Uncle Sam's Theater

BY FAR THE MOST extensive American commitment to the arts ever undertaken, the Federal Arts Project was born in 1935 when Harry Hopkins included it--with separate Theatre, Art, Writing, and Music Projects--in his Works Progress Administration. Hopkins had two goals in mind: relief for unemployed artists and the development of American culture at a time of national depression--psychological as well as economic.

Free, Adult, Uncensored recounts the story of one of these projects, the Federal Theatre Project. John O'Connor and Lorraine Brown have put together a kind of family scrapbook, a montage of the Theatre Project. They have recovered and included long-forgotten Project "documents"--posters, picture and the like--as well as reminiscences by Theatre Project veterans. The book is loosely organized--a brief historical essay followed by some dozen and a half sections on individual productions. An intimate, insider's "feel" for the Project emerges, a feel for its diversity and its creativity, its struggles and its trials.

"Free, adult, uncensored"--such was the mandate Harry Hopkins gave Hallie Flanagan, a former classmate from Grinnell, when he tapped her to direct the Theatre Project. It was a mandate that permitted boldness, variety, innovation.

The Project's content varied from vaudeville revivals to avant-garde experimentation, its sources from Eugene O'Neill and George Bernard Shaw to undiscovered playwrights, its performers from an aging generation whose formative experiences were in tent shows, travelling troupes, and vaudeville theaters to an energetic new generation that would dominate American entertainment for years to come, a crew that included Orson Welles and John Houseman, Will Geer and John Huston, E.G. Marshall and Joseph Cotton.

The Project pioneered new concepts and directions for American theater. Many productions contained considerable political and social comment, focussing on the plight of individuals within the context of larger social problems. The concept of "Living Newspapers"--dramatizations of current problems and examinations of proposed solutions--was brought to the American stage.

The Project also sought, and won, new audiences for theater. Professional theater was brought for the first time to small towns and rural America. Record numbers attended performances in larger cities. "Children's units" in many cities revolutionized children's entertainment; young Walt Disney was one who drew inspiration from Yasha Frank's Los Angeles performances. Groups like the Spanish unit in Florida and the "Negro units" in many major cities brought series theater to audiences who had been ignored and performers who had been stereotyped.

PERHAPS MOST POIGNANT about the Project was one of its original goals, a goal that remained central--providing relief to unemployed performers. Many were aging vaudevillians; the Depression and the emergence of the motion picture industry had killed vaudeville, and its performers were stranded. As one performer described the Theatre Project to a Writers Project interviewer, "I don't know what would have happened without it. After all what can a man of fifty do?"

Directors were faced with that very question, and it forced them to be creative in answering it. Welles devised special comic roles and dances; Frank used a series of ex-vaudevillians in three-minute stints.

And it is worth considering how a seemingly pedestrian, and certainly non-artistic, purpose--giving unemployed people a job--fit into the results of the Project. Perhaps this explosion of creativity, and the Big Names that came out of it, had something to do with the way the basic need for relief--both in the Project itself and more generally in the nation--tempered artistic self-centeredness, even arrogance, to some extent.

The Thirties were an age that forced a sense of social connectedness, a realization of the impact of social forces on the lives of individuals, a discovery of the range and complexity of human emotions in those who had been previously ignored, and an attempt to communicate that discovery. At their best, the Theatre Project and the other Arts Projects succeeded in communicating these insights.

To be sure, there were problems within these Projects. Much of the output was undistinguished; many Theatre Project productions seem in retrospect one-dimensional, too self-consciously didactic. And conflicts, perhaps inevitable, arose between artistic purpose and political pressures. The political content of the Theatre Project drew the wrath of Congressional critics and ultimately contributed, at least in part, to the withdrawal of Congressional funding in 1939. Nor were pressures only external: despite the "uncensored" mandate, productions thought too controversial were occasionally postponed. By 1938, Welles and Houseman had left the Project in just such a dispute.

But, despite these problems, the Projects signalled important new directions, distinctly non-elitist directions, for the American arts. Not only did the Theatre Project bring theater to new audiences, but the Art Project brought massive murals to American cities and the Writers Project recorded the lives of "ordinary" Americans. Not only did a galaxy of stars emerge from the Theatre Project, but similar galaxies emerged from other Projects as well--Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison from the Writers Project; Stuart Davis, Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning from the Art Project.

The Arts Project--its achievements, its triumphs, and particularly its non-elitism--is especially important in light of a shibboleth long popular in certain critical circles. Elitism is held indispensable to artistic accomplishment; as John Simon recently wrote, "there can be neither true culture nor true art without elitism."

AND YET there has recently been a resurgence of interest in the New Deal Arts Projects. The Writers Project interview cited above is contained in an anthology edited by Cambridge writer Ann Banks and scheduled for publication by Knopf later this year; another Writers Project anthology, Such As Us, appeared last year. Free, Adult, Uncensored is a welcome addition to the growing collection. And the nostalgia itself is a welcome reminder that sometimes an approach that rejects elitism can cause art and artists to flourish and grow.