“Theatre, when it’s good, can change things.” So said Hallie Flanagan, a theater teacher chosen 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 a fascinating new book about this little-known chapter in American theater history, Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro examines the short, tragic life of the Federal Theater Project. This was a New Deal program overturned by Martin Dies, a bigoted, ambitious, firebrand congressman from East Texas, with the help of his political and media allies, in a version of the culture wars of the 1930s.
From 1935 to 1939, this fledgling relief program, part of the WPA, or Works Progress Administration, brought compelling theater to the masses, presenting more than a thousand productions in 29 states, seen by 30 million, or about 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, which opened in Harlem and toured parts of the country where Jim Crow still ruled; a modern dance project that included black protest songs; 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 model or “playbook” for the more well-known hearings of Senator Joseph’s House Un-American Activities Committee. McCarthy in the 1950s. and to today’s right-wing cultural warriors who seek to ban books in public schools and censor high school productions of popular plays.
The Dies committee hearings began on August 12, 1938, and over the next four months, Shapiro writes, “reputations would be tarnished, impartiality abandoned, hearsay evidence would be accepted as fact, and those with honest differences of opinion would be considered anti-American.” The following June, President Roosevelt, whose popularity was in decline, eliminated all government funding for the program.
In the epilogue, Shapiro briefly wonders what might have happened if the Federal Theater had survived. Perhaps “a more vibrant theater culture… a more informed citizenship… a more equitable and resilient democracy”? Instead, he writes: “Martin Dies begat Senator Joseph McCarthy, who begat Roy Cohn, who begat Donald Trump, who begat the horned ‘QAnon Shaman,’ who from the Senate dais on January 6, 2021, thanked his fellow insurgents to the Capitol “for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists and the traitors within our government.”
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