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THE PLAYBOOK: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War, by James Shapiro
Per week earlier than Election Day 1936, when a landslide vote would maintain Franklin D. Roosevelt within the White House for a second time period, the antifascist play “It Can’t Happen Here” opened nationwide: 21 productions in 18 cities, from Los Angeles to New York.
Adapted from Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel of the identical title, the present turned a success for the Federal Theater Project, a jobs-for-artists division of Roosevelt’s Depression-era Works Progress Administration.
But it was a chaotic scramble to get the play onstage. Long earlier than the appearance of e mail and even fax machines, the present’s textual content was nonetheless evolving as opening evening approached, the script adjustments mailed cross-country to the varied corporations.
The Federal Theater, in the meantime, was so nervous about being perceived as partisan that it had prohibited the play and its publicity supplies from instantly mentioning fascism or real-world political figures. Posters in Detroit depicting a army man resembling Hitler had been ordered, by telegram, to be destroyed.
Ambitious, civic-minded and self-sabotaging, the entire enterprise moved quick, quick, quick. The Federal Theater, which lasted simply 4 years, spent its transient life in that mode. Its ultimate months had been dedicated to making an attempt to fend off the wild accusations of a Communist-hunting congressman, who in headline-grabbing hearings smeared it baselessly, ruinously, as un-American.
With the American theater struggling to regain the vitality it had earlier than Covid-related shutdowns, some creators and critics have referred to as for a brand new model of the Federal Theater to come back to the rescue. The U.S. authorities is hardly a spendthrift with arts {dollars}, however what if it had been to pony up for the business once more?
Well, let James Shapiro’s piquant and resonant historical past banish any romantic fantasies. His new guide, “The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War,” is about how messy and compromised the state of affairs can get for artists when Congress is signing the checks, how cynical the politics might be and the way acquainted — how Trumpian — a number of the muddying ways deployed within the Thirties now appear.
To Shapiro, whose earlier books embrace “Shakespeare in a Divided America” (2020), “the well being of democracy and theater, twin-born in historical Greece, has at all times been mutually dependent.”
In his view, then, it was to the joint advantage of democracy and theater that the federal program got here into existence in 1935 and to their detriment when it was eradicated in 1939 after having “staged, for a pittance, over a thousand productions in 29 states seen by 30 million, or roughly one in 4 Americans.”
The underdog hero of “The Playbook” is Hallie Flanagan, the Vassar professor and experimental theater maker tapped to direct the Federal Theater. She believed, with transferring sincerity, that “the theater, when it’s any good, can change issues,” as she advised a gaggle of administrators and designers halfway via the mission.
She added: “And if, in making individuals giggle, which we definitely wish to do, we will’t additionally protest … in opposition to a number of the evils of this nation of ours, then we don’t deserve the prospect put into our palms.”
Flanagan seized that likelihood, producing classics and new works, a few of which — just like the 1938 play “One-Third of a Nation,” in regards to the housing disaster — smacked of pro-Roosevelt propaganda. That didn’t precisely endear her to the president’s adversaries.
Among them was Martin Dies, a cigar-chomping Texas Democrat and onetime New Deal supporter who that yr turned the founding chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was, Shapiro writes, “an opportunistic, America-first, anti-immigrant, antilabor, racist politician with few scruples, for whom energy and recognition mattered greater than ideology.”
Possessed of “a canny sense of the place American democracy’s guardrails had been flimsiest,” Dies scare-mongered in regards to the Federal Theater partly as a result of he craved consideration, which was simple to get from the press that means.
But did he actually, as Shapiro argues, innovate a right-wing playbook whose methods — like “battling over tradition and id,” threatening violence to gin up marketing campaign assist and overwhelming the information media with a lot unsubstantiated data that reporters wouldn’t have time to fact-check it — stay “extensively used right now”?
Without ample proof, the assertion comes throughout as overreach. In a nation as fractious and puritanical from the get-go as this one, it’s exhausting to not surprise if Dies’s playbook was only a fashionable iteration of what others had accomplished earlier than.
“The Playbook,” although, is nonetheless an engrossing learn (Willa Cather, as soon as a fledgling theater critic in Nebraska, makes a really sensible cameo), and the present-day echoes of Dies’s culture-warring are unambiguous.
Shapiro wraps the story of the Federal Theater and Dies’s committee round 5 chapters devoted to particular person Federal Theater exhibits, just like the “Macbeth” {that a} 20-year-old Orson Welles directed in 1936, in Harlem, for its Negro Unit. Ever after, he and the present’s producer, John Houseman, would inform ostensibly witty anecdotes about it, recalling their Black collaborators in grotesquely debased phrases.
The guide’s most gripping and enraging chapter is about “Liberty Deferred,” a daring play by two younger Black playwrights, Abram Hill and John Silvera, that was watered down in growth and never produced. Set partly “in ‘the fabled land the place all lynch victims go,’ Lynchotopia,” the play, whose targets embrace the racism of Northern whites, is described in riveting element. Shapiro notes that it has by no means been staged. Maybe it’s time to vary that.
The Federal Theater was no paradise for Black artists, however this system’s relative progressivism on race riled up Dies and different politicians.
So did the notion of the federal government, within the midst of grievous unemployment, paying theater makers to generate artwork. Yet probably the most compassionate speeches quoted in “The Playbook” comes from the Democratic senator Sherman Minton of Indiana, imagining some atypical playwright on reduction who maybe “didn’t create a Hamlet or a Launcelot Gobbo” (shout-out there to “The Merchant of Venice”), however deserves to eat.
After Dies triumphed and opinion turned in opposition to the Federal Theater, Roosevelt himself signed it out of existence. Decades on, when Flanagan was previous and unwell and residing in a nursing house, the reminiscence of Dies’s wrecking-ball pursuit disturbed her nonetheless, in keeping with a biography of her that Shapiro quotes in his epilogue.
“In moments of self-doubt,” the biographer wrote, “she would surprise if the voices she heard within the hall outdoors her room had been accusing her of being a Communist.”
THE PLAYBOOK: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War | By James Shapiro | Penguin Press | 384 pp. | $30
