Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times
Susan Quinn
by Robin Galen Kilrain
When Susan Quinn writes, “First the stock market collapsed, then the banks closed, then ordinary people began to lose their jobs,” she isn’t describing this country’s recent financial history but that of America in the late 1920s. A time that led to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), which spawned the Federal Theatre Project. Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times, Quinn’s book on the subject, offers a tale of strange bedfellows — theatre and government. Though this prickly relationship continually challenged its ballsy and innovative leader, Hallie Flanagan, during its four-year run, the Federal Theatre Project was ultimately successful in creating shows, jobs and a broader view of what theatre can do.
Quinn’s fascinating history of how tough times begot a boon for the nation’s theatres begins in 1935, with WPA head Harry Hopkins handpicking someone to run his brainchild theatre project. He tapped Flanagan, a former classmate and then director of the well-respected, “groundbreaking” theatre program at Vassar College. She proceeded to buck American perceptions about race (all theatres performing the Project’s shows were required to allow integrated audiences, and integrated casts were paid equally) and so-called leftist views as she steered the exciting experiment with a steady hand. Under her direction, this subdivision of “Federal One” — its other three sections sought to lift writers, visual artists and musicians from unemployment — strove to broaden theatre’s base in the United States while making it more relevant to the masses.
And it did just that, often despite heated conflicts with politicians over where to draw the line between relevance and revolution. Shows were regularly aimed at timely topics, subjects the economically strapped audiences could identify with. The issue of labor unions took center stage in The Cradle Will Rock, a production of the branch of the Federal Theatre Project named Project #891 (which was headed by no other than John Houseman and Orson Welles). Performances called Living Newspapers also addressed pertinent concerns; the influence of big power companies was tackled in the appropriately titled Power.
Controversial themes aside, Hopkins and Flanagan sincerely wanted to aid a wide swath of Americans who desperately needed a piece of the governmental pie that WPA represented. Their quest was to implement, through the Federal Theatre Project, a large-scale spread of stage productions and to help employ theatre workers. A striking unemployment statistic from New York City illustrates the need: Of the 25,000 plying their trade on Broadway in the late 1920s, only 4,000 remained by 1933.
But big cities were not the main emphasis of the Project. Instead, an extensive regional theatre network was planned. Multiple concurrent stagings of the same play throughout the country was a goal as well. When extremely popular novelist Sinclair Lewis gave the dramatization rights for It Can’t Happen Here to the Federal Theatre Project rather than sell it elsewhere, Flanagan was able to pull off an astounding feat: The play opened in 21 different parts of the country on the same date and continued for five years — even after the Project’s own run had come to an end.
By the time Flanagan’s grand undertaking was forced by Congress to take its final bow in 1939 — President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs in general were under attack, and the House Un-American Activities Committee had reared its ugly head — what had started as a relatively small relief effort had far exceeded expectations (except, perhaps, those of its two originators). Although finally a victim of politics, the Federal Theatre Project had become, under Flanagan’s strong guidance, the Little Project That Could, introducing into American history a number of theatrical milestones.
