Frost (English, UNC Chapel Hill) presents a study of the politically charged children's plays of the
Federal Theatre Project in the 1930s, showing how the Project participated in popular front politics of organized labor, antiracism, and antifascism.
The first play Welles directed professionally, two years later, also had something to do with social justice; it was his all-black Macbeth for the W.P.A.'s
Federal Theatre Project. Callow properly gives credit for the production to John Houseman, who as head of the Negro Theatre Unit decreed that it would present not only contemporary dramas but also classics, and that an untried 20-year-old would mount the first of them.
The Living Newspaper was initiated in the United States in 1935 as part of the WPA
Federal Theatre Project. One of its major supporters was dramatist Elmer Rice.
She examines the following performances of the play: Gilbert Seldes' controversial 1930 Broadway production; The
Federal Theatre Project's Negro Repertory performances in 1936; a 1955 musical film adaptation, The Second Greatest Sex; Spiderwoman Theater's 1977 Lysistrata Numbah!; The Lysistrata Project of 2003, an anti-war theatre movement; and the off-Broadway hit musical of 2011-2012, Lysistrata Jones.
The
Federal Theatre Project was a New Deal institution created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which made jobs and training available for unemployed workers.
Topping these preliminary treats was the Joffrey revival of Frankie & Johnny, first presented in 1938 by Ruth Page and Bentley Stone at the Great Northern Theatre as part of Franklin Roosevelt's WPA
Federal Theatre project.
In director Tim Robbins's true '30s-era story about the fight to save the
Federal Theatre Project from communist-routing Republicans, the sharp, chipper Jones plays the program's real-life chief, Hallie Flanagan, a woman the actress says she admires for being "a firecracker."
WPA
Federal Theatre Project National theater project sponsored and funded by the U.S.