The Playbook

The Playbook delves into the turbulent life of the Federal Theater Project (FTP), a New Deal experiment launched in 1935 to bring theater to the masses, only to be crushed by the government four years later. Shapiro recounts the FTP's audacious productions, from Orson Welles's “Voodoo” Macbeth, set after the Haitian Revolution, to One Third of a Nation, an exposé of urban housing that blended newsreel and agitprop styles. Alongside such experimental, often leftist works, the FTP also served up more conventional fare — think Lincoln biographies and classic plays — and provided employment for thousands of theater workers struggling to survive the Depression.The book's real drama, though — and where Shapiro's narrative becomes especially gripping — unfolds not on stage but in Congress, where FTP director Hallie Flanagan faced off with her nemesis: Texas congressman Martin Dies, a man whose persuasive bigotry foreshadowed the tactics of Joseph McCarthy. Shapiro captures Flanagan's fight to defend her vision against Dies's Un-American Activities Committee, framing her as a New Deal heroine caught in a battle for artistic freedom.Shapiro contends that the FTP's demise left a void in American cultural life, weakening democracy itself, “for the health of democracy and theater, twin-born in ancient Greece, has always been mutually dependent” — an evocative thought, though debatable. A brief glance back at Shakespeare's England or Molière's France is enough to remind us that robust theater does not necessarily align with democratic ideals. If there is any enduring relationship between theater and democracy, it is perhaps just that demagoguery thrives on bad theatrics. Two of the most influential postmodern American presidents, after all, have been actors: the first in Hollywood movies, the second on reality TV. As Shapiro's study ably shows, the enemies of democracy have a playbook too

Battle · Craft · Demise · Democracy · Luck · Making-of · Narrative · Politics · Thriving · Theatre and Performance Studies