The Playbook

Starred review from March 25, 2024
Columbia University literature professor Shapiro follows up Shakespeare in a Divided America with another captivating theater history in which politics and entertainment intersect. Established in 1935 under the New Deal, the Federal Theatre Project was a nationwide jobs program that quickly became a hotbed of idealism. Hallie Flanagan, a stagnating academic appointed to lead the program, seized the opportunity to produce challenging plays that tackled social problems (“God help me to be able to do something more vivid in life than adding to the number of Vassar girls in the world,” she wrote at the time). The program’s notable works include Orson Welles’s all-Black retelling of Macbeth set in Haiti and an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s antifascist novel It Can’t Happen Here that opened simultaneously in almost two dozen cities. Led by Texas Democrat Martin Dies, congressmen hoping to disrupt the New Deal targeted the Federal Theatre for its blatant progressivism, and in 1939 it became “the first New Deal project... terminated” for “promot un-American activity.” Shapiro’s shrewd narrative revels in absurdity; during congressional hearings, committee members kept reading Federal Theatre scripts aloud, as though yearning to be actors, while Dies, a natural performer, deployed his own warped brand of showmanship to pummel Flanagan from the dais. Shapiro’s exquisite backstage history also cannily reflects on present-day political implications. It’s a bravura performance.

April 15, 2024
Shapiro (Shakespeare in a Divided America, 2020) points out at the beginning of his fascinating, tightly written tome that the word playbook has two meanings--a book of scripts and a set of tactics employed in a competitive activity. Shapiro draws on both in his chronicle of the active but brief life of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project (1935-39). Shapiro covers the Federal Theatre's more illustrious productions--including a stage adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' anti-fascist novel, It Can't Happen Here, and Orson Welles' groundbreaking Voodoo Macbeth--and offers a compelling portrait of Hallie Flanagan, the strong-willed force behind the Federal Theatre. The most compelling chapters, though, concern Texas Representative Martin Dies Jr. and the playbook he followed as director of the House Committee on Un-American Activities to target and, ultimately, bring down the Federal Theatre Project and Flanagan. Shapiro notes that Dies' destructive tactic, using well publicized public hearings to spread hearsay, rumors, and half-truths about his targets and gain lots of press, became the model for subsequent culture warriors intent on securing notoriety and silencing unwelcome voices and dissent.

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May 1, 2024
The triumph and downfall of a groundbreaking theater. Award-winning Shakespeare scholar Shapiro, author of Shakespeare in a Divided America, creates a vibrant history both of the astonishingly successful Federal Theatre Project and the culture wars that succeeded in quashing it. Under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, from 1935 to 1939, the FTP "staged, for a pittance, over a thousand productions in twenty-nine states seen by thirty million...two thirds of whom (according to audience surveys) had never seen a play before." However, rabid conservatives, led by "charming, bigoted, and ambitious" East Texas Rep. Martin Dies, condemned the project as "dangerously progressive," promoting a racially integrated, pro-union vision of America. The Dies Committee hearings, a precursor to the House Un-American Activities Committee, went on virulent attack against plays such as It Can't Happen Here, based on Sinclair Lewis' anti-Fascist novel; a production of Macbeth--the largest to ever tour America--with an all-Black cast, set in Haiti, incorporating voodoo, and directed by Orson Welles; and One Third of a Nation, an expos� of the dangerously substandard housing that beset many American cities. A critic in New Orleans called One Third "a dramatic bombshell." Shapiro looks at the creation and reception of these plays and considers two others that were focused on racism: How Long, Brethren?, a dance performance featuring "Negro songs of protest," and Liberty Deferred, which was never staged. With Dies as the book's villain, Hallie Flanagan, a Vassar professor with a stellar background in theater, who was appointed FTP director, is the hero. Committed to mounting productions that exposed racial, religious, and political persecution, she battled "red tape, local politicians, censorship of various kinds," and "dreaded" requisitions forms to keep it alive. Its demise still resonates, Shapiro warns, with the Dies playbook revived by culture warriors noisily censoring the arts. Sharp history as cautionary tale.

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