Arts Alive San Antonio

The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War by James Shapiro
Reviewed by Steven G. Kellman

            For four heady, embattled years, 1935-1939, the United States indulged in an audacious artistic experiment – a government-sponsored network of cutting-edge theatrical productions in cities and towns throughout the country. Conceived during the Depression, as part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, the Federal Theatre Project was designed to help relieve the unemployment crisis. At its peak, it provided jobs to more than 12,000 struggling artists. But, convinced that live theater could be a tonic to a vibrant democracy, the leaders of the Federal Theatre Project also challenged the 30 million Americans who saw its productions in 29 states to think about urgent issues such as class, race, poverty, housing, and war. Such thoughts were considered so threatening that Congress abruptly terminated its operations.

            James Shapiro, the author of popular studies of Shakespeare, begins his latest book theatrically – with an account of an American inquisition. It is as dramatic as the clash between Joseph McCarthy and Edward R. Murrow that is the basis of the hit play Good Night and Good Luck that is set more than a decade later.

On December 6, 1938, the House Un-American Activities Committee, under the leadership of Martin Dies, an opportunistic white supremacist from East Texas, met to interrogate Hallie Flanagan, an energetic professor at Vassar College who ran the Federal Theatre Project, about the value of her work. Trying to paint Flanagan and her enterprise as dangerously radical, the committee pressed her on whether her productions constituted Communist propaganda. Joe Starnes, a Congressman from Alabama, seized on an article in which Flanagan had written about “a certain Marlowesque madness” to the ambitions of her performers. “You are quoting from this Marlowe,” said Starnes. “Is he a Communist?”

            The Federal Theatre Project subsisted on a frugal $7 million budget, 90 percent of which had to be spent on labor. And the cost of labor was kept below minimum wage. Nevertheless, despite ignorance of the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, Congress, in an action anticipating Donald Trump’s decision to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, withdrew all funding from the Federal Theatre Project. In a serious blow to the New Deal, it was the first agency of the WPA to die.

            In separate chapters, Shapiro examines some of the Federal Theatre’s more notable productions. Most famous of all was probably the all-Black Macbeth that 20-year-old director Orson Welles set in 19^th-century Haiti. More than four decades later, after Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Touch of Evil, Welles reflected: “By all odds, my great success in my life was that play.” With Macbeth and other plays, the Federal Theatre challenged racist taboos and stereotypes. Even in Southern states, productions played to integrated audiences, often using integrated casts.

            Another popular success was a stage adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here, which sounded the alarm that fascism could come to the United States. How Long Brethren? was a modern dance production set to the music of Black spirituals. Problematic was the fact that the dancers were White and the chorus was Black. One Third of a Nation, an example of what were called “Living Newspapers” – which focused on contemporary issues and often featured an editorializing narrator – exposed the housing crisis in New York City. Shapiro also examines several projects such as Liberty Deferred, which, exposing the epidemic of lynching, became too controversial and was scuttled.

            However, Shapiro is less interested in a complete history of the Federal Theatre Project than in examining the culture war that resulted in its demise. For all of the occasional weaknesses in conception and execution, he is melancholic about the failed idealism of the project. He endorses Flanagan’s verdict that the “first government-sponsored theatre in the United States was doing what it could to keep alive ‘the free, inquiring critical spirit’ which is the center and core of a democracy.” He portrays its nemesis, Texas Congressman Dies, as “an opportunistic, America-first, anti-immigrant, anti-labor, racist politician with few scruples, for whom power and popularity mattered more than ideology.” Although Dies died in 1972, his kind has not gone away.——————————————————————————————————————

The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War; by James Shapiro; Penguin Press; 2024; $30.00.