Ever since democracy and theater emerged together in ancient Athens, thinkers have debated the relationship between these two risky and precious human practices. The philosopher (and former dramatist) Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that theater corrupts public virtue and tempts citizens into dissipation. The playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht believed, by contrast, that the interventions of drama could make the world more just. Democracy and theater both involve collective assembly, conflict, and a willingness to perform before the eyes of others. Both grant scope to charisma, deception, and illusion. Actors and politicians alike rely on that fickle entity, the public, to whom they must be exquisitely attuned, in a dance of supplication and manipulation. For whether in a darkened playhouse or at a blaring political rally, one can never be sure whether the public rules or is being ruled.
The Federal Theatre sought to democratize the dramatic arts. But it also tried to use theater to invigorate democracy, which is where the program ran into trouble. The Federal Theatre presented not only circus acts, vaudeville, marionette shows, and Shakespeare; it also staged plays dealing with pressing political issues, such as racial inequality, slum housing, and rural electrification. The Project’s defenders claimed that such performances responded to popular demand and helped educate the citizenry. Its critics saw these productions as nothing more than propaganda for the New Deal, propaganda that carried a whiff of communism.
The Federal Theatre’s rise and fall is the subject of James Shapiro’s new book, The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War. The heroine of Shapiro’s story is Hallie Flanagan, a theater professor at Vassar College who led the Federal Theatre Project with grace and determination, fulfilling, for the four years in which the organization survived, the hope she had once privately voiced: “God help me to be able to do something more vivid in life than adding to the number of Vassar girls in the world.” The villain is Martin Dies, a lusty-voiced congressman from East Texas who, as the first chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), resolved to make a name for himself by taking down Flanagan’s “communistic” enterprise.