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August 27: The Federal Theatre Project

lawrencebush
August 27, 2012

The Federal Theatre Project, a program of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration that included a Yiddish-language component as well as an African-American theater group, was founded on this date in 1935. The project’s purpose was to give work to unemployed theater professionals and provide cultural enrichment to the American working class. However, the project ran into censorship problems almost immediately: the FTP’s “Living Newspapers,” in particular, which turned topical issues (the Tennessee Valley Authority, syphilis testing, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, etc.) into left-oriented plays, were strongly opposed by conservative members of Congress and the State Department. In 1936, playwright and director Elmer Rice (Reizenstein), the first head of the New York office of the FTP, resigned in protest over censorship. Three years later, funding for the FTP was abolished. Among the theater greats who began their careers with the FTP were Arthur Miller, Orson Welles, John Houseman, Martin Ritt, Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, and Marc Blitzstein; among the most politically charged FTP plays were The Cradle Will Rock, One Third of a Nation, and It Can’t Happen Here.
“The most truly experimental effort ever undertaken in the American theater.” —Harold Clurman
John Houseman describes “the true story” of the opening night of Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock: