‘It was . . . theater for people who had no money.’

This month the Actors Alley Repertory Theatre in Sherman Oaks is celebrating the 50th anniversary of a distant period in American theater when the federal government paid actors to act and let the public watch for little or no charge.

That was from 1935 to 1939, when the Federal Theatre Project employed out-of-work actors, directors, set designers, stage hands, clerks, ushers and even writers as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, the New Deal program created to put the nation back to work.

Under today’s more laissez-faire conditions, professional actors who want to practice and be seen perform for next to nothing at small theaters like the 68-seat Actors Alley, under special contract with their unions.

So it is with an envious sort of nostalgia that Actors Alley is staging “Me Third,” a 50-year-old social satire written and originally produced on the federal payroll.

After a special showing Friday, the theater held a reunion for anyone in the Los Angeles area who worked for the unusual Depression-era program.

The invitation list was impressive. Notable names were John Houseman, Joseph Cotten, E. G. Marshall and Burt Lancaster.

The party was organized by Prof. Lorraine Brown of George Mason University in Virginia, the director of the University’s Institute on the Federal Theatre Project and New Deal Culture.

Brown has almost single-handedly revived the memory of the federal theater project from the oblivion into which it sank after Congress cut its funds in 1939 and called its director, Hallie Flanagan, before the House Un-American Activities Committee to face questions about Communist infiltration.

In that acrimonious atmosphere, the program’s administrators packed every record and artifact they could into boxes and foot lockers, which the federal government relegated to bulk storage.

The cache remained out of circulation for almost 40 years until Brown, on a tip from a clerk at the Library of Congress, went to an obscure federal warehouse in a town east of Baltimore.

There she opened a foot locker and felt the thrill of looking into King Tut’s tomb. It contained scripts, stage notes, set designs, handbills and photographs from hundreds of productions.

The materials recorded the breadth of America’s dramatic expression in a period of social turmoil.

“It spoke to the people, not Broadway audiences,” Brown said Friday. “It was meant for people who had not been in the theater before, theater for people who had no money.”

There was, for example, the “swingcopated” version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Mikado,” produced by an all-black company in Detroit. There was Upton Sinclair’s “It Can’t Happen Here,” a fictional portrayal of a Communist takeover of America through the electoral process.

And there was “Me Third,” a spoof about the puffery of the upper classes.

This quaint play found its way to Actors Alley through the theater’s founder, Arthur Peterson, the white-haired, bushy-browed marshal from the TV program “Soap.”

Introducing the play Friday night, Peterson said he spotted the script in Brown’s archives and recognized it as the first effort of Mary Coyle Chase, who later wrote the Broadway hit “Harvey.”

“Oh, my God,” Peterson said, recalling the moment. “Where has it been? Where has it been?”

Peterson brought it home to Actors Alley.

The result, obediently following the original, took almost three hours to tell a 1930s Cinderella story of the sacrifices of a young working woman living with a politically ambitious husband and his self-absorbed mother and sister.

The lawyer’s campaign slogan, “me third,” short for “God first, the other guy second and me third,” captured the archaic feeling of the piece, which got its laughs from stereotyping and exaggeration.

After it ended, the management of Actors Alley brought out a handsome table of hors d’oeuvres, mostly gobbled up by the 19 members of the cast and friends.

For, as is common at political rallies and receptions, the most glittering guests on the list didn’t come.

Only a handful of Federal Theatre Project alumni showed up, and most left quickly.

Still, the party was not without its touching moments.

Bob Baker, who runs the Marionette Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, said he had hoped to meet others from the project.

Though he did not find any old friends, Baker did find someone who cared about his memories.

For 10 minutes, under the lights of a George Mason University student camera crew, he reminisced about the theater project’s puppet unit which, he said, produced “Pinocchio” and “Alice in Wonderland” before Disney made them into movies.

The interviewer, Barbara Jones Smith, showed Baker a photograph of a nude, muscled Adam, being carved with intricate internal joints.

Baker said it was for the puppet version of “Genesis,” which never was produced.

“Those are Chris’s hands,” Baker said with a suggestion of a tear. It was the master puppet carver Charles Christadoro, his mentor in the project.

Eventually Baker drifted into the night alone.

Perhaps he’ll do better when they revive the “swingcopated ‘Mikado.’ ”