939. It employed
10,000 people per year on average; up to 12,000 people at its highest.
The Federal
Theatre Project [this
link takes you to an article (also at the Library of Congress)
on the FTP by Dr. Lorraine Brown of George Mason University, one of
the two people responsible for discovering the FTP files in an airplane
hanger in Baltimore) gave 1200 productions of at least 850 major works
and of 309 new plays (29 new musicals) to an audience estimated at
25 million people in 40 states. (You can see a number of photos of
FTP productions by going here.)
DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT
Hopkins didn’t want just a relief project, though
that was important. He turned to Hallie
Flanagan [this
link takes you to the Library of Congress site] (1898-1969), who
was a teacher and director at Grinnell College in Iowa. She had been
a student in George
P. Baker’s famous Workshop 47 class at Harvard; when Hopkins hired
Flanagan, she was running the experimental theatre at Vassar College
in New York. Hopkins hired Flanagan
[this
link takes you to the Billy Rose Theatre Collection at New York
City's Public Library at Lincoln Center] to be the head of the Federal
Theatre Project, which was divided into five areas--New York City,
the East, the South, the Midwest, and the West. Flanagan
had been influenced by European theatre, German Theatre and, American
workers’ theatre. The Communist revolution had occurred in Russia
in 1918 and many Europeans came to the U.S.; many were Communists.
The Federal Theatre Project also had units in Florida,
Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and many
others all around the country, and eventually grossed over $2 million.
THE FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT'S CONTROVERSIES
Despite all of its benefits, the F. T. P. was plagued
by censorship, political problems, and inefficiency. The
problems began to appear almost immediately: the FTP experimented
with a theatre form that Flanagan had used at Vassar, called "the
living newspaper" (click here
for a list of available photos) --montage documentaries, carefully
researched, with clear points of view, using the Epic
theatre techniques of Piscator
and Meyerhold’s
constructivist techniques. Most Living Newspapers used a common man
as their unifying character, whose curiosity about the current problem
has been aroused. The character is then led through a background of
the problem, which clarifies the issue for the audience. The FTP’s
first Living Newspaper, planned for production in January 1936 but
never produced, was called Ethiopia. The show depicted Haile
Salassie, leader of Ethiopia. Washington immediately ordered that
no current ministers or heads of state could be represented in the
Federal Theatre Project plays, a policy that was eventually modified
to allow for actual quotes, but still no depictions of real heads
of state were allowed. Playwright Elmer
Rice, who had taken the position as director of the New York City
project, resigned over what he thought was censorship. The incident
was highly publicized (Flanagan said later that the publicity may
have kept the FTP as free from censorship as it was). Other living
newspapers followed, however, and became what some have called one
of two unique American contributions to world theatre (the other being
the musical):
Triple-A
Plowed Under (1936) dealing with Agricultural Administration
Act, which paid farmers to ruin their own crops;
One
Third of a Nation (1938), based on a pledge Roosevelt
made in his second inaugural address to feed and house the nation;
Power
(1937), about monopolies of power companies and about the Tennessee
Valley Authority;
and Spirochete
(1937), about the problem of Syphilis.
THE "NEGRO UNITS"
The "Negro Units" of the Federal Theatre
Project were headed by Rose McClendon, a well-known black actress,
and John
Houseman, a theatre producer who was able to get actor/director
Orson
Welles to work with the unit. (10 percent of the Federal Theatre
Project budget could be used to pay non-relief workers). There were
Negro units in many cities, but the most notorious was New York’s:
it produced a Swing Mikado, a swing version of the Gilbert
and Sullivan show, Negro spokesman and author W.
E. B. DuBois’s Haiti, and, perhaps the most famous,
the Voodoo
Macbeth, for which Welles brought in actual "witch doctors"
from the Caribbean (click here
for some photos and here
for even more photos and other fascinating material).
SOCIALLY SIGNIFICANT PLAYS
It
Can’t Happen Here, a dramatization of Sinclair Lewis’s novel,
opened on October 27, 1936, in 17 different locations simultaneously
around the United States, including one black production. The show
dealt with an imaginary fascist takeover in the United States; Flanagan
wanted lots of publicity with this show and doing so many productions
at the same time did the trick.
The
Cradle Will Rock was rehearsed by Welles’s and Houseman’s
FTP unit to be produced in June of 1937.
Marc
Blitzstein wrote this show, which is more like an opera than anything
else, about Larry Foreman, a worker in Steeltown (played in the original
production by Howard
da Silva), which is run by the boss, Mister Mister (played in
the original production by Will
Geer -- Grandpa in "The Waltons").
The show clearly had left-wing and unionist sympathies
(Foreman ends the show with a song about "onions" taking
over the town and the country), and has become legendary as an example
of a "censored" show. Shortly before the show was to open,
FTP officials in Washington announced that no productions would open
until after July 1, 1937, the beginning of the new fiscal year. John
Houseman writes in his book Runthrough about the
circumstances surrounding the opening of the show.
Photo:
The Cradle Will Rock in rehearsal
All the performers had been enjoined not
to perform on stage for the production when it opened on July 14,
1937. The cast and crew left their government-owned theatre and walked
20 blocks to another theatre, with the audience following. No one
knew what to expect; when they got there Blitzstein himself was at
the piano and started playing the introduction music. One of the non-professional
performers, Olive Stanton, who played the part of Moll, the prostitute,
stood up in the audience, and began singing her part. All the other
performers, in turn, stood up for their parts. Thus the "oratorio"
version of the show was born. Apparently, Welles had designed some
intricate scenery, which ended up never being used. Welles and Houseman
left the FTP shortly after that, and formed the Mercury Theatre (later
to become famous for their controversial War of the Worlds
radio broadcast, which had put much of the country in a panic),
performed Cradle on Sundays, and later took the show
to Broadway.
Revolt
of the Beavers. The Federal
Theatre Project also had active Children's Theatre units; they were
not immune to criticism, either. One of the most infamous children's
plays was Revolt of the Beavers -- criticized for its
socialistic viewpoint (click the image or title above to see more
information).
Sing
for your Supper was the production
that became the most visibly and publicly condemned by Congress, which
eventually led to the closing of the Federal Theatre Project. The
show opened in the spring of 1939 (the opening date is disputed in
various sources), after eighteen months of rehearsal. (Brooks Atkinson's
review of the show in the New York Times was entitled,
"Federal Theatre's 'Sing For Your Supper' Officially Concludes
Rehearsal Period" [25 April 1939, 18:6]).
The long rehearsal period was a caused by a number
of factors and led to even further condemnation by a Congress determined
to close the FTP down: actors would be seen by agents and get hired
for other shows; the FTP then had to find other performers and rehearse
with them; and in the meantime other performers would find other jobs.
Adding this to the red tape involved in getting funding and approval
for any changes, it is remarkable that the show went up at all.
Supper closed on the last
day of the FTP’s existence, June 30, 1939. It was a topical revue
about what the performers were doing--they were indeed singing for
their supper, which would be paid for by the federal government.
THE DEMISE
OF FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT
Partly because of its 18-month-long rehearsal
time, and partly because of long-held suspicions that the FTP was
fraught with Communists and fellow travelers, Congress shut it down.
Republican member of Congress, Martin
Dies, became the head of a new committee, the House
Un-American Activities Committee, charged to find those in and
out of government participating in un-American Activities (this committee
would, of course, continue through the forties and into the ‘50s,
until it was eventually stifled by the negative publicity of Congress-member
Joseph
McCarthy). Dies deplored the FTP’s inefficiency, extravagance,
and political satire, along with its lewdness, waste, and leftism,
calling it a propaganda machine.
Members of this committee certainly didn’t know
much about theatre: when Flanagan mentioned, during testimony, the
name of Christopher
Marlowe, one member of Congress asked whether Marlowe was a Communist.
Despite their ignorance (my editorial: or perhaps because of it),
Congress removed all funds from FTP projects. The other three Arts
Projects--Music, Art, and Writing--continued to be funded by Congress
until 1941.
The Federal Theatre Project had brought
theatre to millions who had never seen theatre before, it employed millions
of people, it introduced European epic theatre and Living Newspaper
theatre techniques to the United States, and hence could be seen as
a great success. In fact, it is a unique development in the American
theatre, whose implications are still not clear. At the very least,
it has shown the debilitating effects that can occur in the United States
when politicians and bureaucrats have ultimate control over what should
be an artistic endeavor.
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