Primary Sources: The Great Depression and the 1930s: Theatre

"This online presentation includes items selected from the Federal Theatre Project Collection at the Library of Congress. Featured here are stage and costume designs, photographs, posters, playbills, programs, and playscripts, including productions of Macbeth and The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus as staged by Orson Welles, and Power, a topical drama of the period. Selected administrative documents from the project are also available."

"The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) Materials Collection contains nearly one thousand different 35mm slides taken from original posters, set designs, and costume designs. These images are of the original designs used on posters to advertise FTP plays in many different American cities from 1935 to 1939. Also included are playscripts for twenty-two productions. The images are indexed by title, author, subject, theater, place, date, and related names."

"Part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was one indication of the breadth of that program. Perhaps best known for its trenchant political satire and innovative presentations, the FTP actually represented a much broader range of activity. But the FTP’s mandate proved fragile. When the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established in May 1938, one of its first targets was the FTP, which it labeled a subversive organization. When FTP director Hallie Flanagan testified before HUAC in December 1938, she fought back against these attacks. But the FTP still fell victim to the Congressional cuts."

"...ten plays written by Hurston (1891-1960), author, anthropologist, and folklorist. Deposited as unpublished typescripts in the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and unproduced until a manuscript curator rediscovered them in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection in 1997. The plays reflect Hurston's life experience, travels, and research, especially her knowledge of folklore in the African-American South. "

Milton Meltzer Remembers the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project by Milton Meltzer/Elizabeth C. Stevens

Hallie Flanagan on Drama as Politics
“The theater must grow up,” declared Hallie Flanagan, director of the New Deal-era Federal Theatre Project (FTP), which provided employment for actors, directors, and technicians during the Depression. By the 1930s, theater was rapidly losing its audiences to movies, and Flanagan sought to win audiences back by revitalizing drama with the excitement and conflict of contemporary life and politics. Her energy and sense of urgency came through in this talk on theater as social action, entitled “First Federal Summer Theatre: A Report.” She borrowed the rhetoric of the militant labor movement as she summarized the work of a 1937 summer project that gathered FTP workers from around the country."