{"id":424,"date":"2024-11-06T16:25:24","date_gmt":"2024-11-06T16:25:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/30\/?p=424"},"modified":"2024-12-24T16:39:24","modified_gmt":"2024-12-24T16:39:24","slug":"the-playbook-a-story-of-theatre-democracy-and-the-making-of-a-culture-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/30\/the-playbook-a-story-of-theatre-democracy-and-the-making-of-a-culture-war\/","title":{"rendered":"The Playbook: A Story of Theatre, Democracy and the Making of a Culture War"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By James Shapiro<\/strong>
New York:\u00a0Penguin, 358 pp<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reviewed by Don Rubin<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, <\/em>is a look back at the Federal Theatre Project, America\u2019s post-Depression attempt at creating a federally-subsidized theatre. For those unfamiliar with this odd moment in American theatre history, it didn\u2019t end well with the country\u2019s political far right attacking it savagely as being \u2013 no surprise — un-American.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The closing of the Federal Theatre Project put a brake on a range of small gains in the arts, especially racial gains. Shapiro\u2019s volume \u2013 which essentially rehashes well-trod material \u2013 says that the US should not make that mistake again. This is not a new insight but if Shapiro\u2019s cultural slumming generates new interest in politics and theatre in the US, well good on him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s experiences are still here to be learned, suggests Shapiro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s 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 \u201ca once thriving\u2026relief program that did not survive and has left little trace [but]\u2026 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\u2026.It employed at its peak over twelve thousand struggling artists, some of whom\u2026would soon be famous\u2026It was the producer of a moment when the arts\u2026were thought to be vital to the health of the republic and deserving of its support\u201d (xvi).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shapiro\u2019s introduction argues that \u201cthe consequences of the attacks on it, part of a particularly ugly culture war that led to its defunding, are still felt today\u2026.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\u201d (xvii, xix).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is certainly hard to argue with what he says but the fact is that the Federal Theatre Project\u2019s dramatic rise and fall has already been pretty well covered in such books as Hallie Flanagan\u2019s own memoir Arena <\/em>(published in 1940), Jane De Hart Mathews\u2019 The Federal Theatre: Plays Relief and Politics <\/em>(published in 1967), Joanne Bentley\u2019s biography Hallie Flanagan\u2019s A Life in the American Theatre <\/em>(1988), and more recently in Barry B. Witham<\/a>\u2019s The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study <\/em>(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 \u201cBibliographic Essay\u201d which is neither readable as an essay nor especially useful to those wishing to do further research on the subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what is Prof. Shapiro\u2019s 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<\/em> is a micro-vision that simply misses too much of the Federal Theatre\u2019s forest for the minutiae of its trees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, I suppose, even a micro look can turn up nuggets at times. I actually found the volume\u2019s dance chapter interesting for its look at the Federal Theatre\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also underscores the fact that the Federal Theatre was not just for actors. \u201cThere were also playwrights, prop makers, musicians, prompters, stagehands, producers, ushers, designers, managers, carpenters, bill posters, advertising agents, scenic artists, electricians, dancers and costume makers.\u201d He notes that unemployment hit 25 per cent in 1933 and in New York City that year, \u201c300,000 meals were dispensed by the Stage Relief Fund and the Actors\u2019 Dinner Club\u201d (28).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The oft told tale of the project\u2019s 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, <\/em>a dramatization of \u201cMussolini\u2019s recent and brutal invasion of that African nation, about which the U.S. government had officially remained neutral.\u201d Boasting a company of Black actors and dancers\u201d 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<\/em>\u2019 critic Brooks Atkinson \u201csobering and impressive\u201d was forced to close after its first and only performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, the Federal Theatre\u2019s first New York hit was with an all black 180-person production of Macbeth<\/em> 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<\/em> reported that \u201csoutherners are understood to have felt that colored players in a colored play is one thing, but colored players in Shakespeare is another\u201d (80).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cthe Harlem savage.\u201d For Tamiris \u201cthe 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\u201d (116).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019 vision, writes Shapiro, \u201cnever had the time, resources or strong leadership to mature into something more consequential and only managed to stage a handful of original productions\u2026Its greatest success was Tamiris\u2019s How Long Brethren?, <\/em>a long-running Broadway hit that offered a glimpse of a different future for modern American dance had the Federal Dance Theatre survived\u201d (120).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201chundreds of gangsters, murderers and thieves unfit to live in this country.\u201d (190). Predecessor of the infamous post-war McCarthy Committee on un-American Activities, the Dies committee pitted \u201crural patriots\u201d against \u201curban subversives\u201d (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAfter that,\u201d says Shapiro, \u201cshows were closed, scripts were put in storage, and thousands of actors, designers and stagehands would lose their jobs\u201d (247), causing no less a personage than Eleanor Roosevelt to say \u201cthis 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\u201d (252). Clearly the project could not sustain itself under such political attacks, attacks typified by Senators such as North Carolina\u2019s Robert Reynolds who not only called its work \u201cputrid\u201d but added that they were serving the cardinal keystones of communism \u2013 \u201cfree love and racial equality\u201d (255).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flanagan tried to defend the work on numerous occasions responding at one point in the New York Times <\/em>by <\/em>saying the government was obviously \u201cafraid\u2026 of thinking people because the Federal Theatre gave Negro actors as well as white actors a chance\u201d (258).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 in 1981 under Ronald Reagan; in 1989 and 1990, in 1995 and again in 2018 \u201cwhen Donald Trump\u2019s proposed budget called for its termination. All this, says Shapiro, \u201cshows how little the right-wing playbook has changed since 1938: taxpayer support of the arts is \u2018welfare for cultural elites,\u2019 promotes \u2018the worst excess of multiculturalism and political correctness;\u2019\u201d and \u201cdemeans the values of ordinary Americans\u2026.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\u201d (266-68). <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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*<\/a>Don Rubin <\/strong>is Professor Emeritus of theatre studies at Toronto\u2019s York University and Editor of Routledge\u2019s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre.<\/em> He is Book Review Editor of Critical Stages.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2024 Don Rubin
Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em>, #30, Dec. 2024
e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Creative<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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