Theater, by accident

Of ALL the Depression-era jobs programs created by the Works Progress Administration, the Federal Theatre Project was the most controversial. Conservative congressmen, unhappy about the U.S. government hiring people to pave roads or build airports, were livid at the idea of handing out federal paychecks to actors. “They’ve got to eat just like other people,” declared WPA chief Harry Hopkins. At the flood tide of the New Deal’s popularity in 1935, Hopkins’ view prevailed, bringing theater to people across America who had never seen a live performance -- and at ticket prices even a sharecropper could afford.

Susan Quinn recaptures those heady years in American theater between 1935 and 1939 in “Furious Improvisation.” Led by a red-headed dynamo named Hallie Flanagan, the Federal Theatre Project staged such fare as the socially conscious Living Newspaper series and the lightweight “Up in Mabel’s Room.” The project presented classical Greek plays, Shakespeare, modern drama, musicals, religious pageants, vaudeville, children’s theater and puppet shows. There were African American companies and groups that performed in Yiddish, Italian, German, French and Spanish. Mobile units toured the country, playing for flood victims and federal workers. This variety reflected Flanagan’s vision of a distinctively American national theater, as eclectic and democratic as Europe’s centralized state theaters were not.

The project “has been the best friend the theatre as an institution has ever had in this country,” New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson wrote in 1939 in response to congressional hearings depicting it as a hotbed of communism and race-mixing, an egregious waste of taxpayers’ money that produced work with dangerous political leanings and no artistic merit. The appeals of Atkinson and other prominent theater boosters were unavailing. That year, Congress sent President Roosevelt an appropriations bill excluding the Federal Theatre Project; he reluctantly signed it to avoid throwing more than 3 million other WPA employees out of work.

Quinn focuses on a few paradigmatic shows that encapsulate the theater project’s achievements and conflicts, including “Ethiopia,” the first production of the New York unit, its largest and most fractious group, which launched the Living Newspaper series. Flanagan envisioned the series as a means to dramatize current events and -- not so incidentally, since she was running a jobs program -- to employ hundreds of people in a single play. The play’s depiction of fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia proved too incendiary for Washington bureaucrats -- and the production was canceled on the eve of its premiere in January 1936. Less than two months later, however, “Triple-A Plowed Under” stirred audiences and critics with its impressionistic, avant-garde portrayal of the U.S. farm crisis; after a long run in New York, it was later staged by regional groups.

Hopkins’ promise that government-funded theater would be “free, adult, uncensored” was not honored without a struggle, but political dramas were among the project’s memorable productions. The most ambitious was “It Can’t Happen Here,” Sinclair Lewis’ adaptation of his novel about a fascist takeover of the United States, which opened simultaneously on Oct. 27, 1936, in more than 20 theaters across the country. The most famous was “The Cradle Will Rock,” Marc Blitzstein’s fiery labor opera, whose stormy premiere on June 16, 1937, has become a legend (and the subject of a 1999 film by Tim Robbins). Quinn’s evenhanded appraisal shows Flanagan caught between WPA officials, who were struggling with major budget cuts and not disposed to be sympathetic to what they saw as deliberately inflammatory, and the production’s 22-year-old director, Orson Welles, who was more interested in making a splash than in compromising.

Plays addressing social issues got the most publicity, but they constituted only 10% of the menu, and Quinn is careful to do justice to the project’s vast scope. Its scrappy, improvisatory gusto is highlighted by “The CCC Murder Mystery,” which nine different companies took to Civilian Conservation Corps camps around the country. The production of T.S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” fulfilled the project’s twin mandates to put people to work and produce artistically challenging theater. Young director Halstead Welles (no relation to Orson) took a cast of mostly old-time actors unversed in poetic drama and crafted an imaginative production “that forced critics to take the Federal Theatre Project seriously.” The author also follows Flanagan on a 1937 inspection tour with stops in Chicago for a “biblical extravaganza in Yiddish,” in Los Angeles for a thrilling children’s production of “Pinocchio” and in Seattle for an ill-fated black production of “Lysistrata.”

The African American units were the source of some of project’s proudest achievements, including such popular, groundbreaking productions as “The Swing Mikado” and “the voodoo ‘Macbeth,’ ” as it was known. Black artists were delighted “to discard bandanna and burnt-cork casting,” and they appreciated the project’s refusal to perform in a Cincinnati theater with segregated seating. Quinn persuasively argues that these enlightened racial policies outraged the project’s critics at least as much as any left-wing sentiments its productions voiced. During congressional hearings, she notes, several of the “purportedly offensive” passages cited were “by or about the experience of a black man and [were] read to a white woman.”

No one can top Flanagan’s description in her 1940 book, “Arena,” of the surreal experience of testifying before congressmen so reflexively hostile that when she referred to Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, one of them asked, “Is he a Communist?” But Quinn’s distance from the tumult enables her to give a more candid analysis of the broader political currents that shaped the government’s poorly managed defense of the theater project, including the fact that Hopkins, who had presidential aspirations, may well have concluded that it was a political liability best sacrificed for the good of the entire WPA.

Even in the New Deal’s heyday, when big government was as popular as it ever got in this country, Americans were uneasy about federally subsidized artistic endeavors. The author shows Flanagan and others in the Federal Theatre Project grappling with this unease throughout its life span; because Quinn doesn’t minimize the difficulties encountered by project participants, their achievements seem all the more remarkable and the project’s transience unsurprising, if poignant. “[F]or a brief time in our history, Americans had a vibrant national theatre almost by accident,” she writes. Perhaps that’s the only way we will ever have a national theater. *