Content area
Full Text
The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was created in 1935 as the arts component of the nationwide Works Progress Administration (WPA). Along with similar programs in music and art, it was designed to establish local theatres across the country and embody the democratic values and antidiscrimination policies of the WPA. The project was organized across five geographical regions, and the South was the most problematic. Liberals in Washington, D.C., believed that federal programs could moderate Jim Crow, but only eight of the original eleven Southern states participated in the project, and only four were active when the project closed in 1939. The Birmingham units folded early, and the Atlanta Negro Unit produced only one play. In some Southern states where segregated seating was rigidly enforced, it was even illegal to have whites and blacks onstage together, unless the blacks were servants.
Of course, racial bias was not limited to the South. Civilian Conservation Corps camps were segregated throughout the country. Many northern theatres had separate seating, and the Seattle unit had white and black companies throughout the project. But the confrontation between the antidiscrimination policies of the WPA and Jim Crow was a major motif in the South, and Cecilia Moore explores the fault lines of that collision in this distinct US region. Hallie Flanagan, the executive director of FTP, envisioned the regions of the country as the scaffolding on which she would erect a national theatre, and Moore presents the South as a unique "folk play" featuring amateur "hams," nurtured at the liberal University of North Carolina and blossoming in dozens of little-remembered productions and Paul Green's historic pageant, The Lost Colony.
Moore begins her analysis with Professor Frederick Koch, who came to Chapel Hill in 1918 to establish a folk-drama program similar to the one he had pioneered in North Dakota. Koch encouraged...