The Promise of the Green New Deal

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-28
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Osborne
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
National Service ◽  
Service Bureau ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
Structural Inequities

US theatre suffers from insufficient funding, mass unemployment, and widespread structural inequities. The Green New Deal, with its calls to create millions of highwage jobs and promote equity, offers a solution: establish a Green Federal Theatre. This examination of two historical Federal Theatre Project structures — the National Service Bureau and the Community Drama Program — culminates in a manifesto for a Green Federal Theatre.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 251-254
Author(s):  
Kate Dossett
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Black History ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Black Theatre ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Federal Theatre

The conclusion considers the impact of Black Federal Theatre on the broader history of African Americans and the New Deal. It argues that African Americans did not wait to be inspired or reined in by New Deal programs, but rather devised new techniques and adapted existing dramatic forms to make space for Black authored dramas. The rich history of Black drama developed on the Federal Theatre Project has long been marginalized in histories of U.S. theatre and culture and isolated from the radical Black traditions it helped create. Knowledge producing practices of archival and academic institutions have long marginalized Black cultural histories. However the Black Arts Movement played a pivotal role in the recovery of Black Federal Theatre. The work of Theodore Ward was published for the first time in 1970s Black Theatre anthologies and celebrated by Black theatre artists such as Amiri Baraka. The history of the archive of the Federal Theatre Project is a reminder of how easily Black history can be buried as well as the long and rich theatre heritage which has shaped the radical Black tradition.

Federal Theatre Project (1935–9)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry B. Witham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Children's Theater ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
House Committee ◽  
Federal Theatre

The Federal Theatre Project was a government-subsidized program established in 1935 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide jobs for theater artists during the Great Depression in the United States. Along with similar programs in art, music, dance, and writing, the project was designed to produce professional theater throughout the country and eventually established companies in thirty-one American states. While the fare of the program was broad, including circuses, vaudeville, musicals, and children’s theater, its offerings were largely progressive, which led to conflicts with Congressional Republicans who viewed the program as propaganda for New Deal politics. Eventually, charges of communism led to an investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the budgetary elimination of Federal Theatre in 1939.

Gender and the Dies Committee Hearings on the Federal Theatre Project

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 993-1017 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATE DOSSETT
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Committee Chairman ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
House Committee ◽  
Gendered Roles ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
Key Characters

This paper examines the House Committee on Un-American Activities and Propaganda's investigation into un-American activities in the Federal Theatre Project. In particular it examines the performances of committee chairman Martin Dies and his Republican colleague J. Parnell Thomas, who led the interrogation of Federal Theatre witnesses. Relying on so-called “friendly witnesses,” usually disaffected former Federal Theatre employees or former communists, Dies and Thomas devoted three days to the testimony of Hazel Huffman, a WPA mail clerk, who never worked on the FTP, while allowing Hallie Flanagan and Ellen Woodward, the two women who directed the national theatre programme, just a few hours each. While Huffman gushed and flirted, Flanagan and Woodward refused to perform the version of femininity the committee demanded. The reordering of gendered roles that resulted was startling. The Dies Committee took to presenting itself as emasculated, a victim of masculine women and New Deal–communist conspirators, who were stripping not only them, but also America, of manhood. This paper suggests that it is only by analysing the powerful gendered performances of the key characters in this unfolding drama of un-Americana that we can understand how and why un-Americanism gained so strong a foothold in mid-century America.

Kate Dossett. Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal

Modern Drama ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-375
Author(s):  
Julie Burrell
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Black Performance ◽  
Black Theatre ◽  
Black Public Sphere ◽  
Performance Communities ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
The New Deal

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal focuses on the Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project (1935–39). Dossett argues that Black performance communities consisting of Black theatre artists and the Black public sphere helped shaped the performance and reception of theatre manuscripts in the New Deal era.

Gertrude Stein's Identity:

2006 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
John Bell
Keyword(s):  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Thornton Wilder ◽  
Theatre Production ◽  
Puppet Theatre ◽  
Federal Theatre

Donald Vestal's 1930s puppet theatre production of a Gertrude Stein play, Identity, or I Am I Because My Little Dog Knows Me, marked a confluence of Midwest modernism, the resources of the Federal Theatre Project, the development of American puppet theatre as a modernist art form, and the coincidental presence of Stein, Vestal, Thornton Wilder, Bil Baird, and other artists of 1930s Chicago.

For the People

2021 ◽  
pp. 81-128
Author(s):  
Naomi Graber
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
The Political ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Center ◽  
Federal Theatre

Several projects from the late 1930s saw Weill writing in American folk idioms in ways that he carried over into the 1940s. One Man from Tennessee (1937, unfinished), written for the Federal Theatre Project, uses Leftist language to address contemporary political issues, although problems with the libretto doomed the endeavor. The World’s Fair pageant Railroads on Parade (1939, rev. 1940) represents Weill’s willingness to work within the political center, which coincided with mounting tensions with Germany. After the war (and his naturalization), Weill returned to folk idioms with Down in the Valley (1948), which draws on some of the same musical, theatrical, and political ideas as One Man from Tennessee, but in a drastically different cultural context.

‘Injunction Granted’ in Its Times: a Living Newspaper Reappraised

1990 ◽  
Vol 6 (23) ◽  
pp. 279-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerry Cobb
Keyword(s):  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Theatre ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Theatrical Practice ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
The University ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Living Newspapers

Back in the early 1970s, the original Theatre Quarterly published a number of articles which revived interest in the Federal Theatre Project. In TQ 4, Heinz Bernard placed the work of the FTP's Living Newspaper Unit in the context of American left-wing theatrical practice in the 1930s, and a piece on its techniques by Arthur Arent, the principal writer of the Living Newspapers, first published in 1938, was reprinted in the same issue. Then, in TQ 9 (1973), came Arnold Goldman's incisive and far-ranging article, ‘Life and Death of the Living Newspaper Unit’, which not only traced the political rise and fall of the Unit and the Project, but suggested the importance of the Living Newspaper form to American political theatre, and identified important formal links with Soviet and German practices. This marked the beginning of a reassessment of the work of the Unit, whose reputation had been tarnished and somewhat marginalized in the wake of the FTP's closure by Congress on the grounds of political extremism, and the subsequent legacy of the McCarthy years. The present article by Gerry Cobb continues the reassessment process, and deals with the Living Newspaper considered most contentious of all both by Congressional opponents of the Project and by its own hierarchy – Injunction Granted. Cobb argues that this piece was singled out for attack because of its divergence from the policies of the New Deal, and its call for the organization of workers under the auspices of the CIO, its politics thus coming to obscure its theatrical strengths. His article both demonstrates the historical relevance of Injunction Granted at the time of its creation, and emphasizes and reassesses its strengths as a piece of theatre. Gerry Cobb is a postgraduate student at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where, in addition to working on a doctoral thesis on the Living Newspapers, he is editing a volume of the four major works in the form, including Injunction Granted, for publication by Bristol Classical Press late in 1990.

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