Federal Theater Project

FEDERAL THEATER PROJECT (1935-1939). From its inception, the Federal Theater Project (FTP) was a “political theater.” It encouraged political awareness and action in its audiences and experimented with theatrical forms. First and foremost, the FTP was itself a political creation that emerged from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and put more than 13,000 unemployed actors, directors, designers, dancers, playwrights, technicians, and more, back to work in their own fields. National Director Hallie Flanagan envisioned it as a “federation of theatres” that would bring high-quality, locally relevant theatre to cities and towns across the country.

The FTP is often remembered as a radical organization with communist sympathies. Yet overtly political productions like Arthur Arent’s Ethiopia, which dramatized Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and Mark Blitzstein’s infamous The Cradle Will Rock, a Brechtian allegory of social corruption that focused on the steel industry, closed before they opened. Critics accused the FTP of boondoggling and employing extremists.

In fact, fewer than 10 percent of FTP plays dealt explicitly with hot-button political issues such as housing, agriculture, or labor. The FTP produced more plays by Shakespeare than by any other playwright, with cycles of plays by Eugene O’Neill and George Bernard Shaw close behind. Popular forms included children’s theatre, vaudeville, circus, and religious dramas, and the FTP’s National Service Bureau created dozens of lists of recommended plays for different audience interests, including Christmas plays, amateur theatricals, radio plays, historical plays, and folk plays. In its four years, the FTP reached more than 30 million people, 60 percent of whom had never seen live theatre before.

While controversial political plays represented a fraction of the FTP’s work, those pieces became weapons wielded by conservatives hoping to tarnish the FTP and, with it, Roosevelt’s New Deal. One great triumph was It Can’t Happen Here. Based on Sinclair Lewis’s novel, It Can’t Happen Here rehearsed how the United States could devolve into a totalitarian state. The FTP opened twenty-one productions in eighteen cities simultaneously, one week before the 1936 presidential election. The combined productions played to hundreds of thousands in what New York theatre critic Burns Mantle described as “justification of the organization as a people’s theatre that is willing and able to discuss problems of social import boldly and freely.”

Living Newspapers similarly dramatized social issues and were built around extensive research (demonstrated via comprehensive footnotes). In Chicago, Arnold Sundgaard’s Spirochete (1938) attempted to destigmatize syphilis; the original production even included free syphilis tests in the lobby. Drawing from Roosevelt’s second inaugural address, One-Third of a Nation (1938) documented the compounded inequities that accompanied lack of property ownership; it asserted that the combined work of Americans had increased the property value, so all should share the benefits. While no Living Newspaper was used explicitly as a platform for Socialist or Communist Party propaganda, they frequently posed questions that challenged structural inequities.

As a federal organization, the FTP could not legally inquire about worker political affiliations, so there was no way to keep a head count of Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, or Communists. However, writers, directors, and choreographers expressed their beliefs in their work, and in some cases innocuous scripts were politicized in production. Production concepts made classical adaptations an important vector for social justice, particularly in the FTP’s negro units. Orson Welles’s and John Houseman’s famous ‘Voodoo’ MacBeth (New York, 1936), set Shakespeare’s play during the Haitian independence movement that resulted in the emancipation of Haiti’s slaves. A Los Angeles unit set its own version of MacBeth in Africa (1937). The Seattle negro unit adapted the anti-war Lysistrata (1936), which was shut down for its “risqué” verse. These subtle political statements, catering to specific audiences, were difficult for the FTP to police.

With its national reach, all-encompassing programs, and attention to local communities, the FTP took on different identities all across the country. FTP units traveled through Civilian Conservation Corps camps to entertain the “CCC Boys” while a vaudeville company toured refugee camps during the Great Flood of 1937. History plays drew attention to the plight of Native Americans and to women’s suffrage. But the FTP also employed Black writers, choreographers, and performers like Theodore Ward, Asadata Dafora, and Edna Thomas, and women like Ellen Woodward and Susan Glaspell had the opportunity to lead and shape policy. In four years, the FTP cost $46 million, $42 million of which went directly to salaries for qualified relief workers.

Even so, Flanagan spent enormous amounts of time and energy defending the FTP from charges of communist activity. In 1939, with the FTP again under attack, Flanagan testified before the Dies Committee in a last-ditch effort to save the organization. In spite of her testimony, Congress terminated funding effective June 30, 1939. As Flanagan wrote in Arena, “Curtains came down on plays. Curtains came down on a coast-to-coast theater plant; on the people; and on the records of the activities of those people.”

Brown, Lorraine, and John O’Connor, eds. Free, Adult, and Uncensored: The Living History of the Federal Theatre Project. Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books, 1978.

Mathews, Jane De Hart. The Federal Theater, 1935–1939: Plays, Relief, and Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967.

Osborne, Elizabeth A. Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Saal, Ilka. New Deal Theater: The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

White, Ann Folino. Plowed Under: Food Policy Protests and Performance in New Deal America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.

Witham, Barry B. The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.