Federal Theatre Research Articles

The Refusal of Motherhood in African American Women's Theater

As Darlene Hine and Kate Wittenstein show in their recent study of slavery, African American slave women practiced sexual abstinence, abortion, and infanticide as strategies of resistance, exemplifying their refusal to participate in and help perpetuate a system that treated their bodies and their children's bodies as property. But the reality of the black woman who refused participation in a racist and patriarchal system by refusing motherhood continued even after was abolished in this country, as early twentieth-century drama by black women writers attests. Though written past the period where, as Margaret Wilkerson writes, the institution of the black woman the legal instrument of her people's slavery and injustice intruded into her most private (viii), these plays express a strong melding of the personal and the political, as they show how historical oppression recurs in the present, and how the black woman's body continues to be the site of both domination and resistance. As thematic antecedents to Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, Angelina Grimke's Rachel (1916), Georgia Johnson's Safe (1930?), Shirley Graham' s It's Morning (1938-40), and to a lesser extent Alice Childress's Mojo (1971) and Aishah Rahman's Unfinished Women Cry in No Man's Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage (1977) all demonstrate the difficulty of black motherhood in this country. These plays feature heroines who refuse motherhood and/or child rearing because they cannot bear the alternative of birthing and raising a child in a culture that discriminates on the basis on race, class, and gender. Instead of critiquing the heroine's actions, these works clearly explain why such decisions are made in a society that at worst resorts to lynching and at best withholds employment and educational opportunities for black youth at the same time it renders black mothers powerless to protect their own children from experiencing the wrongs of racism. Finally, May Miller's Thorns and Nails (1933) takes this theme a step further to suggest how the system of racism wrongs white mothers and their children as well. The play shows how terribly wrong a white mother's privileged assumption is that she can actually protect her own (white) child against the wrongs of racism and by extension classism and sexism as well. What such works demonstrate are the peculiar ramifications for black women of what Lindsay Patterson calls the Nigger Moment: when, in Patterson's words, a black person loses his innocence ... discovers he is a `nigger' and his mentality shifts gears (quoted in Brown-Guillory, Images 234). For the black women depicted in these plays, such moments often relate to their realization of their powerlessness as mothers when through the examples of a relative or a family friend or even a casual acquaintance, they are forced to witness the murder or pain of a young black person, usually male. Experiencing the boy's pain as an extension of their own, these mothers then make their decision. Denied voice and power, they choose to give up the child they are having or already have. Perhaps because of their morbid subject matter, the word applied to Grimke's play when it first appeared, the first three of these plays have not exactly had a high production rate. Rachel was first performed on March 3, 1916 by the Drama Committee of the NAACP; while there were two other productions within two years (one in New York City, the other in Cambridge, Massachusetts), the play was not performed again until the Spelman Players (of Spelman College) revived it in 1991. Of the several plays Johnson submitted to the Federal Theatre Project, a government-sponsored arts program that was part of the Works Projects Administration of the late 1930s, none, Safe among them, was ever produced. Moreover, while plays by Grimke, Miller, Childress, and Rahman are available in several anthologies, only one of Graham's plays has been published, and Johnson's Safe has only recently been published, thanks to the recuperative efforts of Kathy A. …

Living Newspaper: Theatre and Therapy

Living Newspapers—a hallmark of the Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s—were foretold in 1915 by the Italian futurists, brought into existence in 1919 in the Soviet Union, further developed in Vienna in the 1920s by the founder of psychodrama, Jacob Moreno, played in India in the 1960s and after, and are used as therapy today.

Memory, manhood, management and “mentalities”: The C. C. C. murder mystery and its audience

The 1936–37 Federal Theatre Project's production of The C.C.C. Murder Mystery depended on the deployment of restrictive assumptions about gender. The production targeted a specific audience: young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps. The memories of C.C.C. “boys” as octogenarians inform this analysis of this use of theatre for social change and for organizing a specific C.C.C. masculinity.

"And Yet They Paused" and "A Bill to Be Passed": Newly Recovered Lynching Dramas by Georgia Douglas Johnson

My recent discovery Georgia Douglas Johnson's lost ends a scholarly quest of many years and confirms Johnson's status as the leading playwright of the genre. The typescripts, dating from the 1930s and found among the NAACP papers at the Library of Congress on June 11, 1999, make possible a more thorough study of the six one-acts comprising the body of work Johnson specifically referred to as her lynching or plays on lynching.(1) Since Johnson was the most prolific playwright of drama, such a study can provide a clearer understanding of her contributions to this uniquely American dramatic genre, as well as the conditions of its production and reception. Plays representing the history of in the United States are only beginning to be understood as a distinctly American dramatic genre, a type of theatre that began to appear at least as early as 1905 and continues to evolve on the contemporary stage.(2) As the first anthology to address how the horrors of have been represented in American theatre, Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, edited by Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens (Indiana UP, 1998), reveals the historical continuity of the genre and speaks to its prior neglect in theatre history and dramatic criticism. The fact that Johnson is known primarily as one of the leading poets of the Harlem Renaissance but has, until recently, remained invisible as the leading playwright of an unrecognized dramatic genre speaks loudly to the genre's status and critical reception, as well as to the precarious position Johnson occupied as a black woman writer in the 1920s and '30s. In her recent review of Strange Fruit, Eileen Cherry's comment that dramas may not present the picture that America wants to see of itself provides insight into why the genre has been neglected in the recorded history of American theatre (224-25). This note describes the conditions surrounding the production of And Yet They Paused and A Bill to be Passed, provides brief synopses of the plays, and locates the texts in relation to Johnson's more familiar and accessible dramas: Sunday Morning in the South, Safe, and Blue-Eyed Black Boy. I am indebted to the work of scholars such as James V. Hatch, Ted Shine, Winona L. Fletcher, Margaret Wilkerson, Sandra Richards, Kathy Perkins, Bernard L. Peterson, Nellie McKay, Gloria T. Hall, Cheryl Wall, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, and Claudia Tate, whose writing on Johnson brought the importance of her work to my attention. According to correspondence in the NAACP files, in June of 1936 Johnson sent Walter White, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, several of her on the subject of lynching, but White returned the in January of 1937 on the grounds that they ended in defeat and gave one the feeling that the situation was hopeless despite all the courage which was used by the Negro characters.(3) Johnson graciously replied that she understood the point that White was making but added, Yet, it is true that[,] in life, things do not end usually ideally[;] however, it is a point that I shall keep in mind if I write others or perhaps rewrite these.(4) Today Johnson's words are prophetic, since we know that, despite the NAACP's considerable and sustained efforts, the United States Congress never enacted any federal anti-lynching legislation. In her letter to White, Johnson mentioned that her were under consideration for publication by Samuel French, but since her more recent Catalogue of Writings does not list these dramas among her published plays, it seems clear that French rejected them. Winona Fletcher's valuable 1985 article in Theatre Annual documents Johnson's submisson of her dramas to the Federal Theatre Project between 1935 and 1939, as well as the result that none were accepted for production in any of the producing units of the FTP. These historical records provide a glimpse into the struggle Johnson faced in seeing her dramas published or produced in her lifetime, especially in the 1920s and 1930s when the brutality of was not an uncommon occurrence in society. …

Rousing the nation: radical culture in Depression America

This interdiscplinary study blends textual analysis with social history to chart the intellectual and artistic ferment of Depression-era America. It explores the fiction, drama and film produced during the decade by socially conscious intellectuals who struggled to create a uniquely American art. Challenged by a public more exposed to comic strips and tabloids than to serious artistic creativity, these writers and cinematographers used the techniques of modernism and muckraking to fashion works that would be experimental without being insular and would inspire the public to social activism. Browder first considers authors James T. Farrell, Josephine Herbst and John Dos Passos, arguing that their work successfully sparked a discussion about what it meant to be American at a time when the country's very future seemed in doubt. She then examines the Living Newspaper productions of the Federal Theatre Project, which brought politically and aesthetically provocative drama to 25 million Americans. In a final chapter, she examines social films of the period, focusing on Paramount's 1939 production of One-Third of a Nation.

Black Voices, White Bodies: The Performance of Race and Gender in How Long Brethren

WOMEN STANDING BY THEIR MEN, SUPPORTING THEIR MEN'S EFFORTS to effect reform, never claiming their own rights: this is the dominant image of womanhood that Barbara Melosh discerns in plays staged by the Federal Theatre Project from 1935 to 1939. In her comprehensive study, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater, Melosh argues that the Federal Theatre Project participated in the containment of feminism evident in New Deal liberalism. Although she cites the plays' celebration of domesticity as a specifically female form of activist citizenship, she argues that this idealization of domesticity precluded any acknowledgment of the conditions that restricted women's full participation in the public sphere. Melosh concludes that the Federal Theatre cast women in revised roles but retained them as supporting players in male narratives

Black Theatre--The Way it is: An Interview with Woodie King, Jr.

Woodie King, Jr., was born in Alabama in 1937 and, from the age of 9, reared in Detroit. In Detroit, he co-founded Concept East Theatre in 1960 and began working in New York in 1964, where he quickly became the premier producer of Black theatre. He founded the New Federal Theatre in 1970 and went on to produce Broadway plays, films, and recordings; publish anthologies; teach; and mentor literally hundreds of Black actors, playwrights, and theatre professionals as well as found the National Black Touring Circuit. Over a twenty-seven-year period at the New Federal Theatre, King produced and, in numerous cases, provided the launching pad to Broadway for productions such as Black Girl by J. E. Franklin; What The Wine Sellers Buy and Checkmates, both by Ron Milner; The Taking of Miss Janie and other plays by Ed Bullins; Slaveship by Amiri Baraka; for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf by ntozake shange; The Dance and the Railroad by David Henry Hwang; Champeen by Melvin Van Peebles; and Mr. Universe by Jim Grimnsley. As a filmmaker, King's list of credits includes directing and co-producing The Long Night, the only American film selected as part of the New Directors/New Films show at the Museum of Modem Art in New York; directing Death of a Prophet, a feature film on Malcolm X starring Morgan Freeman, and Torture of Mothers, starring Ruby Dee; and producing Right On, an award-winning feature on the Last Poets. He has also produced spoken-word recordings for Motown, and his publications include numerous fiction, drama, and poetry anthologies. Often called a renaissance man, Woodie King, Jr., has excelled as a producer, a director for stage and film, a writer and editor, a teacher and mentor, and a founder and artistic director of theatrical institutions. In the far-ranging and frank interview that follows, Woodie King, Jr., reviews his history and offers his views on the future of Black theatre. Salaam: How did you break into the theatre scene in New York? King: I came to New York at the height of the Black Power Movement. I worked in and around New York for maybe eight or nine months, then became associated with the anti-poverty program. They were setting up cultural arts programs in Harlem, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and Brooklyn as part of larger anti-poverty agencies. I became the director of the one in Manhattan. It was called Mobilization for Youth. We set up training programs for young Blacks, Latinos, and Asians between the ages of 16 and 21 down on the Lower East Side. We paid them to take classes. It was supposed to be a program designed for failure, but we made it something viable and meaningful in that Lower East Side community. We brought in a lot of fantastic musicians and artists to work with the participants. In jazz, for example, we brought in Kenny Dorham and Jackie McLean. We brought in poet Diane Wakowski and people like Baraka. In dance, we had people like Rod Rogers. In play-wrighting, Lonne Elder, III, and J. E. Franklin. Work that came out of there captured the imagination of a New York critical, mid-'60s kind of establishment. Beyond all of that, what was happening in the city was a whole new movement: Black Power, Black empowerment, social awareness, Black is Beautiful. We operated on the Lower East Side, but we were very close to the sister organizations, Haryou-Act in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant Redevelopment Corporation in Brooklyn, so we would be traversing among all of these. What was happening around the world was that this new, young Black art was impressing itself on world culture. We ended up taking young people to Rome, Italy, to the Hemisphere in San Antonio, Texas, to the Montreal Expo '67. These young artists, then 18 and 19 years old, are now some of the major artists working in the American performing arts: people like Gary Bolding, Maurice Sneed, Bostic Bearfelder, and Ronnie Clanton, who starred in movies like The Cool World. …

Tamiris and the Federal Dance Theatre 1936–1939: Socially Relevant Dance Amidst the Policies and Politics of the New Deal Era

Credit is due a great many individuals for sustained, serious and heartbreaking efforts to achieve successful dance productions within the organization of the Federal Theatre Project in New York, but there is one person who has practically given all her life to it for the past three years and has repeatedly and consistently identified her own career with it. She has been responsible for four productions and has done more than any other one person to hold the whole project together and keep it going. Without her tremendous creative enthusiasm and energy, her personal and artistic integrity, her sense of social responsibility, I doubt if this project could ever have endured. I doubt it could have been organized in the first place.… I am speaking of Tamiris.The history of the Works Progress Administration's short-lived Federal Dance Theatre embodies many of the aspirations, achievements, ambiguities, handicaps and frustrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Like the other Works Progress Administration (WPA) relief programs, the Federal Dance Theatre (FDT) was created with federal funds to help alleviate the hardships brought on by the Great Depression. The FDT was established in January 1936 as a distinct artistic entity within the WPA relief organization. It employed professional dancers, choreographers, musicians, designers, and technicians, and set before them the task of producing socially relevant dance pieces for the American people, in particular, audiences that had not previously had access to the theatre. That the Federal Dance Theatre came into existence at all and managed to stay afloat and produce a few critically acclaimed productions of social portent and artistic merit was largely due to the perseverance of modern dance maverick, Helen Tamiris (1905–1966).

Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 1935-39

Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 1935-39

Others, Adults, Censored: The Federal Theatre Project's Black Lysistrata Cancellation

Though it has been almost completely overlooked, the arbitrary cancellation of the Seattle Negro Repertory Company's 1936 Lysistrata provides a remarkable opportunity to explore the connections between a single, seemingly localized action and a network of socially, politically, and racially repressive forces. Lysistrata's closure on ostensibly moral grounds reveals the operation of a set of cultural and social controls masked as standards of decency. An array of racist assumptions as rigid as those anywhere in the country, though somewhat more subtle, obscured the generally repressive ends that the control system served, both in Seattle and nationwide. The incident thus provides clues to the institutionalized antireform mechanisms that soon coalesced in a successful congressional attack on the Works Project Administration's Federal Theatre Project (FTP), of which the Negro Repertory Company (NRC) was a major unit. The Lysistrata cancellation's connection with that broader offensive also demonstrates the manner in which Hallie Flanagan's “free, adult, uncensored” national theatre threatened the nation's essentially conservative political power structure and drew the decisive backlash that eventually overturned efforts at social change during the Depression Era.

Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 1935-1939.

List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Introduction 1. A new deal (or not) for culture 2. Critical directions: toward a national negro theatre 3. Producing new dramas: the politics of choice 4. The unpredictable audience 5. Acting properly Afterword Notes Index.

Pointing to the Future

As many historians of American theater and culture know, the Fenwick Library of George Mason University (GMU) became the home in 1974 to a major collection of Federal Theatre Project (FTP) materials. As many researchers also know, some FTP material was removed from GMU to the Library of Congress in the fall of 1994. In this essay, I will bring Theatre Survey's readers up to date on the status of the FTP collection, which, because of its continuing development over two decades, houses not only a considerable body of FTP material but also early records of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA). ANTA in its earliest days was a worthy successor to the FTP in the drive to have a national theater in the United States. Since 1980, all of these holdings have been an integral part of the Center for Government, Society and the Arts (CGSA) at GMU. CGSA has been the site of many activities exploring the relationship between our government and the arts, ranging from conferences on theater and cultural studies to our own theatrical productions of FTP materials, some of which I will outline here.

Liberty Censored: Black Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project

The living newspaper, a favorite genre of Hallie Flanagan, the Director of the Federal Theatre Project, was one of America's most ambitious theatrical efforts in the period between the world wars. Descended from the Soviet Red Army's Zhivaya Gazeta ('Alive' or 'Living Newspaper') and German and American agit-prop troupes (McDermott 83), the living newspaper used huge casts, spectacular sets, and film, vaudeville, and agit-prop techniques to depict contemporary political and social issues in theatrical terms. In the four years of the Federal Theatre's existence, from 1935 to 1939, living newspapers addressed issues as diverse and controversial as agricultural reform, labor relations, public ownership of utilities, housing problems, and public health. One issue, however, was pointedly not addressed publicly by the living newspaper was the status of African Americans. The Federal Theatre's fictional dramas often dealt with racial issues. J. A. Smith and Peter Morell's Turpentine (New York, 1936) exposed the wrongs of the Southern labor-camp system, while Theodore Browne's Natural Man (Seattle, 1937), about the legendary John Henry, showed African Americans being worked to death on labor gangs. Hughes Allison's courtroom drama The Trial of Dr. Beck (Newark, 1937) dealt with the implications of racial hatred and self-hatred. And Theodore Ward's Big White Fog (Chicago, 1938) depicted African American society as divided among belief in the American dream, the Marcus Garvey Back-to-Africa movement, and socialism. In fact, three living newspapers about African Americans were completed, and at least one more was proposed, but not a single one was produced. Were the authors too unknown? Was the quality of their work too low? Were their staging requirements too complex or expensive? Was there insufficient audience for them? Was there a problem with the living-newspaper form itself? And was there, officially or unofficially, consciously or unconsciously, some sort of racially based censorship? Elmer Rice, a Broadway director and the author of The Adding Machine (1923), Street Scene (1929), and other successful plays, proposed the first living newspaper about race relations. Rice, of Eastern European Jewish descent, was the first head of the New York office of the Federal Theatre, but he resigned in 1936 to protest the censorship by the government of the living newspaper Ethiopia, about Mussolini's invasion of country. Before his resignation, Rice proposed and wrote an outline for a living newspaper with contemporary American racial subject matter. He planned a show that would expose the common practice of lynching Negroes and also the plight of the sharecroppers (Abramson 65). The left-leaning director Joseph Losey also was probably involved in planning this play. The staff of the living newspaper office researched and put together a preliminary draft in twelve scenes: Called The South, it is clearly a work-in-progress. The play opens with Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation, and closes with Angelo Herndon, a Black labor organizer, calling on his comrades - and the audience - to join in the fight of all workers against the international capitalist conspiracy. In between, it covers such racially charged matters as the Scottsboro case, separate-and-unequal educational allotments, the flogging of integrationists, and the Senate's anti-lynching bill; largely unconnected matters such as constitutional challenges to the Tennessee Valley Authority are treated as well. The draft of The South has none of the earmarks of the best living newspapers, such as a narrator, a common-man character who acts as the audience's representative on stage, or scenes put current issues into focus through vaudeville-like techniques. Unlike other living newspapers, the script contains no footnotes or bibliography, despite the fact virtually every one of its scenes quotes prominent political figures. …

Actors as Activists: The Theatre Arts Committee Cabaret, 1938–1941

Given the omnipresence of performers of all political stripes speaking for a variety of causes and candidates, it is difficult to remember a time when artist-activists were not an integral part of America's theatrical landscape. Indeed, under David Douglass's leadership, the American Company (formerly the Hallam Company) assuaged Puritan fears about the presence of ‘theatricals’ in staid eighteenth-century New England by performing benefits for local causes, thereby injecting its work with a social purpose. Throughout its history the American theatre has used performance as a propaganda weapon for such causes as abolition (Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852), temperance (Ten Nights in a Bar Room, 1858), civil rights (A Raisin in the Sun, 1959), and currently the AIDS crisis (Angels in America, 1993). Political activism in the American theatre flourished in the 1930s, largely through the work and ideology of such enterprises as the Group Theatre, the Theatre Union, even the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and similar left-wing movements that sought to produce plays that deal boldly with deep-going social conflicts, the economic, emotional, and cultural problems that confront the majority of people. The mission was realized mostly through traditional theatre means, i.e. plays or agit-prop dramas à la Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers. These have been chronicled in a number of useful surveys, most notably Gerald Rabkin's Drama and Commitment (1964), Sam Smiley's The Drama of Attack (1972), and especially Malcolm Goldstein's detailed look at the 1930s radical theatre, The Political Stage (1974).

Frankie and Johnnyin Chicago and some problems of attribution

Chicago has long had strong theatre and music traditions, and at times has been an important dance city, even if for somewhat mysterious reasons it has never had a resident ballet company to equal the Chicago Symphony, the opera, or the newer Steppenwolf theatre company. Certainly there have been many distinguished teachers there, from Adolph Bolm, Laurent Novikoff, Andreas Pavley, and Serge Oukrainsky through Edna McRae, Berenice Holmes, Bentley Stone, and Walter Camryn to Maria Tallchief. The one important ballet to be created in Chicago, however, came out of a heady mix of the Depression, the WPA Federal Theatre Project, local artistic politics, and two of Chicago's most durable dance figures, Ruth Page and Bentley Stone. The subject was as American as Carl Sandburg, although rather less respectable, being based on the song about which Sandburg remarked, If America has a classical gutter song, it is the one that tells of Frankie and her man.' The story of the creation of this ballet also raises a number of interesting points in attribution as part of the complex workings of collaboration in dance, especially apportioning the credits for choreography and design. Frankie and Johnny was first shown on a program presented by the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress Administration

The American stage: social and economic issues from the Colonial period to the present

List of illustrations Notes on the contributors Preface Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller Acknowledgements Introduction: American theatre history scholarship Oscar G. Brockett 1. The theatre and its audience: changing modes of social organisation in the American theatre Douglas McDermott 2. Puritan mercantilism and the politics of anti-theatrical legislation in colonial America Peter A. Davis 3. 'Lady-managers' in nineteenth-century American theatre Vera Mowry Roberts 4. Hustlers in the house: the Bowery Theatre as a mode of historical information Rosemarie K. Bank 5. Museum theatre and the problem of respectability for mid-century urban Americans Bruce A. McConachie 6. Social awareness on stage: tensions mounting, 1850-1859 Walter J. Meserve 7. The development of the American theatre program Marvin Carlson 8. The Hyers Sisters: pioneers in black musical comedy Errol Hill 9. Money without glory: turn-of-the-century America's women playwrights Felicia Hardison Londre 10. 'For laughing purposes only': the literature of American popular entertainment Brooks McNamara 11. E pluribus unum: Bernhardt's 1905-1906 farewell tour Stephen M. Archer 12. Commercialism glorified and vilified: 1920s theatre and the business world Ronald H. Wainscott 13. Quicksilver revisited: a portrait of the American stage in the 1930s Charles H. Shattuck 14. The economic structure of the Federal Theatre Project Barry B. Witham 15. The American Repertory Theatre (1946-1947) and the repertory ideal, a case study Daniel J. Watermeier 16. Sojourning in Never Never Land: the idea of Hollywood in recent theatre autobiographies Thomas Postlewait 17. Consuming the past: commercial American theatre in the Reagan era Alan Woods 18. Narrative strategies in selected studies of American theatre economies Margaret M. Knapp 19. Multiculturalism versus technoculturalism: its challenge to American theatre and the functions of arts management Stephen Langley 20. Checklist of selected books on American theatre, 1960-1990 Don B. Wilmeth Index.

Remembering Helen Tamiris

In March of 1936, when I was still known as Pauline Bubrick, I joined the Dance Project of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project and was assigned to the group directed by Helen Tamiris. I had been a student of Martha Graham since I had turned up at her studio the day after I first saw her perform in 1934, but in the depths of the Depression a paying job as a concert dancer was not easy to find-while bills had to be paid and food put on the table. Thus it was that I had the opportunity to work for more than three years with one of the remarkable women of American dance, and one whose full contribution has yet to be acknowledged. Although Graham remains my greatest inspiration, my regard for Tamiris has grown immeasurably through the years. Helen Tamiris was born Helen Becker in New York City on April 23, 1902, into a poor but cultured family whose social values were to be a dominant influence on her life as a dancer and choreographer. Recognizing her enthusiasm for dance, the family registered her for classes in Duncan-inspired movement at the Henry Street Settlement, located in her neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York City. Tamiris went on to study Italian ballet at the Metropolitan Opera, where she became a member of the corps de ballet, and Russian ballet at Fokine's studio. Her training was as intensive as her per-

Susan Glaspell's Fiction: Fidelity as American Romance

Susan Glaspell's play Trifles (1916) or short story she based on it, Jury of Her Peers (1917), may be found today in almost every anthology introducing college students literature, yet it seems strange that woman who wrote nine novels and over fifty short stories, in addition fourteen plays, is still mainly known, when known at all, for short dramatic work. Feminist critics such as Christine Dymkowski and Linda Ben-Zvi, among others, are in process of resurrecting Glaspell's reputation and establishing that she is one of two most accomplished playwrights of twentieth-century America (Dymkowski 91). But although this is invaluable, attention continues be focused almost solely on Glaspell's drama, exclusion of her novels. Veronica Makowsky's recent study provides first scholarly feminist analysis of Glaspell's entire oeuvre, from her early stories her late novels, but even Makowsky appears agree with standard view, which is in my opinion not sufficiently substantiated, that Glaspell's plays are her greatest work (24). Glaspell's first novel, Glory of Conquered, was published in 1909; her second, The Visioning, in 1911; and her third, Fidelity, in 1915. In 1913 she married George Cram Cook, an idealistic, bohemian fellow lowan. They moved New York and summered in Provincetown, Massachusetts. They were both instrumental in creating Provincetown Players and in establishing group in Greenwich Village. Despite fact that she spent most of 1920s plays for Provincetown theater and did not return novel form until 1928 with Brook Evans, Glaspell considered herself writer of and, as she recalled in later autobiographical fragment, began plays because my husband forced me to (Noe 33). Later, after she and Cook had left New York for two-year sojourn in Greece, she confided in letter her mother that the theater always made it hard for me write and now I will have better chance for my own writing (Noe 49). Although her play Alison's House won Pulitzer Prize in 1931, and she served briefly as Midwest director for Federal Theatre Project in Chicago during 1934, she basically settled in Provincetown after Cook's death in Greece in 1924 and returned fiction, producing five more novels: Fugitive's Return (1929), Ambrose Holt and Family (1931), The Morning Is Near Us (1939), Norma Ashe (1942), and Judd Rankin's Daughter (1945). Not only did Glaspell regard herself primarily as fiction writer, but she was critically accepted as an American novelist of integrity and importance until mid 1930s. Many of her novels were reviewed, increasingly favorably, in New York Times. Fidelity was praised by New York Times reviewer for its convincing realism, but it was seen be romantic tale; the story of caught in mesh of law; therefore reviewer did not understand second half of novel, where love is entirely abandoned, and found it flawed for that reason (Anon.). Although Percy Hutchison, Times reviewer of Fugitive's Return, found novel uneven, he praised Glaspell as so much of an individual [that] knows in advance that novel from her pen will not be an ordinary book. John Chamberlain praised Brook Evans in 1928 Times review as a masterpiece on small scale, masterpiece because Glaspell has distilled essence from most important and character-revealing moments, and small scale because she has limited her canvas deliberately . . . focus[ing] on purely human values that remain eternal, irrespective of time or place. In 1931 he aptly described Ambrose Holt and Family as tragi-comedy of and noted Glaspell's delicately pervasive humor, which acts as perpetual astringent cutting through sentimentality. In both reviews he discussed Glaspell's idealism in her life and her work, and praised her courage and commitment as writer. …

Right Center Left: Essays in American History.

For past fifteen years, Leo Ribuffo has been among leading disputants writing on most pressing issues of American religion and politics. He is a scholar and a writer in tradition of Warren Susman: deliberate and provocative at same time. This collection of his best work reaffirms what his many readers already know, that his is a unique and refreshing voice that is sure to cause controversy. This book contains seven essays (all revised for this volume) and an introduction on the complexity of American history that is, in itself, an important statement. Right Center Left challenges clichZs about men, women, and movements across American political and cultural spectrum. Ribuffo ranges from New England during Reformation, to Madison Avenue during 1920s, to Hollywood during Depression, to Eastern Europe during Cold War. On right, nativists like Josiah Strong and Henry Ford are explained in historical context. On left, American Communism looks more complicated than either orthodox critics or recent revisionists suppose. In center, Hallie Flanagan's Federal Theatre Project reveals limits of New Deal, ad man Bruce Barton emerges as a shrewd corporate capitalist instead of a naive positive thinker, President Gerald R. Ford appears as a thoughtful Cold Warrior instead of a chronic bumbler, and President Jimmy Carter governs as an able lay theologian instead of a provincial source of national malaise. What unites these essays is Leo Ribuffo's unique style, clarity of mind and purpose, and revealing insights into minds of bigots and hucksters who pervade American history.

Milestones in American Children's Theatre

Milestones in American Children's Theatre Anthony L. Manna (bio) Bedard, Roger L., and C. John Tolch , eds. Spotlight on the Child: Studies in the History of American Children's Theatre. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1989. It is no small task to paint a clear picture of the forces which first brought American children's theatre into being at the close of the nineteenth century, later salvaged it from the narrowly prescribed form and content which shaped its character in the early decades of the twentieth century, and, later still, prodded it into the more sophisticated and challenging structures, styles, and topics which, by fits and starts, began to emerge in the 1930s, and which now characterize the most notable plays in an increasingly mature repertoire. To trace the history of the children's theatre movement in America is to wade through a web of sporadic developments in artistic quality, conflicting attitudes about the very nature and function of theatre for young people, and, at times, poorly documented efforts and achievements in both play writing and play production. And what makes the task that much more formidable is the lack of a discrete definition as to what theatre for young audiences is or should be: Should the genre embrace only plays written and staged by professionals in legitimate theatres? What then of school-based drama, or the multitude of plays developed throughout this century by and with children and adolescents in cultural and social centers? Must a complete perspective on the genre therefore include plays conceived and performed by children themselves, plays they have had a hand in writing as well as ones written for them? Several recent publications have helped to bring some order to the plethora of types, changes, and trends in both form and content which have shaped American children's theatre since its modest beginning. In Theatre, Children and Youth (Anchorage, 1982), a hefty handbook for critics and practitioners alike, Jed Vavis and Mary Jane Evans provide, among other things, a historical context for contemporary theories and practices by acknowledging the influence of former philosophical and aesthetic beliefs on current attitudes toward the nature and development of child audiences. Roger Bedard's Dramatic Literature for Children: A Century in Review (Anchorage, 1984) describes the principal issues and developments which have informed the American children's theatre movement from the 1880s to the present. The volume contains thirteen representative scripts, chronologically arranged, which Bedard illuminates with astute commentary on the social, political and artistic sentiments and values in which the plays are rooted. Then came Six Plays for Young People from the Federal Theatre Project (1936-1939) (Greenwood, 1986), edited by Lowell Swortzell, which draws much-needed attention to a short-lived heyday for children's playwrights. Although sometimes forced into allegiance to restrictions imposed by President Roosevelt's New Deal politics, and too easily drawn to obvious moralizing and plot contrivance, the New Deal playwrights produced a remarkable number of plays in a variety of styles and forms which, however dated they may now seem, once attracted thousands of children and adolescents to the theatre. And to fill in some of the gaps left by the preceding titles, there is Nellie McCaslin's comprehensive Historical Guide to Children's Theatre in America (Greenwood, 1988), which offers brief overviews of both the accomplishments of more than 300 commercial, community, and educational theatre companies, and the contributions of America's most significant professional playwrights and most influential theatre organizations and associations.1 Now Bedard and Tolch have gathered together eleven carefully researched and richly documented essays which chart yet another Cook's tour of some major milestones in the evolution of a distinctly American brand of theatre for, by, and sometimes with young people. Far from covering new territory, however, the essays in Spotlight on the Child offer some fresh insights into, as well as critical analyses of, a variety of plays, playwrights, and theatre companies highlighted in other recent histories of American children's theatre. Here, the route begins in the late eighteenth century with the publication of Charles Stearns' Dramatic Dialogues for the Use of Schools, touted in Jonathan Levy's perceptive opening piece as "the first...