THE PLAYBOOK: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War, by James Shapiro
A week before Election Day 1936, when a landslide vote would keep Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House for a second term, the antifascist play “It Can’t Happen Here” opened nationwide: 21 productions in 18 cities, from Los Angeles to New York.
Adapted from Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel of the same name, the show became a hit for the Federal Theater Project, a jobs-for-artists division of Roosevelt’s Depression-era Works Progress Administration.
But it was a chaotic scramble to get the play onstage. Long before the advent of email or even fax machines, the show’s text was still evolving as opening night approached, the script changes mailed cross-country to the various companies.
The Federal Theater, meanwhile, was so nervous about being perceived as partisan that it had prohibited the play and its publicity materials from directly mentioning fascism or real-world political figures. Posters in Detroit depicting a military man resembling Hitler were ordered, by telegram, to be destroyed.
Ambitious, civic-minded and self-sabotaging, the whole enterprise moved fast, fast, fast. The Federal Theater, which lasted just four years, spent its brief life in that mode. Its final months were devoted to trying to fend off the wild accusations of a Communist-hunting congressman, who in headline-grabbing hearings smeared it baselessly, ruinously, as un-American.
With the American theater struggling to regain the vitality it had before Covid-related shutdowns, some creators and critics have called for a new version of the Federal Theater to come to the rescue. The U.S. government is hardly a spendthrift with arts dollars, but what if it were to pony up for the industry again?
Well, let James Shapiro’s piquant and resonant history banish any romantic fantasies. His new book, “The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War,” is about how messy and compromised the situation can get for artists when Congress is signing the checks, how cynical the politics can be and how familiar — how Trumpian — some of the muddying tactics deployed in the 1930s now seem.
In his view, then, it was to the joint benefit of democracy and theater that the federal program came into existence in 1935 and to their detriment when it was eliminated in 1939 after having “staged, for a pittance, over a thousand productions in 29 states seen by 30 million, or roughly one in four Americans.”
The underdog hero of “The Playbook” is Hallie Flanagan, the Vassar professor and experimental theater maker tapped to direct the Federal Theater. She believed, with moving sincerity, that “the theater, when it is any good, can change things,” as she told a group of directors and designers midway through the project.
She added: “And if, in making people laugh, which we certainly want to do, we can’t also protest … against some of the evils of this country of ours, then we do not deserve the chance put into our hands.”
Flanagan seized that chance, producing classics and new works, some of which — like the 1938 play “One-Third of a Nation,” about the housing crisis — smacked of pro-Roosevelt propaganda. That didn’t exactly endear her to the president’s adversaries.
Among them was Martin Dies, a cigar-chomping Texas Democrat and onetime New Deal supporter who that year became the founding chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was, Shapiro writes, “an opportunistic, America-first, anti-immigrant, antilabor, racist politician with few scruples, for whom power and popularity mattered more than ideology.”
Possessed of “a canny sense of where American democracy’s guardrails were flimsiest,” Dies scare-mongered about the Federal Theater partly because he craved attention, which was easy to get from the press that way.
But did he truly, as Shapiro argues, innovate a right-wing playbook whose strategies — like “battling over culture and identity,” threatening violence to gin up campaign support and overwhelming the news media with so much unsubstantiated information that reporters wouldn’t have time to fact-check it — remain “widely used today”?
Without sufficient evidence, the assertion comes across as overreach. In a nation as fractious and puritanical from the get-go as this one, it is hard not to wonder if Dies’s playbook was just a modern iteration of what others had done before.
“The Playbook,” though, is nonetheless an engrossing read (Willa Cather, once a fledgling theater critic in Nebraska, makes a very smart cameo), and the present-day echoes of Dies’s culture-warring are unambiguous.
Shapiro wraps the story of the Federal Theater and Dies’s committee around five chapters dedicated to individual Federal Theater shows, like the “Macbeth” that a 20-year-old Orson Welles directed in 1936, in Harlem, for its Negro Unit. Ever after, he and the show’s producer, John Houseman, would tell ostensibly witty anecdotes about it, recalling their Black collaborators in grotesquely debased terms.
The book’s most gripping and enraging chapter is about “Liberty Deferred,” a daring play by two young Black playwrights, Abram Hill and John Silvera, that was watered down in development and not produced. Set partly “in ‘the fabled land where all lynch victims go,’ Lynchotopia,” the play, whose targets include the racism of Northern whites, is described in riveting detail. Shapiro notes that it has never been staged. Maybe it’s time to change that.
The Federal Theater was no paradise for Black artists, but the program’s relative progressivism on race riled up Dies and other politicians.
So did the notion of the government, in the midst of grievous unemployment, paying theater makers to generate art. Yet one of the most compassionate speeches quoted in “The Playbook” comes from the Democratic senator Sherman Minton of Indiana, imagining some ordinary playwright on relief who perhaps “did not create a Hamlet or a Launcelot Gobbo” (shout-out there to “The Merchant of Venice”), but deserves to eat.
After Dies triumphed and opinion turned against the Federal Theater, Roosevelt himself signed it out of existence. Decades on, when Flanagan was old and unwell and living in a nursing home, the memory of Dies’s wrecking-ball pursuit disturbed her still, according to a biography of her that Shapiro quotes in his epilogue.
“In moments of self-doubt,” the biographer wrote, “she would wonder if the voices she heard in the corridor outside her room were accusing her of being a Communist.”
THE PLAYBOOK: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War | By James Shapiro | Penguin Press | 384 pp. | $30
