THEA 100 Intro to Theatre (Brankin)

Federal theatre plays. : 1. Triple-A plowed under / by the staff of the Living newspaper. 2. Power, a Living newspaper, by Arthur Arent. 3. Spirochete, a history, by Arnold Sundgaard

Investigates the explosive phenomenon of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) from a transatlantic perspective Offers the first comparative study of the history, performances and politics of the FTP in a book form Contributes significantly to the study of Hallie Flanagan as the bridge between the FTP and the European avant-garde; it will also contribute to the study of Flanagan's own plays Draws and exposes further links between American modernism and its European counterparts (Meyerhold, Brecht, European avant-garde) Concentrates on close reading of unpublished plays (excerpts from scripts included), on the actual performance events but also on archival material collected by the writer and not previously published in a consistent manner Offers both a historical survey and theoretical analysis based on performance theories Engaging and informative, this book presents a comparative study of the history, performances and politics of the FTP by drawing and exposing further links between American modernism and its European counterparts. It concentrates predominantly on the New York division and its following units: the Living Newspaper, the Negro unit, the Children's unit and the Dance unit. Exploring a range of performances, it suggests that the FTP is responsible for an array of theatrical and dramatic experimentations but that it is also indebted to and carries on from the tradition of the European avant-garde and the contemporary modernist theatrical explorations.

New Deal Theater recovers a much ignored model of political theater for cultural criticism.While considered to be less radical in its aesthetics and politics than its celebrated Weimar and Soviet cousins, it nonetheless proved to be highly effective in asserting cultural critique. In this regard it offers a vital alternative to the dominant modernist paradigm developed in Europe. Rather than radicalizing content and form, New Deal theater insisted that the political had to be made commensurable with the language of a mass audience steeped in consumer culture.The resulting vernacular praxis emphasized empathy over alienation, verisimilitude over abstraction. By examining the cultural vectors that shaped this theater, Saal shows why it was more successful on the American stage than its European counterpart and develops a theory of vernacular political theater which can help us think of the political in art in other than modernist terms.

Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated "Negro Units" set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged black versions of "white" classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the black performance community--a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists--who made and remade black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle. Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.

A reevaluation of American cultural politics in the 1930s This interdisciplinary study blends textual analysis with social history to chart the intellectual and artistic ferment of Depression-era America. In Rousing the Nation, Laura Browder explores the fiction, drama, and film produced during the decade by socially conscious intellectuals who struggled to create a uniquely American art. Challenged by a public more exposed to comic strips and tabloids than to serious artistic creativity, these writers and cinematographers used the techniques of modernism and muckraking to fashion works that would be experimental without being insular and would inspire the public to social activism. Browder first considers authors James T. Farrell, Josephine Herbst, and John Dos Passos, arguing that their work successfully sparked a discussion about what it meant to be American at a time when the country's very future seemed in doubt. She then examines the Living Newspaper productions of the Federal Theatre Project, which brought politically and aesthetically provocative drama to twenty-five million Americans. In a final chapter, she examines social films of the period, focusing on Paramount's 1939 production of One-Third of a Nation.