Voices from the Federal Theatre [With DVD]

Schwartz, an accomplished Broadway stage, film and television producer, examines the Federal Theatre, a Depression relief experiment of the Roosevelt administration, and its widespread influence on American arts and culture. Opening with an informative foreword by Robert Brustein, founding director of the Yale Repertory and American Repertory Theatres, the book follows the project's 1935 origins under the directorship of Hallie Flanagan with a series of dramas, musicals and vaudeville, to its 1939 demise, a result of the work of Rep. Martin Dies's congressional House Un-American Activities Committee. Schwartz shares interviews with former Federal Theatre actors, playwrights, directors, designers, producers, variety artists and dancers to present a distilled look at a creative peak in American culture, when the project employed over 13,000 jobless creative people in the arts, producing a continual series of innovative plays and other entertainment throughout the country. The book's strength emerges in these interviews, where Federal Theatre alumni such as actor Norman Lloyd, writer Studs Terkel, director Jules Dassin, producer John Houseman and playwrights Arthur Miller and Woodie King Jr. speak candidly of the cultural climate of that time. The theater project, though supposedly free of political influence, confronted a number of social issues in its productions and opened new horizons for black performers during the Jim Crow era. Although some of the interviews lack substance and depth by not addressing any of the shortcomings that opened the door for the theater's extinction, this is a fine survey of an important, though brief, project in American history.