Wrestling with Heroes

2020 ◽  
pp. 122-163
Author(s):  
Kate Dossett
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Orson Welles ◽  
Native Son ◽  
Natural Man ◽  
Federal Theatre

This chapter and Chapters 4 and 5 consider how African Americans debated and dramatized the Black hero in Federal Theatre dramas. Chapter 3 focuses on the variant manuscripts of Theodore Browne’s John Henry drama, Natural Man. Written for and staged by the Seattle Negro Unit in 1937, it was significantly revised by the newly formed American Negro Theatre in Harlem in 1941. This chapter situates these manuscripts at the very center of a broader conversation about the problem of the hero that occupied Black writers in and beyond the Federal Theatre Project. In particular it compares the revisions made to Natural Man, with the stage adaptation of Richard Wright’s prize winning novel Native Son (1940). Running at St. James Theatre in Manhattan just as Natural Man opened in Harlem in spring 1941, the stage version was a collaboration between Wright, the white dramatist Paul Green, and the director-producer team of Orson Welles and John Houseman. While Wright had previously advocated for Green’s ‘Negro folk’ dramas when he worked on the Chicago Negro Unit, the two men came to have conflicting views about Wright’s hero, Bigger Thomas. Wright captured their troubled collaboration in a seven-page drama entitled “The Problem of the Hero.”

Rose McClendon and the Black Units of the Federal Theatre Project: A Lost Contribution

1992 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Plum
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Project Director ◽  
Orson Welles ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Official History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Federal Theatre

Although the then-called Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project arguably played a pivotal role in the development of African-American theatre, Rose McClendon (1884–1936) is unarguably one of the most overlooked contributors to its history. This oversight is extremely puzzling, in view of the fact that McClendon co-directed the Harlem Unit with John Houseman when it opened in 1935. Five years later Federal Theatre Project director Hallie Flanagan attributed much of the initial success of the unit, as well as the very idea of creating separate black units, to McClendon. Yet, except for a paragraph in Flanagan's Arena, little else has been recorded about McClendon's participation in the Project. Even the official history of the Negro Units written by the Federal Theatre Project's Department of Information claims that “guiding the destinations of the Negro Theatre at its inception were John Houseman and Orson Welles.” The history makes no reference to McClendon.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-39
Author(s):  
Kate Dossett
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Black Performance ◽  
Black Theatre ◽  
Literary Heritage ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
Over Time

The introduction explores the significance of Black theatre manuscripts for histories of the Federal Theatre Project, Black literary heritage and the Radical Black tradition. Black theatre manuscripts developed on the Federal Theatre Project were not always staged or published, but they document Black creativity and theatrical innovation in the 1930s and constitute a crucial if overlooked part of American cultural history. Theatre histories that only include plays staged or published will invariably be histories of what was interesting or acceptable to whites. This book examines what was important and necessary to African Americans. It develops the idea of the Black Performance Community, a temporary community which performance creates among spectators, performers, directors, writers and others whose backstage roles shape manuscripts and performance. It argues that histories of Black theatre need to consider variant manuscripts, the communities of unacknowledged collaborators that shaped them over time, and the role of the archives and anthologies in shaping knowledge production about Black theatre.

Free at Lass!

2020 ◽  
pp. 203-250
Author(s):  
Kate Dossett
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Orson Welles ◽  
Black Performance ◽  
Black Theatre ◽  
The Future ◽  
Performance Communities ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
Black Agency

The final chapter examines the Harlem Negro Unit’s immensely popular production of Haiti. Authored by white New York journalist William Dubois, white theatre critics attempted to place Haiti within a white dramatic tradition of Black primitivism which included Emperor Jones and Orson Welles’ recent Voodoo version of Macbeth. By contrast, the Black performance community worked to transform Dubois’s racist play into a celebration of the Haitian Republic’s Black heroes. The success of Haiti helped the Black performance community push the Federal Theatre to invest in Black dramatists. On the eve of the FTP’s closure two new Black dramas were being prepared for production: Panyared, (1939) explores the origins of African slavery and was the first instalment of a historical trilogy by Hughes Allison; Theodore Browne’s Go Down Moses (1938), is a dramatization of Harriet Tubman’s life which examines Black agency in ending slavery. While neither drama made it to the stage, centering Black theatre manuscripts, and the performance communities who developed them, allows us to see how African Americans imagined radical paths to the future.

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.

scholarly journals “All’s Well that Ends Welles”: Orson Welles and the “Voodoo” "Macbeth"

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (28) ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
Robert Sawyer
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Federal Funding ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Orson Welles ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
Back To Work

The Federal Theatre Project, which was established in 1935 to put unemployed Americans back to work after the Great Depression, and later employed over 10,000 people at its peak, financed one particularly original adaptation of Shakespeare: the “voodoo” Macbeth directed by Orson Welles in 1936. Debuting in Harlem with an all-black cast, the play’s setting resembled a Haiti-like island instead of ancient Scotland, and Welles also supplemented the witches with voodoo priestesses, sensing that the practice of voodoo was more relevant, if not more realistic, for a contemporary audience than early modern witchcraft. My essay will consider how the terms “national origins” and “originality” intersect in three distinct ways vis-a-vis this play: The Harlem locale for the premier, the Caribbean setting for the tragedy, and the federal funding for the production.

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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