By Wendy Smith

The shutdown of virtually every theater America has given people who care about this ancient art form plenty of time to think about what shape it might take when theaters can safely reopen. The chorus of voices that clamored in the media over the summer and early fall, including a blistering online manifesto from theater artists of color (“We See You, White American Theatre”), made it clear that business as usual is not what anyone has in mind.

Over and over, playwrights, actors, and directors declare their yearning for theater with low ticket prices and diverse audiences. They’re looking for an alternative to the commercial theater’s insane cost structure and nonprofit theater’s endless chase after corporate sponsors and wealthy patrons. They want theatre to be essential culture for everyone, not just the white and the well-heeled. They imagine theaters rooted in their communities, developing plays written and performed by local artists. They dream of theatres that give dramatic form to pressing social issues, serving as forums for civic dialogue and engagement. Of course they want to entertain, but they want to offer more meaningful entertainment to more people.

It’s simple, really. They want a new Federal Theatre Project.

The Federal Theatre Project was a small but highly visible unit within the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency that hired 8 ½ million people to do everything from rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure to serving hot school lunches. Astonishingly, among those millions were some 12,000 unemployed actors, playwrights, directors, and theater technicians. “Hell! They’ve got to eat just like other people,” WPA head Harry Hopkins declared.

For four thrilling years, from 1935 to 1939, the Federal Theatre staged productions across America, bringing free and low-cost theater to people who had never seen a live performance. Mobile units toured the country, playing for flood victims along the Ohio River valley and workers in remote Civilian Conservation Corps camps; “summer caravans” entertained half a million people a week in city parks. The project reached out to immigrant audiences with companies performing in Yiddish, Italian, German, French and Spanish. It established 16 Negro units and prohibited segregated seating at all Federal Theatre performances.

Productions ran the gamut from the serious, socially conscious Living Newspapers to trifles like “Up in Mabel’s Room.” The Federal Theater presented modern drama and history plays, children’s theatre and puppet shows, musicals, religious pageants, and vaudeville, classics from Aristophanes to Shakespeare.

This eclectic fare reflected Federal Theater Project director Hallie Flanagan’s vision of a distinctively American national theater: eclectic and democratic as Europe’s centralized state theater were not. “National in scope and regional in emphasis” was her motto. She disliked it when people referred to the Federal Theatre as a national theater. “The word ‘national’,” she said in 1937, means “an attempt to have one theater expressive of one national point of view.” A federal theater, by contrast, was “many theater brought together not so much for purposes of control as for mutual benefit.” She constantly urged her regional staff to find out what interested their local audiences. “We’re giving them plays which made the Theater Guild famous,” a stage manager in Atlanta sniffed when Flanagan asked why Federal Theatre productions there played to such small audiences. “Plays which made the Theater Guild famous,” she retorted, “were not the plays that made the Federal Theater successful.”

The plays that made the Federal Theater successful voiced national concerns in a period of crisis, but they also reflected local sensibilities and demonstrated local strengths. Susan Quinn’s excellent 2008 history of the project, Furious Improvisation, captures the Federal Theatre’s regional variety by following Flanagan on a 1937 inspection tour. In Chicago,  O Say Can You Sing drew on the city’s abundant stock of unemployed vaudeville performers; an integrated cast of 250 juggled, tap danced, and clowned their way through a musical revue that genially spoofed the Federal Theatre itself—and the politicians who saw a communist behind every curtain.

 Flanagan was so excited by the wildly imaginative Pinocchio she saw in Los Angeles that she made director Yasha Frank national consultant for the children’s theater program.  Frank, who quit his job at Paramount Pictures to take “the chance of a lifetime” with the Federal Theatre, also produced plays in French, Yiddish, and Spanish for LA’s multilingual audiences. An updated Lysistrata was characteristic of the Seattle Negro unit’s focus on “plays whose universal theme remains the same regardless of color or creed.” The Negro units were a source of enormous pride for African Americans, who relished and seized the opportunity to participate in the Federal Theatre as equal members of its creative teams and its audiences.

The productions that got the most national attention were hot-button plays like It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’ adaptation of his novel about a fascist takeover of the U.S., and the Living Newspapers, dramatic documentaries that used projections, loudspeakers, and other then-new theatrical devices to tackle such incendiary subjects as slum housing (One-Third of a Nation), public ownership of utilities (Power), and syphilis (Spirochete).

Flanagan was justly proud of the simultaneous opening of It Can’t Happen Here in 21 theatres across the country; it affirmed the Federal Theatre’s professionalism and efficiency during a rocky first year when conservative politicians decried it as an amateurish waste of tax dollars. And she staunchly defended the controversial Living Newspapers as innovative means of informing the public about important contemporary issues. “We all believed that the theater was more than a private enterprise.” she wrote in Arena, her impassioned 1940 memoir about the project. “It was also a public interest which, properly fostered, might come to be a social and educative force.”

The places that most needed the Federal Theatre, Flanagan believed, were the vast stretches of rural and small-town America where no one had seen live performances since the movies killed vaudeville, places whose inhabitants had no reason to think that theater could be a meaningful part of their lives. It wasn’t enough to send them urban productions, though many Federal Theatre shows toured multiple locations. Flanagan wanted to foster theater that sprang organically from these diverse communities, capturing their unique histories and present-day experiences in the words and performances of the people who lived there. But these places had few of the professional theater people the Federal Theatre Project was set up to employ; it was required to hire 90% of its labor force from the relief rolls, and they had to have been previously employed in the theater.  

Flanagan maneuvered by sending employees from big-city units flush with personnel to collaborate with universities, civic organizations, and community theaters in underserved areas. She dispatched four playwrights to whip into final shape a Pageant of Education written by students and teachers from all parts of North Carolina, arguing to her skeptical superiors, “Isn’t it one of our ideas to decentralize? It won’t cost us any more to pay people in North Carolina than in New York.”   She tapped an indefatigable actor/director/stage manager from New York to set up community theaters across the rural South. He and a single colleague were the only paid staff; “the object was not to put on plays but to get plays out of the people themselves.”

One play grew from the reminiscence of coal miners in West Virginia; others consisted of folk songs, recitations, and dances chronicling local history. The director of the Oklahoma unit solicited writers and theaters across the Southwest for material about their states’ early days. Three dramatists from the Federal Theatre’s National Service Bureau in New York helped the Oklahoma office provide plays and radio scripts fashioned from this raw material to more than 200 amateur dramatic groups; the program eventually employed more than 60 writers.

The plays produced by these efforts were not intended to be literary masterpieces. The Federal Theatre’s aim was to make theatre a vital part of every community, to create new audiences previously shut out by high ticket prices and lack of access. Flanagan’s mission was to nurture work the commercial theater would not. This was not necessarily the mission of her bosses in Washington, who hoped to return Federal Theatet employees to the commercial theater as soon as possible, nor of the WPA’s state administrators, who were often openly hostile to idea of publicly financed theater. WPA officials were usually the source of the project’s occasional censorship battles; Hopkins’ promise that government-funded theater would be “free, adult, uncensored” was mostly honored, but not without a struggle. Their views conflicted throughout the project’s lifespan with Flanagan’s vision of theater as a popular art of popular expression, subsidized by a government “offering the people access to the arts and tools of a civilization which they themselves are helping to make.”

This was very much a New Deal vision of the role of the arts in a democracy, and it was as bitterly contested in the 1930s as it undoubtedly would be today. Conservative congressmen, unhappy enough about the WPA hiring people to pave roads or build airports, were apoplectic at the idea of handing out government paychecks to actors. They considered the socially conscious plays that made up approximately 10% of the project’s total output as indisputable evidence that the entire Federal Theatre was subversive; this conviction was reinforced by the picketing and sitdown strikes at the New York City units that followed drastic WPA budget cuts in 1936-7. Also, as Quinn points out in Furious Improvisation, the Federal Theatre’s egalitarian racial policies were anathema to Southern Democrats, many of whom turned against the New Deal in the late ‘30s.

When the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established in 1938, it was clear that the Federal Theatre Project would be a target. The arguments made against the Federal Theatre will be depressingly familiar to anyone who has followed contemporary battles over school textbooks and heard the recent pronouncements about 'patriotic education' and 'a pro-American curriculum.' A historical drama about the Constitution, protestors declared, was “un-American” because it featured a chorus of common people: “famous characters of history were thus cheated of sufficient importance.” When a play about Abraham Lincoln’s early years showed him suggesting that political debate topics should be “subjects for action—useful for living,” Congressman J. Parnell Thomas announced “that is Communist talk” and dubbed Prologue to Glory “propaganda.”

Thomas went on to claim as a member of the Dies committee that the Federal Theatre Project was “completely dominated by Communists” and hired people with no previous theatrical experience. WPA officials initially considered such accusations a joke and forbid Flanagan to respond to them. By the time they realized their mistake and allowed her to testify, the Dies committee’s attitude was so reflexively hostile that when she made a reference to Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, one member asked, “Is he a Communist?” Derisive laughter erupted in the hearing room, but ignorance and fearmongering were as tenacious and effective then as they are now. In June 1939, Congress passed a relief bill that specifically excluded the Federal Theatre Project; FDR reluctantly signed it to avoid throwing millions of other WPA employees out of work.

Like the jettisoning of national health insurance from the 1935 Social Security Act (also in response to adamant opposition from a small group), the loss of the Federal Theatre Project prompts wistful thoughts of what might have been. “There is no reason why there should not be a whole chain of permanent theatres throughout America,” exulted New York theater critic Burns Mantle in 1938, fired up by a cross-country tour of Federal Theatre productions in playhouses that had been dark for years before the project reopened them. Americans needed to stop thinking of a national theater as a single marble building, Mantle commented, and imagine instead “a circuit of national theater units.”

The fledgling circuit established by the Federal Theatre Project disintegrated after 1939, and although today’s regional theaters have informal networks to share scripts and ideas, they also have to compete for scarce private and public grants. How much more could they accomplish as part of a confederation guided and funded at least in part by a national agency?

A new Federal Theatre Project could support the development of existing regional theaters and extend their reach by bankrolling national tours of their best work. It could once again send theatre professionals into the countryside to encourage communities to create their own theatre. It could broaden the piecemeal educational efforts of nonprofit theatres and provide staff to make theatre part of the curriculum and extracurricular activities in public schools. It could create a national program to subsidize lower ticket prices and free performances; the few determined theatres that have hustled up corporate sponsorships for such programs have all seen their audiences become younger and more diverse. It could fund companies to bring theatre into prisons and army camps, expanding on the pioneering work of The Actors’ Gang and Arts in the Armed Forces. Artists have worked heroically during the pandemic shutdown to keep theatre in the public eye with livestreamed events, Zoom plays, Instagram monologues, and some fascinating interactive performances. A new Federal Theatre could support these innovations so they can continue when theatres reopen. Streamed performances could play an important role in making live theatre accessible to new audiences, who might go on to discover the pleasures of theatre in a physical space.

In short, a new Federal Theatre Project could help make theater part of the national cultural conversation. It seems unlikely right now that we will ever get such a project, after four decades of relentless promulgation of the idea that the only good government is a small government. But a publicly funded theater was just as unlikely in 1929, when Republicans had been pursuing the same policy for nine years to general public approval. The stock market crash and three long years of suffering while the Hoover administration did nothing changed Americans’ minds about what they expected from their government. Perhaps our current crisis, though different, will prompt similar rethinking. Perhaps a politician as expansive as Harry Hopkins will include the arts in a federal program to put Americans back to work in projects that will revitalize the nation’s soul as well as its economy. Otherwise, when theatres can finally reopen, the ones that survive will be even more expensive, and audiences will continue to be small, white and wealthy.

Some 30-million people, more than one-fifth of the U.S, population, attended Federal Theatre productions, belying the notion that theater was necessarily a luxury product for the elite. On the contrary, Hallie Flanagan asserted in 1940, the network of “public theaters” built on the commitment of 12,000 Federal Theatre workers in every corner of America was an instrument of democracy and national unity. Flanagan’s closing words in Arena, written as fascism was overrunning Europe, speak just as powerfully to our era of bitter polarization: “Such a theatre can interpret region to region, emphasize the united aspect of the states…Against the death forces of ignorance, greed, fear, and prejudice, such a theater is a life force.”

Wendy Smith is the author of Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940. Twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circe Nona Balakian Citation for Reviewing, she is a contributing editor at The American Scholar.