“The theater, when it is any good, can change things.” So said Hallie Flanagan, a theater professor tapped by the Roosevelt administration to create a taxpayer-funded national theater during the Depression, when a quarter of the country was out of work, including many actors, directors and other theater professionals.
In an enthralling new book about this little-known chapter in American theater history, Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro examines the short, tragic life of the Federal Theatre Project. That was a New Deal program brought down by Martin Dies, a bigoted, ambitious, rabble-rousing East Texas congressman, with the help of his political allies and the media in a 1930s-era version of the culture wars.
From 1935 to 1939, this fledgling relief program, part of the WPA, or Works Progress Administration, brought compelling theater to the masses, staging over a thousand productions in 29 states seen by 30 million, or roughly one in four, Americans, two-thirds of whom had never seen a play before.
It offered a mix of Shakespeare and contemporary drama, including an all-Black production of “Macbeth” set in Haiti that opened in Harlem and toured parts of the country where Jim Crow still ruled; a modern dance project that included Black songs of protest; and with Hitler on the march in Europe, an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s anti-fascist novel, “It Can’t Happen Here.”
Shapiro, who teaches at Columbia University and advises New York’s Public Theater and its free Shakespeare in the Park festival, argues that Dies provided a template or “playbook” for Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s better-known House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in the 1950s and for today’s right-wing culture warriors who seek to ban books in public schools and censor productions of popular high school plays.
