The Federal Theater Project was established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on August 27, 1935, as part of the Works Progress Administration. The WPA was a response to the collapse of the U.S. economy after the stock market crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1935, unemployment was stuck at 21% of the workforce, and over 20 million Americans were on relief. The WPA was a key element of Roosevelt's New Deal, which concentrated on the three R's. Relief, providing food and shelter for the hungry and homeless.
Recovery, creating government-funded projects to provide at least one paying job to each American family. And reform. putting controls and institutions in place to prevent future economic meltdowns and to provide a measure of security for retirees, widows, the disabled. The Works Progress Administration addressed the need for recovery by hiring hundreds of thousands of Americans to build bridges, roads, public buildings, and park and forest improvements.
Just about every American city and town has some WPA structures. Here in LA, surviving WPA projects include the Hollywood Post Office, the federal courthouse downtown, the Terminal Annex building, the fountains and entryway to the Hollywood Bowl, the old L.A. Zoo animal enclosures, several bridges over the Los Angeles River, and dozens of other structures and improvements.
But the head of the WPA, Harry Hopkins, was adamant that American theater artists and craftspeople also needed to be part of the program. the great depression coming on the heels of the transition from silent to sound films had thrown many thousands of actors directors stage managers dancers writers and musicians out of work as well as members of the allied crafts designers set builders painters theatrical electricians and stage hands the mass audience once enjoyed by the legitimate theater had migrated to movie palaces and the live theater audience across the nation had narrowed to a smaller group made up of the relatively more educated and well-to-do. Hopkins wanted to create jobs for theater artists and to provide low-cost, relevant theater to the general U.S. population.
And so the Federal Theater Project was created. To head it, Hopkins called on a remarkable young woman named Hallie Flanagan, an unusual choice, a young professor of theater at Vassar, coming not from the commercial theater, but from the more progressive and experimental world of university theater. influenced by the mostly unfamiliar innovations of modern European theater, and eager to introduce the experience of modern theater to a mass American audience. One of the first big successes of the Federal Theater Project was Macbeth, as produced by what was then called the Negro Theater Unit.
The Voodoo Macbeth, set in Haiti, was conceived and directed by a very young Orson Welles, already a successful radio actor but eager to show his directing chops, and produced by an only somewhat less young John Hausman. The brilliant and innovative theatricality of Wells'production was a revelation to New York audiences, and the production moved from the Lafayette Theater in Harlem to a brief Broadway run and a U.S. tour. This Macbeth was the first of a series of famed government-funded shows to come from the creative team of Wells and Hausman.
The Negro unit in New York, under the leadership of Broadway star and director Rose McClendon, continued to produce successfully, and the other regional units of what the Federal Theater Project called the Negro Theater Project thrived during this period, creating vital theater as well as well-needed jobs for African American writers and designers and stagehands across the country. The Federal Theater Project was unabashedly progressive in its politics, eagerly pushing FDR's New Deal programs and addressing issues of inequality and injustice. of economic disparity and the rise of an organized labor movement.
While continuing an ambitious national production schedule, the theater project constantly had to deal with major political opposition from some members of the U.S. Congress. But through it all, Harry Hopkins gave Hallie Flanagan his full support, vowing that the federal theater project would be a, quote, free, uncensored, adult theater, end quote.
Looking for a way to demonstrate the unique potential of a truly national theater. In mid-1936, Flanagan approached novelist Sinclair Lewis about doing a stage version of his anti-fascist bestseller, It Can't Happen Here, to open coast-to-coast on the same night in WPA Theater. across the country. Lewis accepted the challenge and along with co-adapter John C. Moffat began work on the project.
On the night of October 27, 1936, It Can't Happen Here premiered simultaneously in 21 different theaters in 18 states. There were productions in several languages, Spanish in Tampa, Florida, Yiddish in New York, and an all-African American version in Seattle. After the initial opening, nine touring companies were formed to bring the play to many more theaters in many more cities and towns.
In all, over half a million people saw It Can't Happen Here, the equivalent of a five-year sold-out Broadway run, and many of those people were seeing live theater for the first time in their lives. Here's a brief clip from one of the 1935 productions, a bit from Act II of It Can't Happen Here. We're having a book burner on the grave tomorrow night.
A what? Gonna burn up all this subversive literature. A lot of smutty stuff that's crumpled in public malls.
Have you got any objection? Well, you won't find any subversive books here. Oh. Now, how about this fellow?
Now, this fellow, Charles Dickens, wasn't here communi- The Los Angeles production was mounted at the Mayan Theater downtown, seen here in the early 30s and as it looks today. The main federal theater project playhouse in Los Angeles was on Vine Street in Hollywood, the Hollywood Playhouse, known today, of course, as the Hollywood Palace, a popular L.A. music venue.
Controversial shows included It Can't Happen Here, The Living Newspaper Series, One Third of a Nation, Sing for Your Supper, and most memorably, The Cradle Will Rock, the story of which is vividly, though fictionally, told in Tim Robbins'film of the same name. These shows and others like them were bitterly opposed by the anti-New Deal forces in Washington. Ultimately, the Federal Theater Project was short-lived. The 1939 Congress passed a bill killing its funding and putting an end to a free, uncensored, and adult government-sponsored theater.
But this short experiment planted the seeds of the contemporary American theater as it exists today outside of New York City. The post-war growth of locally funded, non-profit professional theaters can be largely traced back to this grand experiment, thanks to the 12,000 theater artists who participated in it and the millions of Americans who were entertained and inspired by it. Artists who were nurtured and who got a foot in the door, thanks to the Federal Theater Project, included not only Orson Welles and John Hausman, but Arthur Miller, Jules Dessigne, Joseph Lozzi, Sidney Lumet, starring at age 13 in One Third of a Nation, Mark Blitstein, Elia Kazan. Norman Lloyd, who's still with us, a mere 98 years of age and living just a few miles from where Antaeus is today.
The great John Randolph, who evidently wouldn't sit still for a photographer before he was about 65, because I couldn't find any younger photos of him. Jeff Corey, Studs Terkel, Will Gere, groundbreaking choreographer Catherine Dunham. and famed L.A.
puppeteer Bob Baker, who still runs his Marionette Theater here in L.A. under the First Street Bridge. As to the ultimate legacy of the Federal Theater Project, here's Studs Terkel speaking.
To me, the legacy is very simple. It proved that there is a hunger for good, alive, pertinent theater in this country, no matter where it's performed. Sources used to create this presentation include the Library of Congress website, Wikipedia, The Federal Theater Project, A Case Study by Barry S. Whittam, Voices from the Federal Theater by Bonnie Nelson Schwartz, and the WNET documentary, Who Killed the Federal Theater?