New Deal Accomplishment: Over 60,000 theatre performances


Above: A WPA Theatre Performance of Ready! Aim! Fire! in Los Angeles, California, 1937. Hallie Flanagan, the WPA Theatre director described the play as a "satire on dictatorship" and compared the Los Angeles performances to the New York performances: "It had less sophistication and certainly less subtlety than we expect in New York. It lacked the ceramic finish, the hard glaze of a Broadway musical show. Instead it possessed zest and ebullience which Broadway often sacrifices for smartness" (Arena, 1940, pp. 281-282). An announcement in the Eagle Rock Sentinel newspaper noted that the play "includes several important new song hits, dance numbers, comedy situations, and interesting stage effects in a merry fast-moving bill of entertainment" (November 4, 1937, p. 2). Photo from the National Archives.


Above: WPA theatre performances were popular all across the country, in venues big and small. This audience is watching a WPA performance of Broken Dishes, at the Blackstone Theatre, Chicago, Illinois, September 15, 1936. Photo from the National Archives.


Above: WPA actors and singers also performed operas, such as Aida, a love story set in Egypt, seen here at an outdoor theatre in Miami, Florida, August 12, 1936. Photo from the National Archives.


Above: The description for this photo, ca. 1938, reads, "Children at the Children's Theatre in Duluth [Minnesota] learn how to manipulate puppets and to stage entertaining little plays for their parents and friends. The Children's Theatre is a WPA-city sponsored project." Photo from the National Archives.


Above: Children enjoy a WPA puppet show at a public library in Louisville, Kentucky, July 2, 1938. Photo from the National Archives.


Above: The description for this photograph, taken in New York City ca. 1936-1937, reads, "'Macbeth' adapted by Orson Welles. Negro Theatre Unit - WPA Fed. Theatre Proj. of NYC - Act III, Scene 2." For more information on this groundbreaking play, see, Paul Allen Sommerfeld, "The Play That Electrified Harlem," Library of Congress (accessed June 2, 2025). Photo from the National Archives.


Above: There were also WPA circuses, giving employment to forgotten entertainers... and providing entertainment to endless thousands of people. Advertisement created by the National Service Bureau of the Federal Theatre Project, 1939 (scanned from a personal copy and free for anyone to use).


Above: A ventriloquist performing in a WPA vaudeville show in San Francisco, California, September 1, 1936 - one of the many vaudeville shows that the WPA put together across the country. At the time of the Great Depression vaudeville was already a dying art, and so its performers could easily have been forgotten were it not for the WPA's large-scale and wide-ranging employment program. Photo from the National Archives.


Above: The Federal Dance Project, a subdivision of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project, also put on many performances. WPA poster image from the Library of Congress.

Above: From 1936-1938, WPA actors toured CCC camps and put on performances of Grace Hayward's CCC Murder Mystery. 20-30 CCC boys could participate in the comedy show, and on December 17, 1936, Wesley Smith and James DeHoman of CCC Company 367, Camp S-145, Montoursville, Pennsylvania, won best actor and comedian awards. "Army officers and technical officials state that [the CCC Murder Mystery] has done much to increase the morale of the boys in the camps and are insistent that similar productions be staged in the camps" (Sixth District Gazette (Barre, Vermont)--a CCC newspaper--January 30, 1937). Hallie Flanagan wrote that the CCC Murder Mystery was very successful, "eventually playing in 258 camps" (Arena, 1940, p. 243). Image above scanned from a personal copy.


Above: The New Deal also built theatres, such as this one in Fort Peck, Montana, constructed with funding from the Public Works Administration (PWA), between 1933 and 1939. Photo from the National Archives.

Theatre to Entertain, Theatre to Make People Engage in Critical Thinking

By March 31, 1939, just a few months before Congress shut it down, the WPA's Federal Theatre Project had put on 63,728 performances of various types, to a cumulative audience of 30,398,726 (Arena, 1940, pp. 434-435).

The WPA's theatre program was considered to be dangerous, by some, because it touched on current events and made people think critically about the status quo. Racially integrated performances and the concept of public funds for theatre also made conservatives in Congress (from both parties) wince.

After the Federal Theatre Program was eliminated, Hallie Flanagan wrote: "I do not believe anyone who worked on it regrets that it stood from first to last against reaction, against prejudice, against racial, religious, and political intolerance. It strove for a more dramatic statement and a better understanding of the great forces of our life today; it fought for a free theatre as one of the many expressions of a civilized, informed, and vigorous life" (Arena, 1940, p. 367).

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