Federal Theatre Project

Poster for Festival of American Dance, Los Angeles Federal Theatre Project, WPA, 1937.

The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was a New Deal project to fund theatre and other live artistic performances in the United States during the Great Depression. It was one of five Federal One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The FTP's primary goal was employment of out-of-work artists, writers, and directors, with the secondary aim of entertaining poor families and creating relevant art.

Background

The FTP was established August 27, 1935, after a legislative and administrative prologue. Hallie Flanagan, a theater professor at Vassar, was chosen by WPA head Harry Hopkins to lead the FTP. She was given the daunting task of building a national theater program to employ thousands of unemployed artists in as little time as possible. Hopkins added to the difficulty of her job by promising the FTP would be "free, adult, and uncensored." At the time, this statement appeared to FTP directors as a green light to all FTP projects, regardless of their political or social content. Soon, however it would come back to haunt Hopkins, Flanagan and the FTP as a whole.

Poster for Susan Glaspell's FTP production of Alison's House, which later won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Living Newspapers were plays written by teams of researchers-turned-playwrights. These men and women clipped articles from newspapers about current events, often hot button issues like farm policy, syphilis testing, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and housing inequity. These newspaper clippings were adapted into plays intended to inform audiences, often with progressive or left-wing themes. Triple-A Plowed Under, for instance, attacked the U.S. Supreme Court for killing an aid agency for farmers. These politically-themed plays quickly drew criticism from members of Congress.

Although the undisguised political invective in the Living Newspapers sparked controversy, they also proved popular with audiences. As an art form, the Living Newspaper is perhaps the FTP's most well-known work.

Problems with the FTP and Congress intensified when the State Department objected to the first Living Newspaper, Ethiopia, about Haile Selassie and his nation's struggles against Benito Mussolini's invading Italian forces. The U.S. government soon mandated that the FTP, a federal government agency, could not depict foreign heads of state on the stage, for fear of diplomatic backlash. Playwright and director Elmer Rice, head of the New York office of the FTP, resigned in protest.

Many of the notable artists of the time participated in the FTP, including Susan Glaspell who served as Midwest Bureau Director. The legacy of the FTP can also be found in a new generation of theater artists whose careers began with the FTP. Arthur Miller, Orson Welles, John Houseman, Martin Ritt, Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, Marc Blitzstein, Arthur Arent and Abe Feder all became established, in part, through their work in the FTP. Blitzstein, Houseman and Welles collaborated on the controversial FTP production of The Cradle Will Rock.

The FTP was the most expensive of the Federal One projects, consuming 29.1 percent of Federal One's budget. (However, this budget was less than three-fourths of one percent of the total WPA budget.)

On June 30, 1939, the FTP was ended when its funding was canceled, largely attributed to strong Congressional objections to the overtly left-wing political tones of many FTP productions.

Orson Welles directed the New York Negro Theatre Unit's production of Macbeth, c. 1935.

African American Theatre

The Negro Theatre Project (NTP) was part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) and had units that were set up in cities throughout the United States. The units were located in four different geographical regions of the country. In the West, units were located in Seattle, Washington, and Los Angeles, California.In the East,units were located in New York City, New York, Boston, Massachusetts, Hartford, Connecticut, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Newark, New Jersey. In the South, there were units in Raleigh, North Carolina, Durham, North Carolina, and Birmingham, Alabama. In the Midwest, units were located in Chicago, Illinois, Peoria, Illinois, and Cleveland, Ohio. The project provided employment and apprenticeships to black playwrights, directors, actors, and technicians. The project offered a much needed source of assistance for African American theatre from 1935 to 1939.

The New York Negro Unit was active and well known. It was located at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, and staged some 30 plays. The most popular production was the Haitian, or “voodoo,” Macbeth (1935), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play set in the Caribbean and directed by Orson Welles. Other plays included Frank Wilson’s folk drama Walk Together, Children (1936), which described the deportation of 100 African American children from the South to the North to work for low wages. Arna Bontemps and Countee Cullen’s The Conjur Man Dies (1936), was a farcical mystery that dramatized Rudolph Fisher’s mystery-melodrama. Also in 1936, J. Augustus Smith and Peter Morrell co-authored Turpentine, a social drama focusing on the injustice of Southern labor camps. George MacEntee's The Case of Philip Lawrence (1937) was a courtroom melodrama and Haiti (1938) by William Dubois, was a historical drama about overthrowing the Haitian government.

A lightly fictionalized version of the FTP's story is presented in the 1999 film Cradle Will Rock.

See also

• Rena Vale, Los Angeles writer

References

Notes

• BlackPast.org."Federal Theatre Project (Negro Units)." 10 April 2010 <http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/federal-theatre-project-negro-units>.

Further reading

• Schwartz, Bonnie Nelson. Voices from the Federal Theatre. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2003.

External links

• Footage of Orson Welles and the Federal Theatre Project's 1936 "Voodoo Macbeth" - with informative annotations.
• Coast to Coast: The Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939 - A Library of Congress exhibition with photographs and slideshows about the FTP.
• American Memory - The New Deal Stage: Selections from the Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939
• Triple A Plowed Under Full text plus recreation-for-radio production of this Federal Theater Project drama from American Studies at the University of Virginia
• Ponce, Pedro, "An Hour Upon the Stage: The Brief Life of Federal Theatre," Humanities, July/August 2003
• GMU Special Collection & Archives: Federal Theatre Project Playscript and Radioscript Collection
• Federal Theatre Project Materials Collection - online images from George Mason University Library.
• Living New Deal Project, California
• Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture - Federal Theater Project