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.

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.

Pointing to the Future

1995 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-87
Author(s):  
Lorraine A. Brown
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
American Theater ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Arts ◽  
National Theater ◽  
The Status ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Considerable Body

As many historians of American theater and culture know, the Fenwick Library of George Mason University (GMU) became the home in 1974 to a major collection of Federal Theatre Project (FTP) materials. As many researchers also know, some FTP material was removed from GMU to the Library of Congress in the fall of 1994. In this essay, I will bring Theatre Survey's readers up to date on the status of the FTP collection, which, because of its continuing development over two decades, houses not only a considerable body of FTP material but also early records of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA). ANTA in its earliest days was a worthy successor to the FTP in the drive to have a national theater in the United States. Since 1980, all of these holdings have been an integral part of the Center for Government, Society and the Arts (CGSA) at GMU. CGSA has been the site of many activities exploring the relationship between our government and the arts, ranging from conferences on theater and cultural studies to our own theatrical productions of FTP materials, some of which I will outline here.

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.

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.

Others, Adults, Censored: The Federal Theatre Project's Black Lysistrata Cancellation

1996 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ron West
Keyword(s):  
Control System ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Social Controls ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
Depression Era

Though it has been almost completely overlooked, the arbitrary cancellation of the Seattle Negro Repertory Company's 1936 Lysistrata provides a remarkable opportunity to explore the connections between a single, seemingly localized action and a network of socially, politically, and racially repressive forces. Lysistrata's closure on ostensibly moral grounds reveals the operation of a set of cultural and social controls masked as standards of decency. An array of racist assumptions as rigid as those anywhere in the country, though somewhat more subtle, obscured the generally repressive ends that the control system served, both in Seattle and nationwide. The incident thus provides clues to the institutionalized antireform mechanisms that soon coalesced in a successful congressional attack on the Works Project Administration's Federal Theatre Project (FTP), of which the Negro Repertory Company (NRC) was a major unit. The Lysistrata cancellation's connection with that broader offensive also demonstrates the manner in which Hallie Flanagan's “free, adult, uncensored” national theatre threatened the nation's essentially conservative political power structure and drew the decisive backlash that eventually overturned efforts at social change during the Depression 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.

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