Member Reviews
Jonathan M, Media/Journalist
Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center mirrors the attack nine decades ago by the House Un-American Activities Committee on the Federal Theater Project in an arresting way: Like the current President, the Congressmen had never attended the theater that they assailed.
The Federal Theatre Project, author James Shapiro tells us in “The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War” (Penguin Press, 382 pages), “staged, for a pittance, over a thousand productions in 29 states seen by 30 million, or roughly one in four Americans, two-thirds of whom …had never seen a play before.” During the height of the Great Depression, a time when one in five Americans were out of work, it employed more than 12,000 artists, some of whom, like Orson Welles and Arthur Miller, would soon be famous, “but most of whom were just ordinary people eager to work again at their craft.” Yet, despite its remarkable track record, the Federal Theatre Project lasted only four years, from 1935 to 1939, the first program of FDR’s New Deal “to be successfully attacked and abruptly terminated, on the grounds that it promoted un-American activity.”
“The Playbook” was published in a different era – ten months ago, before the reelection of Donald Trump – but its central insight makes it even more relevant these days. That insight is a dispiriting twist on the long connection between theater and democracy. Both theater and democracy began in Ancient Greece. Both flowered together in America: That at least has been the belief of observers as disparate as 19th century French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville — who wrote that “the love of drama is…most natural to democratic nations” — and the 20th century director and professor who led the Federal Theatre Project, Hannah Flanagan, who believed this “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.” But “The Playbook” makes clear, both explicitly and implicitly, how much theater has been intertwined with politics in complicated and often unsavory ways.
Shapiro, a Shakespearean scholar whose best-known books are “1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare,” and “The Year of Lear,” first ventured into American history after serving as a consultant for the Public Theater’s controversial 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production of “Julius Caesar,” which depicted the title character as a Trump lookalike. The experience inspired him to write “Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future,” which details that controversy and seven others over two centuries of American history involving Shakespeare, in order to analyze long-standing tensions involving race, class, gender, immigration and other fault lines in American culture. It is an inventive and enlightening theater book, one of my favorite, unearthing fascinating and little-known events in American history – certainly little-known to me.
“The Playbook,” by contrast, retells a familiar story, one that gained even greater awareness during the pandemic shutdown,amid calls for a new Federal Theatre Project. As in his previous books, Shapiro attempts to fashion a readable focus, by devoting a chapter each to five of the most intriguing of the Project’s productions. A couple are legendary: “Macbeth” in Harlem, set in the Caribbean and featuring an all-Black cast, directed by 20-year-old Orson Welles, and “It Can’t Happen Here,” a dramatization of Sinclair Lewis’s anti-fascist novel that opened in 18 cities across the nation all at the same time, the evening of October 27, 1936. The others are eye-opening.
A now-obscure pioneer of modern dance, a Jewish New Yorker who went by the name Tamiris, created a dance piece, “How Long, Brethren?” using a score of songs of Black protest that had been painstakingly gathered throughout the South by a Jewish immigrant named Lawrence Gellert.
The ”Living Newspaper” produced a play in theaters throughout the U.S. by Arhtur Arent entitled “One-Third a Nation” dramatizing the problem of slum housing, inspired by FDR’s second inaugural address declaring “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”
Two talented Black playwrights Abram Hill and John Silvera, wrote another “Living Newspaper” production entitled “Liberty Deferred” that dramatizes the history of racism in America, in sometimes theatrically inventive ways, such as a scene set in Lynchotopia, “the fabled land where all lynch victims go.”
In his Epigraph, Shapiro offers the two dictionary definitions of “playbook” – “a book containing the scripts of dramatic plays” and “a set of tactics frequently employed by one engaged in competitive activity.” It’s the second definition that most engages the author, who chronicles in exhaustive and enraging detail the machinations of the politicians who brought the whole program down. The House committee that did so was created to investigate Nazi and Communist activity in America but was used by an ambitious, attention-starved Texas politician named Martin Dies and his allies to discredit the Roosevelt Administration, serendipitously targeting the theater program, while actively ignoring actual Nazis and using “Communist” as a smear
But what may be as shocking is how much politics played a role in each of the individual productions that Shapiro explores. This was not just politics in its loftiest sense — issues facing the nation that animated the creation of many of these shows. The shows were plagued by politicking at its most petty or pernicious. Shapiro persuasively argues Orson Welles and John Houseman in subsequent years took more credit than they deserved for the landmark “Macbeth” production, ignoring the contributions of African-born composer, choreographer and musician Asadata Dafora and his troupe. Project officials ordered extensive changes to “Liberty Deferred” (to improve it, they said; in effect censoring it) and then never staged it. It hasn’t been staged to this day.
It is Shapiro’s thesis that the Dies committee (as it was initially called) created the techniques for the “right-wing playbook, widely-used today, for securing power and challenging progressive initiatives.” It’s indeed flabbergasting to read such parallels as that Dies called in the 1930s for the deportation of three million illegal immigrants, “whose numbers, he claimed without evidence included ‘hundreds of gangsters, murderers and thieves unfit to live in this country.’”
Politicians targeted theater then, and target it now, with ulterior motives. But what may be most instructive, if not outright inspiring, about the Federal Theatre Project, for all of Shapiro’s account of the frustrations, sabotage and outright injustice during its existence, is the underlying message of how powerful the arts can be. After the initial run of “One Third of a Nation,” Flanagan gave a pep talk to the artists: “By a stroke of fortune unprecedented in dramatic history, we have been given a chance to help change America at a time when twenty million unemployed Americans proved it needed changing. And the theatre, when it is any good, can change things…And if, in making people laugh, which we certainly want to do , we can’t also protest…against some of the evils of this country of ours, then we do not deserve the chance put into our hands.”
