The plays that made the Federal Theater successful voiced national concerns in a period of crisis, but they also reflected local sensibilities and demonstrated local strengths. Susan Quinn’s excellent 2008 history of the project, Furious Improvisation, captures the Federal Theatre’s regional variety by following Flanagan on a 1937 inspection tour. In Chicago, O Say Can You Sing drew on the city’s abundant stock of unemployed vaudeville performers; an integrated cast of 250 juggled, tap danced, and clowned their way through a musical revue that genially spoofed the Federal Theatre itself—and the politicians who saw a communist behind every curtain.
Flanagan was so excited by the wildly imaginative Pinocchio she saw in Los Angeles that she made director Yasha Frank national consultant for the children’s theater program. Frank, who quit his job at Paramount Pictures to take “the chance of a lifetime” with the Federal Theatre, also produced plays in French, Yiddish, and Spanish for LA’s multilingual audiences. An updated Lysistrata was characteristic of the Seattle Negro unit’s focus on “plays whose universal theme remains the same regardless of color or creed.” The Negro units were a source of enormous pride for African Americans, who relished and seized the opportunity to participate in the Federal Theatre as equal members of its creative teams and its audiences.
The productions that got the most national attention were hot-button plays like It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’ adaptation of his novel about a fascist takeover of the U.S., and the Living Newspapers, dramatic documentaries that used projections, loudspeakers, and other then-new theatrical devices to tackle such incendiary subjects as slum housing (One-Third of a Nation), public ownership of utilities (Power), and syphilis (Spirochete).
Flanagan was justly proud of the simultaneous opening of It Can’t Happen Here in 21 theatres across the country; it affirmed the Federal Theatre’s professionalism and efficiency during a rocky first year when conservative politicians decried it as an amateurish waste of tax dollars. And she staunchly defended the controversial Living Newspapers as innovative means of informing the public about important contemporary issues. “We all believed that the theater was more than a private enterprise.” she wrote in Arena, her impassioned 1940 memoir about the project. “It was also a public interest which, properly fostered, might come to be a social and educative force.”
The places that most needed the Federal Theatre, Flanagan believed, were the vast stretches of rural and small-town America where no one had seen live performances since the movies killed vaudeville, places whose inhabitants had no reason to think that theater could be a meaningful part of their lives. It wasn’t enough to send them urban productions, though many Federal Theatre shows toured multiple locations. Flanagan wanted to foster theater that sprang organically from these diverse communities, capturing their unique histories and present-day experiences in the words and performances of the people who lived there. But these places had few of the professional theater people the Federal Theatre Project was set up to employ; it was required to hire 90% of its labor force from the relief rolls, and they had to have been previously employed in the theater.