Federal Theatre Project Research Articles

Bulworth (1998) and Cradle Will Rock (1999): Critiquing Capitalism in the Late 1990s

Bulworth (1998) and Cradle Will Rock (1999):Critiquing Capitalism in the Late 1990s Martin Halpern The 2008 economic crisis and the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in 2011 produced wide-ranging discussions about the failings of the existing capitalist order and the need to imagine alternatives to it. Since the emergence of Bernie Sanders as a national figure, the term "socialist" has been a focal point of discussion. Some of the debate involves little more than redbaiting. Indeed, the combination of climate change, the coronavirus, and the presidency of Donald Trump brought a continuous stream of worrisome news that has left little room for optimistic reflections. Searing film portraits of our anxious times such as Sorry to Bother You seek to awaken viewers to the depths of malevolence through which we are living. Rather than examine the dystopian visions in recent films, I will look back at two films from the late 1990s that explore socialist and communist ideas. Indeed, artistic critiques of capitalism and imagining of alternatives to it have been features of cultural life even in quiescent and conformist periods such as the 1990s. Despite the disarray in progressive circles resulting from Clintonite centrism in the 1990s, two major film stars, thanks to their ability to leverage financing for major film projects, gave movie audiences an opportunity to critique a social system that was seemingly stable. Set, respectively, in the 1990s and in the 1930s, Warren Beatty's 1998 film Bulworth and Tim Robbins's 1999 film Cradle Will Rock grappled with the dilemma of how one can both survive within an unjust social order and perhaps even transcend it. Each film focuses on the preservation of individual dignity and either explicitly or implicitly contributes to the strengthening of collective struggle against late capitalism. As well-financed feature films appealing to a mass audience Bulworth and Cradle Will Rock provide critiques of elite capitalists and the capitalist system and offer sustenance and support for the idea that "another world is possible."1 Tim Robbins's 1999 film Cradle Will Rock provides a window on the New Deal. At the center of the film is the 1937 effort to stage Marc Blitzstein's pro-labor opera The Cradle Will Rock while the film's rapidly shifting scenes provide insightful glimpses on the mural movement of Diego Rivera, the struggles of steel workers and the unemployed, women's leadership roles, new opportunities for African Americans, and the roles of anti-communist, pro-fascist, and big-business opponents of the New Deal. The film's central focus is on whether impulses for solidarity and human caring, by artist or worker, may overcome the power of money.2 The danger that capitalists are able to use money to corrupt agents of change is evident in both the play within the movie and in the movie's story. In Blitzstein's play, we see that Mr. Mister, the dominant figure in Steeltown and a symbol of capitalist power, has successfully corrupted the clergy and the media. He also attempts without success to buy off Larry Foreman, the union leader. In the movie story, Blitzstein highlights to Orson Welles, who is about to direct his play, the vulnerability of the artist to the blandishments of capital. Welles is the host of a [End Page 37] successful national radio show and Blitzstein asks him, "How long can you whore your talents before you're used up unwanted?" Acknowledging that everyone needs money, Blitzstein probes, "The question is what will you do for the money? Where do you draw the line?" Robbins's film opens with the words "a (mostly) true story," a reference to the fact that most of the film's characters are historical personalities and to the film's culmination with the depiction of a historic event, the runaway opening night performance of The Cradle Will Rock on June 16, 1937. The film's shifting focus on other historical events that happened earlier and later–the painting and destruction of Diego Rivera's mural at Rockefeller Center in 1933 and 1934, the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on the Federal Theatre Project in 1939...

The Loudspeaker and the Little Man: Mass Media and Democratic Participation in the Federal Theatre Project’s One-Third of a Nation

ABSTRACT In a 1938 hearing with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), director Hallie Flanagan claimed that the U.S. Federal Theatre Project (FTP) (1935-9), which she led, disseminated “propaganda for democracy.” In this paper, I explore the possibilities of propaganda for democracy to describe FTP rhetoric. My focus is a body of work that greatly concerned HUAC. Living Newspapers were full-length, documentary plays about hot-button issues. At the New York Living Newspaper Unit (NYLNU), where journalists and theatre-makers worked side-by-side, Living Newspapers wove original reporting into dramatic narratives. Using theatrical conventions, they reimagined democratic communication for a mass society. My case study is the NYLNU’s most popular Living Newspaper. “One-Third of a Nation” was most explicitly about the lack of affordable housing across the U.S. It was also, however, about how to participate in democratic life. More specifically, it was about how to look at, listen to, and speak up about social issues. One-Third of a Nation addressed these themes by way of two recurring characters: a resounding Loudspeaker, and a plucky Little Man who represented the “average” citizen. Their interplay modeled propaganda for democracy as a dynamic relationship between responsive mass media and self-conscious public speech.

The Loudspeaker and the Little Man: Mass Media and Democratic Participation in the Federal Theatre Project’s One-Third of a Nation

ABSTRACT In a 1938 hearing with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), director Hallie Flanagan claimed that the U.S. Federal Theatre Project (FTP) (1935-9), which she led, disseminated “propaganda for democracy.” In this paper, I explore the possibilities of propaganda for democracy to describe FTP rhetoric. My focus is a body of work that greatly concerned HUAC. Living Newspapers were full-length, documentary plays about hot-button issues. At the New York Living Newspaper Unit (NYLNU), where journalists and theatre-makers worked side-by-side, Living Newspapers wove original reporting into dramatic narratives. Using theatrical conventions, they reimagined democratic communication for a mass society. My case study is the NYLNU’s most popular Living Newspaper. “One-Third of a Nation” was most explicitly about the lack of affordable housing across the U.S. It was also, however, about how to participate in democratic life. More specifically, it was about how to look at, listen to, and speak up about social issues. One-Third of a Nation addressed these themes by way of two recurring characters: a resounding Loudspeaker, and a plucky Little Man who represented the “average” citizen. Their interplay modeled propaganda for democracy as a dynamic relationship between responsive mass media and self-conscious public speech.

The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama

The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama

The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama by Cecelia Moore

Reviewed by: The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Dramaby Cecelia Moore Elizabeth A. Osborne The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama. By Cecelia Moore. New Studies in Southern History. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. x, 221. $95.00, ISBN 978-1-4985-2682-1.) At the height of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deployed the Works Progress Administration with the intent of providing relief to the unemployed by putting them to work in their fields of expertise. One arena was the Federal Theatre Project (FTP, 1935–1939), a nationwide network of theaters linked by goals, ideology, and resources but centered on the regional and local needs of their communities. Cecelia Moore's The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama focuseson the FTP in North Carolina, using clear and comprehensive archival labor to demonstrate the connections between the FTP and local and educational theater work already in place, as well as the conflict between national political forces and regionalism. Moore introduces the FTP through national director Hallie Flanagan's oft-quoted description of the different regions, highlighting Flanagan's assertion that the FTP's work in the South would be "'a folk play'" (p. 5). This description serves as inciting incident to Moore's explication and leads her to consider amateur, educational, and professional theater. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the history of the Carolina Playmakers, an outgrowth of the little theatre movement and spearheaded by Frederick Henry Koch (no relation to Koch Industries) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chapter 2 builds on this discussion, offering a more focused interrogation of the role of race in community dramas and the various complications that confronted the FTP in the state. The third chapter concentrates on The Lost Colony, a hit historical pageant staged in Manteo, on Roanoke Island, as a case study for regional success. Chapter 4 highlights playwrights such as Zora Neale Hurston and two virtually unknown women writers, Loretto Carroll Bailey and Betty Smith, as one way of uncovering the vital work of largely unknown individuals. The final chapter traces the regional repercussions of national politics when the arts strive for local relevance, focusing on the FTP's downfall and the shortcomings of a regional model for a national theater. Moore's strength is her ability to dig deeply into the archival record and to flesh out the politics, social norms, and impacts of competing objectives and personalities. Her chapter on The Lost Colonyshowcases this skill. In it, she considers the "Manteo pageant venture [as] an attempt at people's theatre. . . . It would put the working-class people of Manteo onstage in a dramatization of their history and draw similar kinds of people to see it" (p. 85). In this effort, The Lost Colonyserved as a way to integrate theater and U.S. history, "to use the past to promote an inclusive, democratic future for the nation" (p. 85). Moore's detailed case study reveals intriguing information about how and why The Lost Colonywas created, the stakes of its success, and the troubling link between that success and the promotion of Roanoke as "the cradle of Anglo-Saxon civilization" in the United States, at the expense of Native and minority populations (p. 107). Moore's research is compelling and thorough, incorporating the major FTP archives at the Library of Congress and the National Archives, as well as [End Page 1048]numerous local collections that contribute to a deep understanding of North Carolina activities during this period. Yet there is a notable absence of secondary scholarship on theater history in general and the FTP specifically; works by Barry B. Witham, Amy Brady, Ann Folino White, and myself would have offered helpful insights into the many ways that theater intersects with issues of regionalism, censorship, American identity, race, and gender. Nevertheless, Moore's work should appeal to historians and students looking to learn more about this exciting moment in North Carolina and theater history. Elizabeth A...

The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: the Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama by Cecelia Moore

The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: the Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama by Cecelia Moore

“The Every 28 Hours Plays” and “After Orlando”: Networked, Rapid-Response, Collective Theatre Action—New Forms for a New Age

“The Every 28 Hours Plays” and “After Orlando”: Networked, Rapid-Response, Collective Theatre Action—New Forms for a New Age Ann Elizabeth Armstrong (bio) and Joan Lipkin (bio) “The nature of an emergency dictates a response.” —Arlene Goldbard1 Naming both “natural” disasters such as hurricanes and “civil” disasters such as gun violence and police brutality, the US Department of Culture’s guide Art Became the Oxygen specifically details the role of arts in responding to emergencies. Drawing from the insights of crisis-management fields, they describe how artists form a “third line” of support to those in crisis, using storytelling and culture to cultivate allies and resources for communities in need on the “first line.”2 As we find ourselves increasingly lurching from crisis to crisis, theatre-makers are innovating new artistic forms and producing practices that leverage networks and foster dialogue through performance. Some refer to such work as “rapid-response” theatre. In the tradition of the Federal Theatre Project’s (FTP) Living Newspapers, plays are created quickly with minimal production values in order to disseminate a story, often literally ripped from the headlines. However, more than simply capturing a contemporary moment, now artists are also enacting mobilizing strategies, community-building, and collaborative methods that constitute an innovative form of networked, collective theatre action. Projects like “The Every 28 Hours Plays” and “After Orlando” represent a significant new trend using short-form drama to respond to the breakneck speed of the news cycle and construct a space for both a deep and wide community conversation. This note 1) introduces both of these projects and their original impulses and history; 2) explores this emerging genre of theatrical protest: the networked, rapid-response, collective-theatre action; and 3) brings together commentary about six different productions at various university campuses that staged either The Every 28 Hours Plays or After Orlando. Building on the lively roundtable discussions of two sessions in Las Vegas at ATHE 2017, we note that such productions provide significant educational opportunities for student actors, directors, and producers; encourage interdisciplinary collaboration and community partnerships; and construct spaces for deep dialogue, consciousness-raising, and community-building. As evidenced by each contribution, the performance of these plays within different university contexts extends and develops conversations beyond the immediate crisis to bear witness to injustices and construct multiple points of entry for social action. As a necessary step in commemorating, healing, and promoting action, the plays magnify the voices of those who have been silenced and allow for empathy in cultivating a community of allies. As mentioned above, the FTP’s Living Newspapers provide an important precedent for the rapid-response, networked, collective theatre actions. Living Newspaper units in the 1930s organized themselves like a news bureau to create a structure for US artists to quickly represent pressing stories.3 As Jordana Cox notes, their work spoke not only to a concrete public, but called for an “imagined community” as well (301–2). The FTP also consciously used its networks to foster simultaneous discussions at the same time across different geographic spaces.4 Cox notes how Living Newspapers took hold during a moment of a “fraught relationship between mass media and democracy” (302), [End Page 159] calling on audiences as concerned citizens to deliberate the issues of the day. Augusto Boal’s Newspaper Theatre, formulated in the Arena Theatre of 1970s Brazil, is another precedent, a kind of “ideological warm up” (225) for the actor; it uses Brechtian techniques to dramatize current events in short sketches to uncover biases and explore multiple perspectives left out by journalists in an authoritarian society.5 Other precedents of rapid-response, networked, collective theatre action include productions like Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues and Tectonic Theatre’s The Laramie Project. Although not short-form drama, their dramaturgical structure portrays a controversial event or issue from multiple perspectives, based on interviews and research. These productions started in professional theatre.6 Interestingly, they soon discovered how the dramaturgy facilitated the opportunity to move performances beyond that setting to enact mobilization and community-building around the process of performance in educational and community settings. In both, a website provides a kind of unifying frame, bringing local efforts...

Fitzi, True-Believer: The Legacy of M. Eleanor Fitzgerald

Abstract M. Eleanor Fitzgerald (known to friends and colleagues as “Fitzi”) was the long-time business manager of the Provincetown Players and the subsequent incarnations of the group that continued until 1929. This article traces her legacy from her humble childhood in northern Wisconsin, experiences with the Seventh Day Adventist Church and Dr. Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium, to her work and relationships with anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and their publication Mother Earth. Beginning with the Players in 1918, she ultimately served as their business manager, as well as becoming their chief organizer, protector, guiding spirit, and conscience. Her work continued with the Group Theatre, Federal Theatre Project and, finally, the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, run by German playwright and director Erwin Piscator. Because of her passion and devotion to her work and those she worked with, she developed close and influential friendships with O'Neill, Berkman, Goldman, Piscator, and the many playwrights and actors she shepherded over the years. Malcolm Cowley wrote, “The story of the new American theater cannot truly be told without mentioning Fitzi's part in it” and this article attempts to do just that.

The Phantom Public, the Living Newspaper: Reanimating the Public in the Federal Theatre Project's1935(New York, 1936)

Stories of American democracy, whether critical or congratulatory, canonical or popular, feature “the public” as their recurring protagonist. “The public” is a rhetorical fixture of political campaigns and democratic theories, opinion polls and calls to action. Its influence is formidable: the very idea scores political speech, and calls citizens into being. Yet as many scholars have argued, “the public” is a moving target, and possibly even a total fiction. Perhaps the best-known challenge in recent decades has come from literary critic and social theorist Michael Warner. “Publics” he writes in hisPublics and Counterpublics,“have become an essential part of the social landscape, and yet it would tax our understanding to say exactly what they are.” If a public is difficult to describe, it is in part, Warner explains, because the idea hovers in modern imaginaries between the concrete and the abstract. “A public” can conjure at once: a bounded audience—“a crowd witnessing itself in visible space”; a more abstract “social totality” like the constituents of a nation; and a community conjured through shared texts or identities.

Du Bois’s Forgotten Plays

Du Bois’s Forgotten Plays Geoffrey Lokke (bio) The following concerns an unpublished collection of plays written by W. E. B. Du Bois between 1907 and 1931. The plays are The All-Mother (retitled The Slave, the Serf, and the Blond Beast), Black Hercules, Black Man, The Christ of the Andes, and Seven-Up. Outside of a brief extract, there is no record of their being published, nor have they ever been performed. The plays can be found only as typescripts in the Du Bois Papers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This introduction provides a brief history of their development and documents some of Du Bois’s correspondence about them. It also demonstrates how Du Bois envisioned the plays as an embodiment of the black theatre aesthetics he developed contemporaneously with their writing. It ends with an excerpt from one of the plays. Du Bois wrote the first of the plays, The Christ of the Andes, in 1907 for a contest held by the Boston Pacifists (Du Bois, “Tabu of Christ on the Andes”). The following year, he printed an extract from the verse play in his magazine Horizon. Du Bois went on to write over thirty plays and “playlets” in the early decades of the century, and by 1915 was sending them to theatre companies for consideration (Horne and Young 55; Cahn). In 1931, he chose five of the plays for a collection he called Playthings of the Night. Alongside the plays, Du Bois wanted to include a series of essays criticizing both Broadway and the contemporary black theatre. By 1941, Du Bois had revised the plays, editing them to appear more like short stories. He also gave the collection a new title in The Sorcery of Color (although he toyed with calling it The Darker Wisdom). Du Bois was still having the plays edited for publication as late as 1956 (Symington). Du Bois sent the plays to a number of colleagues, theatre groups, and publishers. He gave The All-Mother to the Krigwa Players, a company he helped set up, but they never performed it (Clifford). He sent the plays to Owen Dodson, Arnold Perl, George Streator, Eslanda and Paul Robeson, and Rowena and Russell Jelliffe, among others. In 1937, Du Bois sent two plays to Shirley Graham (later his wife), then director of the Chicago Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project. She found Black Man “a beautiful and moving piece of literature,” but to be “so highly artistic that it would appeal only to those who have developed a sense of aesthetic values.” Years later, Graham herself submitted Black Man to Hallie Flanagan Davis, the national director of the Federal Theatre Project. Davis saw a “confusion of intention” in the play: There are two ideas running through the phantasy: that of slavery and white supremacy, and the destructive force of human nature. That there is a plausible correlation between the two is acceptable, but as it is worked out here it is beyond understanding. The remainder of criticisms stem from the above. The play lacks persuasive power because it is too far away from the world. These plays, as this assessment might seem to imply, were generally not well received, although Du Bois’s editor at Henry Holt thought them “as fine as anything you have ever done” (Sloane). Du Bois was still circulating them in 1960, showing a commitment to the plays he sustained over five decades (Letter to Bobrysheva). [End Page 309] Darwin T. Turner believed that Du Bois, “unlike Wordsworth or T. S. Eliot, never created in his fiction, drama, and poetry the great work which would both illustrate and justify his literary theory” (2). While the plays might not have swayed Turner, they result from Du Bois’s deliberate attempt to illustrate and justify what has been described as his propaganda/protest black theatre aesthetics. This is evinced in the essays Du Bois wrote in 1931 to be published in Playthings of the Night. Among these is “Negro Tabus in American Theatre,” in which Du Bois lists clichés and misconceptions of blackness that proliferated on Broadway at the time: 1. Negro-American drama must be defeatist. It must not intimate...

“All’s Well that Ends Welles”: Orson Welles and the “Voodoo” "Macbeth"

The Federal Theatre Project, which was established in 1935 to put unemployed Americans back to work after the Great Depression, and later employed over 10,000 people at its peak, financed one particularly original adaptation of Shakespeare: the “voodoo” Macbeth directed by Orson Welles in 1936. Debuting in Harlem with an all-black cast, the play’s setting resembled a Haiti-like island instead of ancient Scotland, and Welles also supplemented the witches with voodoo priestesses, sensing that the practice of voodoo was more relevant, if not more realistic, for a contemporary audience than early modern witchcraft. My essay will consider how the terms “national origins” and “originality” intersect in three distinct ways vis-a-vis this play: The Harlem locale for the premier, the Caribbean setting for the tragedy, and the federal funding for the production.

Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea HotelSherillTippins. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel S her ill Tippins. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.Built between 1883 and 1885, the Chelsea Hotel has served as a center for artistic and creative activity, hosting luminaries such as Dylan Thomas, Virgil Thomson, and Allen Ginsberg. Sherill Tippins's exhaustively researched work is not just a celebratory roll-call of famous faces, as she demonstrates how the various periods in the hotel's checkered career offer a microcosm of American history.The hotel was designed by French emigre Philip Hubert in grand style, at the time the largest residential structure in the history of New York. In addition to its elegantly proportioned rooms and ornate lobbies, it boasted every conceivable modern amenity-pressurized steam for cooking, speaking tubes for easy communication, a dumb-waiter for room service. His approach to designing the hotel was highly influenced by the utopian philosopher Charles Fourier, who believed that human beings should be given the chance to pursue their interests unimpeded, so as to create a synergetic music of humanity spurring the population forward to spiritual and social evolution (39). In architectural terms, Fourier recommended that buildings should be created to house self-contained communities, or phalanxes, whose members could mingle freely, share intellectual interests, and divide domestic duties. Such experiments had already been attempted in mid-nineteenth century America: Brook Farm was established by a group of New England transcendentalists, what Nathaniel Hawthorne described as delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor (51). Hubert's building was praised by critics for the way in which it promoted a similar feeling of community; it was likened to a living temple of humanity offering limitless possibilities for improving urban life (66). At a time when America was undergoing profound social and economic change, the Chelsea offered a utopian vision of the future. It was hardly surprising that major figures such as William Dean Howells and Mark Twain chose to reside there.In spite of Hubert's expectations, the hotel at the end of the nineteenth century was largely patronized by the affluent middle class with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piquesongs [and] tinkling rhymes (92). Within four decades, the clientele had become far more cosmopolitan. This was due partly to economic reasons: the hotel was bankrupted as a result of the 1893 and the 1903 recessions, forcing the directors to transform it into a residential hotel. By the 1920s, the hotel's management had passed into the hands of the Knott Corporation, which thoroughly modernized the building by subdividing many of the original apartments, closing the private dining room, and creating more budget-priced facilities. Many creative artists came to live and work there, including novelists Thomas Wolfe and Sherwood Anderson and painter Arthur B. Davies. By now, the Chelsea served as a lasting reminder of the old sweet things of the Victorian era, an antidote to the hard-boiled efficiency and commercialism of the Depression and beyond (138). Within its walls, artists could cultivate a fulfilling and productive existence in private. The Chelsea helped to nurture the Federal Art Project and the Federal Theatre Project, two New Deal initiatives that offered new forms of community for everyone, whether rich or poor.Within two decades, the hotel had new owners, a syndicate of Hungarians headed by David Bard and Frank Amigo. The order of the late nineteenth century had been replaced by a more chaotic environment; the hotel had become shabby, linoleum was laid over marble, and cheap paint had been slapped on the walls. The clientele now included bookies and office clerks, attorneys and insurance executives. …

Plowed Under: Food Policy Protests and Performance in New Deal America by Ann Folino White (review)

Reviewed by: Plowed Under: Food Policy Protests and Performance in New Deal America by Ann Folino White Todd Holmes (bio) Plowed Under: Food Policy Protests and Performance in New Deal America. By Ann Folino White. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Pp. 322. $75.00 cloth; $30.00 paper) “All the world’s a stage,” William Shakespeare once wrote, “and all the men and women merely players.” In Plowed Under, Ann Folino White embraces this truism of performance to provide a fresh and important look at New Deal America and the public protests that arose over one of the most controversial programs of the Roosevelt administration: the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). Adroitly intertwining theater studies and history, White reveals the “theater of food” that stood at the center of public discussion on the AAA and the sophisticated, theatrical strategies employed by both government officials and citizens in their respective claims on the program. These cultural performances, White posits, advances a broader conceptualization of the political and social history of the New Deal, highlighting the producer ethic of citizenship that helped bridge the divides of race and gender among protesters and underpinned their moral argument of a citizen’s right to food amid economic crisis. With some faults, White’s effort succeeds in remapping the cultural and social landscape of food politics during the New Deal and in the process unearths new paths of research for scholars on the era. Drawing from an array of sources, such as contemporary photographs, newspaper accounts, correspondences, government documents, and other archival material, White examines public performance around the AAA through five case studies, all of which offer unique perspectives on the program and its entanglement with the era’s worsening economic depression. The book begins with a lucid analysis of the United States Department of Agriculture exhibit at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago and the promise of plenty the exhibit promoted for America in its exaltation of industrial agriculture and scientific management. For visitors in Chicago, the newly minted AAA was trumpeted as just the latest step in this march of progress. White then juxtaposes the government’s public promotion of the AAA [End Page 122] with three case studies of public protest that targeted the program in the following years: the 1933 Wisconsin dairymen’s strike; the 1935 meat boycott of Polish housewives in Hamtramck, Michigan; and the 1939 demonstration of Missouri sharecroppers. Like her discussion of the USDA exhibit, White provides a rich and astute analysis of the demonstrations that not only highlights the theatrical strategies of the protesters but, more important, lays bare the cultural symbolism of citizenship and the producer ethic that infused their public performances. In the cases of Polish housewives and African American sharecroppers, White shows how such symbolism helped bridge the social divides of race and gender. The book fittingly concludes with the 1936 production of Triple-A Plowed Under, a play by the Federal Theatre Project that critiqued the social and economic implications of the AAA. At root, the play argued for the government to end the suffering of America by regulating the nation’s amoral, capitalist economy and restore each citizen’s opportunity to make their own destiny—an argument that centered on a citizen’s moral right to food. Plowed Under presents a fresh look at the cultural and social history of the New Deal, more specifically one of the era’s most debated programs. The differing perspectives White examines in response to the AAA sheds important light on the public’s evolving interpretation of Roosevelt’s policies and the theatrical strategies that underpinned their public response. While histories of the era have afforded little attention to such protests, or have only included them within specific veins of research, White skillfully interweaves these diverse perspectives to document the shared anxiety that different segments of the population harbored during the agricultural crisis, and how these anxieties were strategically expressed—both culturally and theatrically—on the ground. These contributions notwithstanding, the book will raise some critiques from New Deal historians, especially in regard to its lack of context. White does not fully discuss the supply management mechanisms of the AAA, how it stemmed from the...

Plowed Under: Food Policy Protests and Performance in New Deal America

Introduction 1. The New Deal Vision for Agriculture: USDA Exhibits at the 1933-34 Chicago World's Fair 2. Milk Dumping Across America's Dairyland: The May 1933 Wisconsin Dairymen's Strike 3. Playing Housewife in an Urban Polonia: The Hamtramck (Mich.) Women's 1935 Meat Boycott 4. Hunger on the Highway in the Cotton South: The 1939 Missouri Sharecroppers' Demonstration 5. Staging the Agricultural Adjustment Act: The Federal Theatre Project's Triple-A Plowed Under (1936) Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index

Langston Hughes and Performing Transnational Presence: Scottsboro Limited and Harvest

Theatre revealed shifts between movements black modernism of 1920s and 1930s. As Langston Hughes recalls his autobiography Big Sea (1940) the 1920's were years of Manhattan's black Renaissance.... [T]he musical revue, Shuffle Along ... gave a scintillating send-off to vogue Manhattan, which reached its peak just before crash of 1929, crash sent ... all rolling down hill toward Works Progress Administration. (1) Hughes wrote Scottsboro Limited (1931) just before visiting Soviet Union. Hughes co-authored Harvest with Ella Winter and Ann Hawkins shortly after returning to United States but left play unfinished 1934. Both scripts provoke politically while experimenting theatrical forms to aestheticize narratives of recent upheaval United States. Following Hughes's markers for what he calls that vogue, Scottsboro Limited and Harvest fall chronologically between Shuffle Along (1921) and plays of WPA's Federal Theatre Project (1935-39). These plays remain powerful indicators of a transitional cultural moment which Soviet drama was also vogue. Attending to these plays reasserts theatre as a ubiquitous and influential medium 1930s cultures of United States. Analysis of these plays participates debates on status of transnational modernism at large, while clarifying a crucial element of Hughes's exchange with Soviet culture missing from recent literary studies. Internationally renowned as a poet, Langston Hughes has received renewed critical attention recent years with valuable research on transnational characteristics of his life, poetry, autobiography, and short stories. (2) Theatre, however, has received relatively little attention this critical revival, despite its centrality to Hughes's broad cultural consumption and to his literary work (as is evident from assessments of his biographers and from his correspondence with Carl Van Vechten). This essay reads Hughes's plays Scottsboro Limited and Harvest as theatrical representations of prisoners and workers specific to US contexts mirror Soviet-dominated internationalist film, journalistic theatre, and pageants. Hughes's 1930s participation a transnational aesthetic community of theatrical innovation devoted to developing proletarian theatre remains under-researched. His plays from period embody collaboration and emotional commitment across national lines. Hughes's travel supported circulation and translation of his works journals such as Soviet International Literature (with publications multiple languages) and many Spanish-language journals such as Contemporaneos, Sur, Revista de La Habana, El Diario de la Marina, Cristol, and El Mono Azul. (3) I argue Hughes's work revises Soviet cinematic and theatrical conventions, and these aesthetic choices affirm internationalism. Hughes modifies Soviet forms an act of international exchange, echoing Soviet calls for revolution, while challenging Comintern's Black Belt Nation Thesis and its implications for his poetics. (4) Hughes ends article Moscow: In a Land Where There Is No Jim Crow for International Literature with an English translation of Russian poem KINSHIR (5) For Hughes, Julian Anisimov's poem claims kinship in art between The Russian and Negro through the blood of Pushkin with a vision of unity between cultural nationalities in International. (6) Hughes's work and travel enacted an internationalism dialogue with Anisimov's vision, but Hughes resisted Moscow's authority within ideology of Soviet Internationalism as worldwide communist revolution. Still, Hughes celebrates impression Moscow there are no color bars, and very nature of Soviet system can never admit any sort of discriminatory racial separation, or setting apart from general worker's life of Negroes or any other minority group. …

Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project by Elizabeth A. Osborne (review)

Reviewed by: Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project by Elizabeth A. Osborne Johnathan Chambers Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project. By Elizabeth A. Osborne. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. pp. xi + 240. $85.00 cloth. In Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project, Elizabeth A. Osborne expands familiar perceptions and alters common assumptions regarding the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). As to the former, Osborne shifts the focus away from the FTP’s efforts in New York City—the region that has, along with the Living Newspapers, received the most scholarly attention by far—and instead considers a wide range of projects in Chicago, Boston, the American South, and Portland, Oregon, as well as two tours. In drawing attention to the FTP’s work in these regions and tours, Osborne shows its expansive reach, and, in so doing, demonstrates the ways in which it sought to fulfill national director Hallie Flanagan’s hope for a nationwide federation of theatres. [End Page 105] More importantly, Osborne convincingly argues that the FTP was an extraordinarily complex and vexed endeavor, one that sought to balance the agenda and aspirations of its national office—which was itself seeking to balance its efforts with the goals of the immense bureaucracy of the WPA and its subgroup, Federal Project Number One, which had direct oversight of the FTP—with the actions, hopes, and living and working conditions of regional and local artists, administrators, and audiences. Without question, Osborne’s effort to expand the vision of where the FTP did its work, how that work in regions outside of New York was often in tension with various national and regional offices, and what that work constituted leads to a more complete picture of the project as a whole. Additionally, however, in the course of painting this more complete picture, Osborne also asks us to reconsider the way in which the FTP is frequently characterized—that is, as a “successful failure.” Instead, Osborne argues that it was “a viable enterprise that in many ways attained its primary objectives: to achieve a theatre that could represent the nation while putting Americans back to work in their fields” (2). Building on this hypothesis, Osborne’s case studies reveal that when these regional efforts and tours are evaluated in light of the FTP’s professed goals, the “so-called failures might more correctly be designated as successes” (13). In this regard, then, Staging the People may rightly be called a “game changer.” Indeed, by expanding the vision of what the FTP involved and complicating the frequently one-dimensional suppositions about it, Staging the People alters in profound ways the received history of the project. In terms of structure, following a very useful introduction—wherein she outlines her endeavor to provide a “detailed cultural study of the FTP” (9)—Osborne divides the book into five chapters. Chapter 1, which focuses on two productions in Chicago, stands as a good example of how the whole of the study works. The first half of the chapter centers on Oh Say Can You Sing, staged in 1936, while the second spotlights Spirochete, staged in 1938. Regarding the former, Osborne carefully explicates the composition history, deftly demonstrating how various political pressures unique to Chicago led to radical revisions of the text. She shows that, in effect, the various changes altered the very ethos of Oh Say Can You Sing, making it not a biting piece of political satire but an insipid comedy. As counterpoint, in the second half of the chapter Osborne turns to Spirochete, which took as its subject the syphilis epidemic, a national crisis that had a particularly devastating effect in Chicago. Though not an enormous box-office success, Spirochete nonetheless did inspire accolades from the local and national press, as well as local and national health officials, and was [End Page 106] held up as an example of the type of socially vital theatre a federally funded producing organization could create. Throughout the chapter, Osborne situates her readings of these texts and productions within the social and political context of Chicago, circa the mid-to-late 1930s. Additionally, she convincingly...

“They're sufferin' the same things we're sufferin'”: Ideology and Racism in the Federal Theatre Project'sThe Sun Rises in the West

Myth hides nothing: its function is to distort.—Roland BarthesIn Los Angeles, California, the home of the nation's second largest Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a group of FTP artists spent over a year developingThe Sun Rises in the West, a popular and critically well-received but forgotten play about the Dust Bowl migration and its effects on California's agricultural valleys. The play was mounted by the Southwest Theatre Unit (SWTU), an experimental branch of the Los Angeles Federal Theatre Project that worked as a collective to produce plays independently of the FTP's more mainstream endeavors. The SWTU attracted ample publicity during the latter half of the 1930s for its experimental, politically charged material, but because the group's artistic record has been buried for decades in government and university archives, much critical work remains to be done on its contributions to theatre history. This essay seeks to remedy this gap with a brief sketch of the SWTU as an avant-garde force in Los Angeles and an analysis of the SWTU's original play,The Sun Rises in the West.

“Now I Know Love”: Hallie Flanagan and Euripides’ Hippolytus

This article chronicles Hallie Flanagan’s 1931 production of Euripides’ Hippolytus at the Vassar Experimental Theatre, situating the production within the history of Greek tragic performances in the United States as well as in the context of Flanagan’s later career. Flanagan strove to present a classical play in an experimental form, deviating from the historical trends of ancient Greek theatrical presentation in the early twentieth-century United States. Her artistic choices with the Hippolytus stand as a particularly striking example of her theatrical philosophies and practices that would be projected across the country upon her appointment as director of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre Project in 1935.

The Losey–Moscow Connection: Experimental Soviet Theatre and the Living Newspaper

Although Joseph Losey is best known as the blacklisted director of films such as the Pinter-scripted The Servant, The Go-Between, and Accident, as well as Mr Klein starring Alain Delon, he also had an important career in leftist theatre prior to making his Hollywood film debut in in the late 1940s. Because of his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht on the 1947 Hollywood production of Galileo, it is assumed that Losey learned from him most of his stagecraft – particularly the use of Verfremdungseffekt and self-reflexivity. However, as this article shows, Losey's apprenticeship was rooted not in the Epic Theatre (which was largely a second-hand phenomenon) but in the Soviet theatrical avant garde, observed at first hand during a 1935 Moscow visit studying the techniques of Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, and Pavlovich Okhlopkov, whose ‘theatre in the round’ stagings and use of complex ramps and projections provided the basis for Losey's subsequent Federal Theatre Project ‘Living Newspaper’ productions – notably Triple-A Plowed Under and Injunction Granted! Under the aegis of co-founder Hallie Flanagan, the Living Newspaper proved to be the model of 1930s political theatre: topical, didactic, fast-paced – and almost immediately obsolete as events superseded the plays' relevance. Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of critical studies on Joseph Losey and Karel Reisz for Manchester University Press's ‘British Film Makers’ series and of Beckett, Deleuze, and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art for Palgrave Macmillan. He is currently working with Felicity Colman on a three-volume Encyclopedia of Film-Philosophy.

Corporeal Disasters of War : Legibilities of “Spain” and the Jewish Body in Helen Tamiris’s Adelante!

Corporeal Disasters of WarLegibilities of “Spain” and the Jewish Body in Helen Tamiris’s Adelante! Lisa Jackson-Schebetta (bio) With Goya a new standard for responsiveness to suffering enters art…While the image, like every image, is an invitation to look, the caption, more often than not, insists on the difficulty of doing just that. SUSAN SONTAG, REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS The civil war now raging in Spain has brought Goya’s Disasters of War to [an] intense second life. Through them we see deeper into the present suffering in Spain than we could in newspaper photographs. A. HYATT MAYOR, “GOYA’S ‘DISASTERS OF WAR’” Between 1810 and 1820, Francisco de Goya created Disasters of War in response to Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. Each of the eighty-five etchings explicitly depict wartime atrocities (rape, dismemberment, castration, torture, massacre). Goya captioned each print with cryptic phrases: “This is bad.” “With reason—or without.” “Poor mother.” When first published in 1863 by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, the series appalled British and U.S. critics as psychotic filth and served for others as yet further evidence of the Black Legend, of just how cruel and degenerate the Spanish could be. The etchings found a receptive English-speaking audience, however, after World War I, an audience that grew larger during the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. In 1936, the Spanish military revolted against the Spanish Republic, democratically elected in 1931. The western democracies adhered to a policy of nonintervention throughout the conflict, leaving the Republican side dependent on Communist Russia and, to a [End Page 35] lesser extent, Mexico. The Nationalists, in contrast, benefited from the support of Italy and Germany, borne out in arms, airplanes, money, and bodies. Despite official U.S. policy, as deaths mounted in Spain and fascism’s hold on Europe grew, Republican sympathy in the United States gained momentum. Spanish Republicans conjured popular resistance to Napoleon as a precedent to their current plight, an ideological move that featured Goya’s images, the well-known Third of May 1808 and Second of May 1808 as well as the Disasters. In the United States, Goya’s series was republished in 1938 as a newly potent invective against the atrocities of global fascism in which Spain figured as the key battleground. The publication of the Disasters in 1938 could be read as but one more contribution to the representations of wounded, displaced, dead, and dying bodies that circulated through the international imaginary of the Spanish Civil War. It is not difficult to rattle off such images: Jay Allen’s account from Badajoz, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier, and the violence of air raids, mass graves, and executions documented in newspapers and photography and imagined on screen and stage. What is unique about the Disasters is that they found their way onto a national stage in the United States: Helen Tamiris staged Goya’s work in the dance piece Adelante! (meaning “onward” or “forward”), presented by the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) in April 1939. The presence of Goya in the work has yet to be examined by scholars. In this essay, I argue that Goya’s etchings influenced the aesthetics of the dance, its dramaturgy, and the historio-graphical bent of its politics. In Adelante!, Tamiris ostensibly presented a story of Spain as told through the memory of the dying body of Republican soldier José, but Tamiris was not only documenting the corporeal disasters of war that were littering Spain. Tamiris’s disasters of war, built upon both Goya’s and Spain’s, staged a revision of Iberian Jewish history in order to issue a call to arms, not for the Spanish but for the American Republic. Continued U.S. inaction against the anti-Semitism of fascism, Adelante! declared, compromised America’s legitimacy as a democracy in a global world. Tamiris’s activism in American modern dance, her passion for organizing, and her instrumentality in the Federal Dance Project and the Federal Theatre Project have been addressed by Elizabeth Cooper (1997, 2004), Mark Franko (2002), Susan Manning (2004), and Ellen Graff (2007). Tamiris’s work on Adelante!, in particular, has been amply...