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PORTSIDE CULTURE

AMERICA’S WAR ON THEATER  
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Daniel Blank
July 22, 2024
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ Between 1935 and 1939, the New Deal-sponsored Federal Theatre
Project staged over a thousand productions nationwide, reaching an
audience of 30 million. It was an early target of the House UnAmerican
Activities Committee (HUAC). _

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America’s War on Theater
James Shapiro
Penguin
ISBN: 9780593490204

HOSTILITY TO THEATER has been a virulent feature of American life
since before the country was founded. In 1774, the First Continental
Congress passed the Articles of Association, which aimed to restrict
trade with Britain. But the Articles also discouraged “every species
of extravagance and dissipation,” which included stage plays among
“other expensive diversions and entertainments” like horse racing
and cockfighting. The consequences were real: playhouses sat empty,
and acting companies toured abroad. This was an early attempt, though
hardly the last, to ban theater in the soon-to-be United States—the
result of a centuries-old prejudice that has never completely faded
from our cultural discourse. Anti-theatrical efforts are not
historical blips; they’re an American tradition.

James Shapiro’s _The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and
the Making of a Culture War _(2024), a brilliant and absorbing account
of the 20th-century effort to establish something like a national
theater in the United States, doesn’t go back quite as far as the
Revolutionary Era. Between 1935 and 1939, a New Deal work relief
program, the Federal Theatre Project, staged over a thousand
productions nationwide, reaching an estimated audience of 30 million
people. It was an astonishing undertaking, one whose impetus can be
difficult to grasp from a 21st-century perspective. “It was the
product,” Shapiro writes, “of a moment when the arts, no less than
industry and agriculture, were thought to be vital to the health of
the republic and deserving of its support.” That moment turned out
to be brief, and the Federal Theatre was short-lived. Its inevitable
demise was the result of a sustained effort by a group of lawmakers
who were determined to end funding for a program they saw to be
“spreading a dangerously progressive as well as a racially
integrated vision of America.”

One of those lawmakers was Martin Dies Jr., a racist congressman from
Texas who quickly emerges as the villain in Shapiro’s story.
Ambitious and undaunted, Dies “saw which way the political winds
were blowing” and set sail in that direction, eventually finding
himself at the helm of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities
(laying the groundwork for Joe McCarthy’s crusade a decade and a
half later). The Federal Theatre proved an easy target, and casting
its productions as “un-American” and “Communist” earned Dies
national attention. He sought to make a name for himself and to shut
down the relief program: by 1939, he had succeeded on both counts. A
disappointed President Franklin D. Roosevelt reluctantly signed off on
the Federal Theatre’s termination, and it soon faded into obscurity.
(Its materials—playbooks, programs, and other theatrical
ephemera—were unceremoniously deposited in an airplane hangar in
Maryland, where they remained unnoticed until the 1970s.)

In Shapiro’s persuasive account, Dies established a “playbook”
(a term that, as Shapiro’s epigraph points out, has a theatrical
resonance) that set the stage for some of the same right-wing
strategies still in use today. These include making the debate about
what is American and what isn’t; identifying and attacking
vulnerable groups and organizations; employing intimidating and
threatening, even violent, rhetoric; and using the press to
disseminate dubious, headline-grabbing claims. Shapiro’s focus is
specific—a single federal initiative that existed for only a brief
time—and in this sense, the book is reminiscent of some of his
Shakespeare scholarship, particularly the award-winning _1599: A Year
in the Life of William Shakespeare_ (2005) and its follow-up, _The
Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606_ (2015). This approach allows
Shapiro to illuminate, in archivally rich detail, not only the attacks
on the Federal Theatre but also its productions and the people behind
them. This is an important, much-needed study whose relevance to our
current culture wars is uncomfortably apparent from the first page.
But it’s also worth noting that efforts to suppress theater were
nothing new in the 1930s, even if Dies was remarkably percipient in
his tactics. The Federal Theatre’s closure is just one episode in
the United States’ long and troubling history of anti-theatricalism.

¤

_The Playbook_ opens on a contentious congressional hearing in
December 1938. Here we meet Hallie Flanagan, the Vassar College
professor who had been tapped to lead the Federal Theatre a few years
earlier, defending the enterprise—and theater itself—with
phenomenal poise and determination. Dies and his colleagues grilled
her on the question of whether the Federal Theatre was promoting
propaganda, apparently unaware that, as Flanagan explained, most
theater is in some sense “propagandistic”: it questions the status
quo and comments on societal norms and practices. If anything, these
productions were “propaganda for democracy,” and as Shapiro points
out, “the overwhelming majority” of the Federal Theatre’s
productions “were unobjectionable.” But the committee’s concern
was those few controversial plays that were more piercing in their
social commentary. The fact that Flanagan had spent time as a
Guggenheim Fellow studying theater in Europe (including the Soviet
Union)—a tradition she found to be “intellectually rigorous” and
“committed to education and propaganda”—didn’t help her cause.

In theory, the purpose of the hearing was to discuss the Federal
Theatre’s activities and, at perhaps a deeper level, the question of
whether drama can ever be completely neutral or apolitical. But
instead, it became an opportunity for grandstanding, a forum for Dies
and his colleagues to attack the country’s “enemies” and “the
spiritual lethargy and moral indifference” that allegedly threatened
it. Everything about this congressional scene seems painfully
familiar: the characters, the setting, the script. Some of the lines
Shapiro quotes could easily have been spoken in the current
congressional session. (As I began reading _The Playbook_, for
instance, Marjorie Taylor Greene was refusing to call Anthony Fauci
“doctor” and stating that he should be imprisoned
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as he testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the
Coronavirus Pandemic.) That the Dies committee’s interrogation of
Hallie Flanagan seems so immediate speaks partly to Shapiro’s gifts
as a storyteller, but also to the state of American government in
2024.

In addition to the moral tenor of Dies’s attack, there was also a
financial aspect: whether taxpayers should have to pay for theatrical
productions that advocate a social message (although one gets the
sense that Dies wouldn’t have been any happier had they been
entirely dispassionate). This is a common refrain of
anti-theatricalists: that theater is costly and wasteful, and that the
money—especially when drawn from the government’s purse—could be
better spent elsewhere. Why allocate relief funds to actors to perform
a play, the committee wondered, when you could give it to them to
perform a tangible service? Why build a theater when you could build a
highway? Flanagan reminded the committee that the entire Federal
Theatre Project had only “amounted to […] the cost of building one
battleship.” It’s a common rebuttal even today, though its effect
may be limited: when the New York City arts budget was recently in
danger of being slashed—a decision that, thankfully, was narrowly
averted—one _New York Times_ editorial
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observed that these programs could be supported “for the price of a
police helicopter” (their police department’s budget authorized
the purchase of two).

Again, though, in these sorts of discussions, logical reasoning
usually takes a backseat to uninformed showboating. The Dies committee
aimed to paint a very specific kind of picture for their fellow
legislators and the American people, rooted less in fact than in
ideology. This presents another axiom of anti-theatrical movements:
opponents tend to know very little about the theater they’re
attacking. None of the committee members, Shapiro observes, “had
ever seen a Federal Theatre production.” Nor did they have much
knowledge of theater more broadly: one of the committee members, Joe
Starnes of Alabama, became an object of ridicule when he unwittingly
asked if Shakespeare’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe was a
communist. The Dies committee wanted to gut a program they knew almost
nothing about. It seems telling that the committee’s 124-page report
did not mention a single play.

¤

The sheer popularity of theater in 19th and early-20th-century America
can be difficult to fathom. In _The Playbook_’s second chapter, we
encounter a young Willa Cather, who at the turn of the century was a
theater critic in Lincoln, Nebraska. Despite being a rural state with
a population just above a million, Nebraska boasted over 50 playhouses
in 1890: during a particular week in Lincoln in the spring of 1894,
Cather was able to see and review five separate theatrical
productions. The metrics alone are staggering. Shapiro estimates that
as many as a quarter of the adult-aged population in Lincoln saw a
play that week—“a theatergoing intensity,” he claims, “not
seen since London in Shakespeare’s day.” “[P]laygoing,”
Shapiro concludes, “was a national pastime.”

That popularity would wane in the decades that followed, due in large
part to the arrival of motion pictures. Lamenting what had been lost,
Cather remarked in the late 1920s that only live theater “can make
us forget who we are and where we are,” while films “do not make
us feel anything more than interest or curiosity or astonishment.”
In a sense, the Federal Theatre’s success recaptured what had been
so magical about American theater just a generation earlier: the
_Omaha World-Herald_ proclaimed
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that it “filled […] the gap that was made when the movies took
over.” But popularity is a double-edged sword: from ancient Greece
to the Shakespearean stage, successful theatrical traditions have
almost always met with hostility. To be sure, the Dies committee was
more successful than many previous anti-theatrical efforts throughout
history. But it also attests to just how vibrant the Federal
Theatre—and the spirit of American theater it reclaimed—was.

_The Playbook_’s central chapters each focus on a single Federal
Theatre show, including a production of Shakespeare’s _Macbeth_ that
premiered in April 1936. It was staged in Harlem by one of the
“Negro Units,” which had been established across the country
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“to support Black actors and playwrights.” Set in 19th-century
Haiti, with a cast of 137, this incredibly innovative
production—which became known as the “Voodoo _Macbeth_”—was
also the Federal Theatre’s biggest hit. This was especially clear on
opening night when a marching band made its way through Harlem behind
a banner that read “_Macbeth_ by William Shakespeare,” and a crowd
of more than 10,000 people gathered outside Harlem’s Lafayette
Theatre; a preview performance a few nights earlier had drawn 3,000.
The Lafayette’s capacity was about 1,200.

None of that success prevented certain journalists from writing about
the production in negative, racist terms. (Here and elsewhere, Shapiro
does not shy away from these accounts, opting instead to give a full
picture of the atmosphere surrounding the Federal Theatre and the
obstacles it faced.) Nor did it stop the director, a 20-year-old Orson
Welles, from taking full credit: his working script was titled
“_Macbeth_ by William Shakespeare, Negro Version, Conceived,
Arranged, Staged by Orson Welles”; in later years, he would recall
the production without even mentioning its lead actors, Jack Carter
and Edna Thomas, or the many other cast and creative team members
responsible for its success. But the Harlem _Macbeth_ was nonetheless
a great triumph for the Federal Theatre, and its popularity
undeniable. After transferring to Broadway, it traveled the country
for three months with a company of 180 people—“the largest
Shakespeare production,” notes Shapiro, “to ever tour America.”

It is easy to see why Dies and his like-minded cohort found the
Federal Theatre’s productions so threatening. It wasn’t just that
they promoted a more liberal, inclusive vision of the United States
than Dies was comfortable with. It was also that they were drawing
huge crowds across the country—and their message was spreading.

¤

One of the most striking aspects of _The Playbook_—at least to a
reader who, like me, is deeply interested in amateur theater—is how
many people involved in the Federal Theatre Project were not theater
professionals. To some degree, this was by design: the Federal
Theatre’s intention, after all, was to put people back to work,
often regardless of the credits on their résumés. But it is
nevertheless surprising that its leadership also drew from amateur
backgrounds. The majority of Hallie Flanagan’s theatrical experience
came from her time at Vassar, where she was involved in campus
productions and designed a program around “Experimental Theatre.”
This notion of experimentation undoubtedly shaped her vision of what
the stage should be, and it helps us to conceptualize the Federal
Theatre as a whole: for the majority of productions, a polished
Broadway show was neither the goal nor the outcome. They even
sometimes came across as a bit ragtag: in one instance, Flanagan
stepped in at the last minute to help build a set and locate props, as
if she were helping to salvage a student play.

Much more than professionalism, the goal of the Federal Theatre was to
be relatable to its audience members and to make them reflect on
important social and political issues. Relevance was key—especially
for those who may never have been in a theater before, or not for many
years—and to make productions relevant, they had to be adaptable. In
the summer of 1936, the Federal Theatre signed a deal with Sinclair
Lewis to produce a theatrical version of his chilling novel _It
Can’t Happen Here _(1935), which warned about the destruction of
democracy and the rise of fascism. The book had originally been slated
to be turned into a film by MGM, but the script—which did not hold
back in its depictions of “concentration camps, the burning of the
books, the invasion of homes”—was ultimately deemed too
“politically inflammatory.” The goal was to have the play open
simultaneously in different cities across the country, demonstrating
that, “like a film, a play could open on the same day everywhere.”
This plan proved to be overly ambitious, and productions were
canceled, for various reasons, in New Orleans, Kansas City, and
Brooklyn. For those that went forward, however, the individual
directors had been encouraged to “bring the play to a close in a way
that worked best locally.” The ending in Cincinnati, Tacoma, and
Seattle was different from the ending in Omaha, which was different
from the ending in San Francisco. Part of having a “national”
theater was recognizing that the play would speak differently to
different parts of the nation.

The situation was similar with a play called _One Third of a Nation_.
Its subject was the dangerous, substandard living conditions in New
York City: the play both began and ended with a tenement fire. But
housing issues were not the same everywhere, and once again, regional
productions were encouraged to adapt the play for local audiences.
During a two-month run in Philadelphia, Shapiro explains, “the focus
was changed from White to Black slum dwellers, and the survivor of the
tragic tenement disaster in the opening scenes is a Black woman rather
than a Jewish man.” The primary public concern in Philadelphia was
construction quality rather than fire, so the “disaster” at the
beginning of the play was changed to a building collapse. As was often
the case, the Federal Theatre’s art channeled reality, making it
more immediate for those on and off the stage. Shapiro quotes from
Arthur Jarvis Jr., who notes that “some cast members lived in the
very conditions condemned by the drama and could bring their personal
experiences to each performance.”

Not all of the Federal Theatre’s productions were successful. A play
called _Liberty Deferred_, which confronted the horrors of racism
throughout American history, met with intense resistance and was never
staged—an emblem of the Federal Theatre’s failure to live up to
its ideals. And when the Federal Theatre sold the film rights to _One
Third of a Nation_, it was turned into a sanitized, whitewashed
version that heavily diluted the play’s biting message about the
need for government intervention in the housing emergency. The
project’s ultimate failure, of course, came at the hands of the Dies
committee. But in its attempt to establish a national theater—one
that had a broad reach, spanning racial and class divides and speaking
to both local and nationwide concerns—the Federal Theatre came
closer than anything has before or since.

¤

We don’t need to look too hard to see the Dies committee’s legacy.
In a brief epilogue, Shapiro points to present-day efforts to suppress
the arts, from House Republicans’ attempts to defund the National
Endowment for the Arts to attacks on student theatrical productions in
high schools across the country. As I was writing this review, it was
reported that Florida governor and erstwhile presidential candidate
Ron DeSantis decided without explanation to veto all grants for arts
organizations
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it is no coincidence that he has championed book bans
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mandates
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that have led to the removal of Shakespeare
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from school libraries and classrooms.

What, then, is the path forward? It is at least encouraging that, if
anti-theatricalism is an American tradition, so too is resistance to
it. It was none other than George Washington who, despite the ban on
theater, sanctioned a series of performances by army officers at
Valley Forge in the spring of 1778, intended to boost morale and rally
the cause; Joseph Addison’s _Cato_, apparently one of Washington’s
favorite plays,
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depicted liberty’s victory over tyranny. Washington was fighting
against Britain, but he also took a stand against one of the Articles
of Association’s oppressive restrictions. The colonists followed his
lead: when Congress doubled down on its anti-theatrical stance a few
months later, several states refused to support their position. 

_The Playbook_ is a timely reminder both of the power of theater and
of the vehement antipathy it can generate. In establishing one of his
main themes, Shapiro stresses in the book’s preface that “the
health of democracy and theater, twin-born in ancient Greece, has
always been mutually dependent.” But the third sibling in this story
is anti-theatricalism, which usually arises when theatrical traditions
flourish in healthy democracies. It would be easy to view the Federal
Theatre’s demise as more or less unique, an isolated incident from
which today’s conservative lawmakers continue to draw inspiration.
But it would be more accurate to view the story of American
anti-theatricalism as a continuous tradition that never really went
away and perhaps never will.

¤

Daniel Blank is an assistant professor at Durham University. His
articles on Shakespeare and early modern drama have been published in
journals including _Renaissance Quarterly_, _The Review of English
Studies_, and _Renaissance Studies_. His first book, _Shakespeare and
University Drama in Early Modern England_, was published by Oxford
University Press in 2023. Before coming to Durham, he received his PhD
from Princeton University and spent three years in the Harvard Society
of Fellows. 

* American theater
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* The Great Depression
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* the New Deal
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* The Federal Theater
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* HUAC
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