'Furious Improvisation' by Susan Quinn

How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands

Made High Art Out of Desperate Times

Susan Quinn

Walker & Co.: 326 pp., $25.99

OF ALL the Depression-era jobs programs created by the Works Progress Administration, the Federal Theatre Project was the most controversial. Conservative congressmen, unhappy about the U.S. government hiring people to pave roads or build airports, were livid at the idea of handing out federal paychecks to actors. "They've got to eat just like other people," declared WPA chief Harry Hopkins. At the flood tide of the New Deal's popularity in 1935, Hopkins' view prevailed, bringing theater to people across America who had never seen a live performance -- and at ticket prices even a sharecropper could afford.

Susan Quinn recaptures those heady years in American theater between 1935 and 1939 in "Furious Improvisation." Led by a red-headed dynamo named Hallie Flanagan, the Federal Theatre Project staged such fare as the socially conscious Living Newspaper series and the lightweight "Up in Mabel's Room." The project presented classical Greek plays, Shakespeare, modern drama, musicals, religious pageants, vaudeville, children's theater and puppet shows. There were African American companies and groups that performed in Yiddish, Italian, German, French and Spanish. Mobile units toured the country, playing for flood victims and federal workers. This variety reflected Flanagan's vision of a distinctively American national theater, as eclectic and democratic as Europe's centralized state theaters were not.

The project "has been the best friend the theatre as an institution has ever had in this country," New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson wrote in 1939 in response to congressional hearings depicting it as a hotbed of communism and race-mixing, an egregious waste of taxpayers' money that produced work with dangerous political leanings and no artistic merit. The appeals of Atkinson and other prominent theater boosters were unavailing. That year, Congress sent President Roosevelt an appropriations bill excluding the Federal Theatre Project; he reluctantly signed it to avoid throwing more than 3 million other WPA employees out of work.