Federal Theatre Project

The Federal Theatre Project was a theatre program established during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal to fund live artistic performances and entertainment programs in the United States. It was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration, created not as a cultural activity but as a relief measure to employ artists, writers, directors, and theater workers. National director Hallie Flanagan shaped the FTP into a federation of regional theaters that created relevant art, encouraged experimentation in new forms and techniques, and made it possible for millions of Americans to see live theatre for the first time. Although The Federal Theatre project consumed only 0.5% of the allocated budget from the WPA and was widely considered a commercial and critical success, the project became a source of heated political contention. Congress responded to the project's racial integration and accusations of Communist infiltration and cancelled its funding effective June 30, 1939. One month before the project's end, drama critic Brooks Atkinson summarized: "Although the Federal Theatre is far from perfect, it has kept an average of ten thousand people employed on work that has helped to lift the dead weight from the lives of millions of Americans. It has been the best friend the theatre as an institution has ever had in this country."

Background

Part of the Works Progress Administration, the Federal Theatre Project was a New Deal program established August 27, 1935, funded under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935. Of the $4.88 billion allocated to the WPA, $27 million was approved for the employment of artists, musicians, writers and actors under the WPA's Federal Project Number One.
Government relief efforts funding theatre through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and Civil Works Administration in the two preceding years were amateur experiments regarded as charity, not a theatre program. The Federal Theatre Project was a new approach to unemployment in the theatre profession. Only those certified as employable could be offered work, and that work was to be within the individual's defined skills and trades.
"For the first time in the relief experiments of this country the preservation of the skill of the worker, and hence the preservation of his self-respect, became important," wrote Hallie Flanagan, director of the Federal Theatre Project. A theater professor at Vassar College who had studied the operation of government-sponsored theatre abroad for the Guggenheim Foundation, Flanagan was chosen to lead the Federal Theatre Project by WPA head Harry Hopkins. Flanagan and Hopkins had been classmates at Grinnell College. Roosevelt and Hopkins selected her despite considerable pressure to choose someone from the commercial theatre industry; they believed the project should be led by someone with academic credentials and a national perspective.
Flanagan had the daunting task of building a nationwide theater program to employ thousands of unemployed artists in as little time as possible. The Theatre industry had struggled financially prior to the financial collapse of 1929. By that time it was already threatened with extinction due to the growing popularity of films and radio, but the commercial theatre was reluctant to adapt its practices. Many actors, technicians and stagehands had suffered since 1914, when movies began to replace stock, vaudeville and other live stage performances nationwide. Sound motion pictures displaced 30,000 musicians. In the Great Depression, people with little money for entertainment found an entire evening of entertainment at the movies for 25 cents, while commercial theatre charged $1.10 to $2.20 admission to cover the cost of theater rental, advertising and fees to performers and union technicians. Unemployed directors, actors, designers, musicians and stage crew took any kind of work they were able to find, whatever it paid, and charity was often their only recourse.
"This is a tough job we're asking you to do," Hopkins told Flanagan at their first meeting in May 1935. "I don't know why I still hang on to the idea that unemployed actors get just as hungry as anybody else."
Hopkins promised "a free, adult, uncensored theatre" — something Flanagan spent the next four years trying to build. She emphasized the development of local and regional theatre, "to lay the foundation for the development of a truly creative theatre in the United States with outstanding producing centers in each of those regions which have common interests as a result of geography, language origins, history, tradition, custom, occupations of the people."

Operation

On October 24, 1935, Flanagan prefaced her instructions on the Federal Theatre's operation with a statement of purpose:

The primary aim of the Federal Theatre Project is the reemployment of theatre workers now on public relief rolls: actors, directors, playwrights, designers, vaudeville artists, stage technicians, and other workers in the theatre field. The far reaching purpose is the establishment of theatres so vital to community life that they will continue to function after the program of this Federal Project is completed.

Within a year the Federal Theatre Project employed 15,000 men and women, paying them $23.86 a week while the Actors Equity Association's minimum was $40.00. These men and women would only do six performances a week and have only four hours per day to rehearse. During its nearly four years of existence 30 million people attended FTP productions in more than 200 theaters nationwide — renting many that had been shuttered — as well as parks, schools, churches, clubs, factories, hospitals and closed-off streets. Its productions totaled approximately 1,200, not including its radio programs. Because the Federal Theatre was created to employ and train people, not to generate revenue, no provision was made for the receipt of money when the project began. At its conclusion, 65 percent of its productions were still presented free of charge. The total cost of the Federal Theatre Project was $46 million.
"In any consideration of the cost of the Federal Theatre," Flanagan wrote, "it should be borne in mind that the funds were allotted, according to the terms of the Relief Act of 1935, to pay wages to unemployed people. Therefore, when Federal Theatre was criticized for spending money, it was criticized for doing what it was set up to do."
The FTP established five regional centers in New York, New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. The FTP did not operate in every state, since many lacked a sufficient number of unemployed people in the theatre profession. The project in Alabama was closed in January 1937 when its personnel were transferred to a new unit in Georgia. Only one event was presented in Arkansas. Units created in Minnesota, Missouri and Wisconsin were closed in 1936; projects in Indiana, Nebraska, Rhode Island and Texas were discontinued in 1937; and the Iowa project was closed in 1938.
Many of the notable artists of the time participated in the Federal Theatre Project, including Susan Glaspell who served as Midwest bureau director. The legacy of the Federal Theatre Project can also be found in beginning the careers of a new generation of theater artists. Arthur Miller, Orson Welles, John Houseman, Martin Ritt, Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, Marc Blitzstein and Abe Feder are among those who became established, in part, through their work in the Federal Theatre. Blitzstein, Houseman, Welles and Feder collaborated on the controversial production, The Cradle Will Rock.

Living Newspaper

s 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 infection, 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 the Agricultural Adjustment Act. These politically themed plays quickly drew criticism from members of Congress.
Although the undisguised political invective in the Living Newspaper productions sparked controversy, they also proved popular with audiences. As an art form, the Living Newspaper is perhaps the Federal Theatre's most well-known work.
Problems with the Federal Theatre Project 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 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 and was succeeded by his assistant, Philip W. Barber.

New productions

Numbers following the city of origin indicate the number of additional cities where the play was presented.

Title	Author	City	Dates
Highlights of 1935	Living Newspaper staff	New York	May 12–30, 1936
Injunction Granted	Living Newspaper staff	New York	July 24–October 20, 1936
Living Newspaper, First Edition	Cleveland Bronner	Norwalk, Conn.	June 1–July 2, 1936
Living Newspaper, Second Edition	Cleveland Bronner	Norwalk, Conn.	August 18–25, 1936
The Living Newspaper	Project staff	Cleveland	March 11–28, 1936
One-Third of a Nation	Arthur Arent	New York + 9	January 17–October 22, 1938
Power	Arthur Arent	New York + 4	February 23–July 10, 1937
Spirochete	Arnold Sundgaard	Chicago + 4	April 29–June 4, 1938
Triple-A Plowed Under	Living Newspaper staff	New York + 4	March 14–May 2, 1936