The Playbook: A Story of Theatre, Democracy and the Making of a Culture War

By James Shapiro
New York: Penguin, 358 pp

Reviewed by Don Rubin*

From the heights of Elizabethan High Culture, internationally recognized Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro of Columbia University has for some reason decided to go slumming of late in the depths of American cultural history. His latest volume, The Playbook, is a look back at the Federal Theatre Project, America’s post-Depression attempt at creating a federally-subsidized theatre. For those unfamiliar with this odd moment in American theatre history, it didn’t end well with the country’s political far right attacking it savagely as being – no surprise — un-American.

The closing of the Federal Theatre Project put a brake on a range of small gains in the arts, especially racial gains. Shapiro’s volume – which essentially rehashes well-trod material – says that the US should not make that mistake again. This is not a new insight but if Shapiro’s cultural slumming generates new interest in politics and theatre in the US, well good on him.

Certainly the world already knows that the US has had problems with the creation of social nets under any circumstances in any area but it has had an especial difficulty with social support for artists. The Capitalist mantra is that everyone must pay their own way, earn their own money, no matter what societal block might stand in their way. This is especially true in the arts where, on a per capita basis the US continues to show one of the lowest support rates for arts production in the industrialized world. Lessons from the Federal Theatre Project’s experiences are still here to be learned, suggests Shapiro.

For the record, the US Federal Theatre Project was one of the first serious attempts at changing American attitudes by offering modest salaries to artists after the 1929 Depression. Under the direction of Vassar College theatre professor Hallie Flanagan – of some interest here, she was the mother-in-law of the soon to be influential left-leaning theatre critic Eric Bentley — the project was of some real import for a time to the careers of a number of artists including Orson Welles, Elmer Rice, Arthur Miller and Willa Cather among others. It also brought numerous black artists to public note.

All part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, it specifically sought to offer a living to theatre artists. And it made an impact if numbers are anything to go by. Shapiro describes the Federal Theatre Project as “a once thriving…relief program that did not survive and has left little trace [but]… which from 1935 to 1939 staged, for a pittance, over a thousand productions in twenty-nine states seen by thirty million, or roughly one in four Americans, two-thirds of whom (according to audience surveys) had never seen a play before….It employed at its peak over twelve thousand struggling artists, some of whom…would soon be famous…It was the producer of a moment when the arts…were thought to be vital to the health of the republic and deserving of its support” (xvi).

Shapiro’s introduction argues that “the consequences of the attacks on it, part of a particularly ugly culture war that led to its defunding, are still felt today….A defining legacy of this culture war is how these strategies coalesced into a right-wing playbook, widely used today, for securing power and challenging progressive initiatives” (xvii, xix).

It is certainly hard to argue with what he says but the fact is that the Federal Theatre Project’s dramatic rise and fall has already been pretty well covered in such books as Hallie Flanagan’s own memoir Arena (published in 1940), Jane De Hart Mathews’ The Federal Theatre: Plays Relief and Politics (published in 1967), Joanne Bentley’s biography Hallie Flanagan’s A Life in the American Theatre (1988), and more recently in Barry B. Witham’s The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study (2009). It has also been examined in various chapters on the subject in American theatre histories and has been the subject of innumerable journal articles. Indeed, all of these books and essays would make up a very full bibliography. Unfortunately, Prof Shapiro does not include one, choosing instead to write a 69-page “Bibliographic Essay” which is neither readable as an essay nor especially useful to those wishing to do further research on the subject.

So what is Prof. Shapiro’s goal here? No doubt, a genuine reassessment of the Federal Theatre at this distance in time by such a major scholar might serve a useful purpose but this book is not really that. Its format is a bit of this and a bit of that — a potted history — far more gossipy and curious than insightful or comprehensive. In sum, not so much an academic study as a cautionary political tale for the uninitiated. The Playbook is a micro-vision that simply misses too much of the Federal Theatre’s forest for the minutiae of its trees.

Yet, I suppose, even a micro look can turn up nuggets at times. I actually found the volume’s dance chapter interesting for its look at the Federal Theatre’s support of modern dance through the lens of its numerous Black and Jewish artists. In this area, both racism and prejudice reared their demon heads regularly. Earlier books on the subject often passed over these areas. So Shapiro does the area some service.

He also underscores the fact that the Federal Theatre was not just for actors. “There were also playwrights, prop makers, musicians, prompters, stagehands, producers, ushers, designers, managers, carpenters, bill posters, advertising agents, scenic artists, electricians, dancers and costume makers.” He notes that unemployment hit 25 per cent in 1933 and in New York City that year, “300,000 meals were dispensed by the Stage Relief Fund and the Actors’ Dinner Club” (28).

The oft told tale of the project’s ultimate demise is recalled here. We learn of the many problems that emerged right from the beginning for Flanagan who was required to use 90 per cent of the funds available on labor leaving show budgets precariously low. She also knew that the material produced could not be interpreted as specifically political. This was a particular problem since one of the first Living Theatre productions of the Federal Theatre to open on Broadway was Ethiopia, a dramatization of “Mussolini’s recent and brutal invasion of that African nation, about which the U.S. government had officially remained neutral.” Boasting a company of Black actors and dancers” including the appearance of an actor playing Ethiopian Emperor Haille Selassie on the stage, it was clearly too politically hot to handle and Flanagan was forced to tell playwright Elmer Rice that it was not wise to go ahead with this project. Rice, of course, immediately cried censorship and the production, called by the New York Times’ critic Brooks Atkinson “sobering and impressive” was forced to close after its first and only performance.

In fact, the Federal Theatre’s first New York hit was with an all black 180-person production of Macbeth which was subsequently taken on a three month national tour. In some cities it actually broke the color barrier while in others, performances were cancelled because black playgoers were not allowed to sit next to whites. The show business newspaper Variety reported that “southerners are understood to have felt that colored players in a colored play is one thing, but colored players in Shakespeare is another” (80).

In his section on the Federal Theatre and modern dance, Shapiro writes of a still relatively unknown Jewish dancer named Helen Becker who performed under the stage name Tamiris. Daughter of an eastern European family which settled in New York City at the turn of the century, we are told that Tamiris, after seeing Isadora Duncan for the first time, moved away from ballet into the realm of the modern, staging her own solo concerts from 1927 on. From 1932, she became interested in what was called black dance and she began working with the Bahama Negro Dancers in what was daring inter-racial dance. Members of the press, we learn, called her “the Harlem savage.” For Tamiris “the validity of the modern dance was increasingly rooted in its ability to express modern problems and to make modern audiences want to do something about them” (116).

Tamiris disbanded her own company in 1936 to work with the Federal Theatre as the Federal Dance Theatre. Her goal was to contract some 185 dancers and stage eight original productions. Unfortunately, the company wound up relying on earlier choreography and after 22 months it was forced to close down because of major budget cuts. Tamiris’ vision, writes Shapiro, “never had the time, resources or strong leadership to mature into something more consequential and only managed to stage a handful of original productions…Its greatest success was Tamiris’s How Long Brethren?, a long-running Broadway hit that offered a glimpse of a different future for modern American dance had the Federal Dance Theatre survived” (120).

Attacks on the Federal Theatre consistently hinted that Blacks, Jews and immigrants were too influential in its work. Texas Congressman Martin Dies set up a Committee in the 1930s, in fact, calling for the deportation of three million immigrants whose numbers he claimed, without evidence, included “hundreds of gangsters, murderers and thieves unfit to live in this country.” (190). Predecessor of the infamous post-war McCarthy Committee on un-American Activities, the Dies committee pitted “rural patriots” against “urban subversives” (196) which sounds all too familiar today. It was the Dies Committee which would eventually finish off the Federal Theatre Project in 1939 when all federal funding to the project was cut off in a 373-21 congressional vote.

“After that,” says Shapiro, “shows were closed, scripts were put in storage, and thousands of actors, designers and stagehands would lose their jobs” (247), causing no less a personage than Eleanor Roosevelt to say “this project is considered dangerous because it may harbor some Communists, but I wonder if Communists occupied in producing plays are less dangerous than Communists starving to death” (252). Clearly the project could not sustain itself under such political attacks, attacks typified by Senators such as North Carolina’s Robert Reynolds who not only called its work “putrid” but added that they were serving the cardinal keystones of communism – “free love and racial equality” (255).

Flanagan tried to defend the work on numerous occasions responding at one point in the New York Times by saying the government was obviously “afraid… of thinking people because the Federal Theatre gave Negro actors as well as white actors a chance” (258).

But by 1943, as World War II stretched on, the entire Works Progress Administration (WPA) program came to an end. And with it, make-work projects across the board faded away with the documents of the Federal Theatre consigned to an airplane hangar in Maryland where the materials were all but forgotten. They were ultimately saved from total extinction by two scholars from George Mason University in 1974.

Shapiro points out that in 1965 US federal funding for the arts emerged again in the form of the still active National Endowment for the Arts though it too had to survive numerous attempts to shut it down – in 1981 under Ronald Reagan; in 1989 and 1990, in 1995 and again in 2018 “when Donald Trump’s proposed budget called for its termination. All this, says Shapiro, “shows how little the right-wing playbook has changed since 1938: taxpayer support of the arts is ‘welfare for cultural elites,’ promotes ‘the worst excess of multiculturalism and political correctness;’” and “demeans the values of ordinary Americans….The clash between the playbooks of Martin Dies and Hallie Flanagan continues to resonate across the land, with lessons for both the right and the left, and consequences for us all” (266-68). 


*Don Rubin is Professor Emeritus of theatre studies at Toronto’s York University and Editor of Routledge’s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre. He is Book Review Editor of Critical Stages.

Copyright © 2024 Don Rubin
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #30, Dec. 2024
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