Hallie Flanagan: a woman killed by Congress. Or at least by Congress-approved committee. From 1935 to 1939, Flanagan ran the most extraordinary of stage ventures, a dramatic instance of imagination spurred by political principle. The Federal Theatre Project, set up under FDR’s New Deal to give work to unemployed theatre practitioners, produced more than a thousand plays, estimated to have been seen by thirty million – roughly one in four – Americans. The celebrated ‘voodoo Macbeth’, which took an all-black cast into Jim Crow country, disrupted a creaking Shakespearean tradition, transporting Dunsinane to Haiti, getting rid of kilted thanes and launching the career of Orson Welles. A much needed (still needed) strand of documentary theatre was launched with a series of Living Newspapers, described by Arthur Miller as ‘the only new form that was ever introduced into the American theatre’. Modern dance was eased out of its overlooked niche; the revolutionary lighting designs of Abe Feder resculpted the stage. Audience surveys recorded that two-thirds of spectators had never before been to a theatre. When the project was closed down after four years, deemed to be promoting un-American activity, Flanagan declared her life had been a failure.
Latter-day parallels shudder through James Shapiro’s The Playbook (Faber, £12.99), whose title touches on both scripts and proscription: division between American citizens, the tearing apart of democracy, the shutting down of arts organisations, culture wars! His account keeps the resonances light, concentrating on the Federal Theatre’s particular, enviable qualities. Flexible and light-footed, not based in a building or rooted in a capital, this new model for a nationwide theatre did not merely summon audiences but travelled to them, and adapted its dramas to local circumstances: a play propagandising for slum clearance featured a blazing tenement when seen on Broadway, but in Philadelphia, where poor construction was a more persistent problem, turned on a building’s collapse. In New York, the pivotal figure was a Jewish man, in Philadelphia a black woman.
Dissent also came from within, from the left as well as the right. Mary McCarthy berated the project for ‘aesthetic fatigue’ and New Deal toadyism. Practitioners smudged the truth, not least about that celebrated Macbeth. Welles, who described himself as ‘King of Harlem’, talked down the distinction of his collaborators (‘the only other member of the coven who had any English was a dwarf with gold teeth’). The producer, John Houseman, made up a past as a cowboy and Cambridge graduate. The critic who flattered the production’s reputation for jinxes by dropping dead after filing a disobliging review had been ill for ages; his main complaint was that the curtain went up late.