It Will Happen Here

1936 Cleveland Production, Carter Theatre
Last week the good folks at Cleveland Public Theatre were appraised of a special event with Cleveland historical significance -- theaters around the nation are celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Federal Theatre Project’s nationwide opening of It Can’t Happen Here, the stage adaptation of the 1935 best-selling novel by Sinclair Lewis.

Brief background: The prove the scope of the Federal Theatre was capable of, and of its organizational abilities, it was suggested that a large number of participating theater across the nation open the exact same play on the exact same night. Why this particular play?

“Because it is a play about American life today, based on a passionate
belief in American democracy.” - Hallie Flanagan, Federal Theatre Director

Enough said. The synopsis is simple enough; the good people of the United States, in dire economic straits, elect an attractive, populist senator as
President of the United States, who immediately begins a number of social programs which we might recognize as Fascist (see: Mussolini, Hitler.) Newspaper are closed, unions are centralized by the federal government. The entire story is told from the perspective of a small town in Vermont, and how these changes affect the citizens there.

In presenting the work is 21 different theaters in 18 cities across the nation, each theater was encouraged to adapt the work to their locale, so long as the design did not strain to emulate specific persons or political parties.

“Avoid all controversial issues … Our business is wholly a job of theatre.” - Federal Theatre Policy Statement

Good luck with that.

It Can’t Happen Here opened on October 27, 1936 in Cleveland at the Carter Theatre (redubbed “Federal Theatre”) at East 9th and Prospect in downtown Cleveland, kitty-corner from the Gateway, exactly where Marvel/Disney has been blowing up cars and buildings just this past week. The run was so successful it was sold out for three weeks and only closed because a children’s puppet show was scheduled to take its place in December.

Last week Cleveland Public Theatre contacted me to direct the staged reading scheduled for Monday, October 24, 2011 to celebrate this anniversary, and I was only too happy to get involved. I will provide details of the event as it develops.

This reading will be free and open to the public.


Photo from the Cleveland production.

It Cannot Happen Here

“Written? Too mild a word. The play was created by polygenesis.”
- Hallie Flanagan, Arena
Telegrams …

Denver: WHERE IS REVISED VERSION ACT THREE LEWIS PLAY RUSH IMMEDIATELY.

Chicago: NEW ENDING REVISED ACT THREE LEWIS PLAY DOES NOT MAKE SENSE PLEASE ADVISE

Tampa: SPANISH COMPANY RESTIVE CANNOT LEARN LINES BY OCTOBER 27 UNLESS RECEIVE FULL TEXT PLAY IMMEDIATELY

San Francisco: OBJECT TO CUTTING WHITE HOUSE SCENE ONLY GOOD SCENE LEWIS PLAY

Nebraska: PERSON IN HIGH PLACE CONSIDERS WHITE HOUSE SCENE QUOTE ILL-ADVISED UNQUOTE LETTER FOLLOWS

Los Angeles: MAKING SUPERHUMAN EFFORTS TO MEET OCTOBER 27 LEWIS PLAY STOP IMPERATIVE HAVE NO MORE REVISIONS STOP STOP

William Watts, San Francisco production director …

The chief obstacle was the script itself - because of its hurried and superficial writing.

Orders from Washington to all productions …

… avoid all controversial issues - political angles of any degree - special appeals - racial or group appeals - or inferences in any of these directions, since Federal Theatre is interested only in presenting good theatre, neither adapting nor assuming any viewpoint beyond presenting a new and vital drama of our times, emerging from the social and economic forces of the day …

Also forbidden in most positive terms are any references to any foreign power, any policy of a foreign power, the personalities of any foreign power or government; any comparison between the United States and any specific foreign power, system, personality, etc. Our business is with a play of our time and country by a great writer of our time and country and our job is wholly a job of theatre.

A phone call from Sinclair Lews on the morning of October 25 …

I haven’t slept all night - for the matter of that as yiou know I haven’t slept for weeks. Nobody can say I haven’t given everything to the Federal Theatre … Now it is all terrible - everybody has gone into a coma … I want you to get right on the train and come to New York and postpone the play a week and get new people to do everything, or do it yourself. It is all terrible. It is all a failure.

Dorothea Lynch, Florida Project director …

We didn’t have the last act until it was just about the time to start. Then it came, without who was to say what.

Telegram evening of October 27 …

Cleveland: RESPONSIVE AUDIENCE KEYING UP FOR PERFORMANCE APPLAUSE AFTER FIRST ACT TREMENDOUS

The Plain Dealer - October 28
Sometimes it moves slowly, but it moves. On the whole it is a satisfactory production of a propaganda play that is worth doing.
- William McDermott

Sources:
Arena by Hallie Flanagan (1940)
Showtime In Cleveland
Free, Adult, Uncensored

Call and Response

NEW THEATRE - November, 1935
A letter from Hallie Flanagan

The Federal Government allocated, as you know, $4.8B for relief under the WPA. This appropriation included $27M for putting back to work musicians, writers, painters, sculptors, and theatre people. Each Federal director plans to work through regional directors for some twelve areas throughout the United States.

It will be seen that while our immediate aim in all these projects is to put to work thousands of theatre people, our more far reaching purpose is to organize and support theatrical enterprises so excellent in nature, so low in cost, and so vital to the communities involed that they will be able to continue after Federal support is withdrawn.

During the next few weeks of planning, and later, as the various projects start, we need the active interest and help of every person who cares about the theatre and about the problem of unemployment; we need the support of people who believe, as we do, there is skill, experience, enthusiasm and intelligence in the theatre people now on relief rolls and in the thousands of theatre people who will cooperate with them.

We need the support of people who share our belief thatthe theatre horizon is not contracting, but widening to include Santa Fe Desert, the Rocky Mountains, and the valley of the Missisippi; windening to include a consciousness of the social scene as well as the social register; widening, in short, to include the impossible - that same impossible which has led our conetmporaries to soar to the stars, whisper through space, and fling miles of steel and glass into the air.

We need the belief of all you who care about the theatre in terms of the art and economics of 1935.


The Plain Dealer - January 2, 1936
McDermott on the Arts Dole
“Why not fan dancers? Theater project a bust. Not all can be Hamlets.”
by William F. McDermott

It is apparent that the federal theater project in its present status, and despite some earnest efforts of some copetent people, is a bust. There are not enough really experienced theatrical folks on the relief rolls to organize any practical theatrical project except, perhaps, in New York and, there, organization is held up by red tape and bickering between the groups involved.

Even to a sympathetic eye, the arts projects generally are plainly in a mess. They come up against two almost insuperable obstacles: First, the number of unqualified and inexperienced people who want jobs in arts projects and who will often have to be accepted because of a lack of better materials, second the fewness of competent art workers on the relief rolls.

Injunction Granted

"A chronicle of Labor Activity in the United States," Injunction Granted opened in July, 1936 at the Biltmore Theatre in New York and became a flashpoint for criticism of the entire Federal Theater Project. Project Director Hallie Flanagan always supported this play in public, and in fact defended its existence before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

In private however, she had requested - prior to opening - that the writers "clean up the script and make it more objective" which they did not do, and after opening night wrote a terse letter reading in part:

... you are allowing your own personal beliefs to endanger the idea idea of the living newspaper ...

... The production seems to me to be a special pleading, biased, an editorial not a news issue. (Witness the one-sided treatment of the CIO rally; the voice reading Hoover; the scene showing judges asleep, etc. etc.)"

And she was right. To call it a factual representation of the issues is entirely inaccurate. Injunction Granted is actually an editorial cartoon, taking quotes out of context, placed into the mouths of characters who are presented in the broadest terms possible - including a silent, Harpo Marx-like "CLOWN" (that's the character's name) who comments on all of the proceedings, making what is already obvious glaringly so.

Have I utilized such broad satire in my own work? Of course I have. But when so many people's livelihoods were assisted through this federal works project, it seems in hindsight to be horribly selfish to put them into jeopardy in this obnoxious fashion.

Source: "Liberty Deferred" and other Living Newspaper os the Federal Theatre Project

Can You Hear Their Voices? (play)

Can You Hear Their Voices? (A Play of Our Time)
Peculiar Works Project (2010)

Yes, a Depression-era drama, based on true events, performed in an empty storefront near the NYU campus. Forty seats on knock-together risers, struggling air-conditioning, the actors had to jostle for position to use the single bathroom with the patrons just prior to the performance.

I have read agitprop theater from this era and was expecting a very dry piece of work. They were all so obvious - and polite - back in those days.

Farmer: How can we eat when the drought has destroyed all of our crops?
Senator: The American people will never agree to a dole.

I mean, how can you have interesting political discourse when no one can refer to Nazis?

Well, first of all, I was wrong about the play. In places it really is funny, and moving. And though you are led to the expectation that there really will be some kind of minor revolution at the end, the ending is much more realistic, personal, and leaves you wondering what will happen? As if to say to the audience, here we are, where do we go from here?

Modern technology has made it possible for small companies like this one to project video images on the wall to cover for what in the olden days were long and awkward to watch set changes. And the videos were of great period film, sometimes with captions. Even better, the trio playing live (piano, clarinet and bass) were a real swell ensemble, I would have been happy to hear them continue after the 60-minute show was over.

The Times made a bit of a stink over the use of cross-gendered and other forms of non-traditional casting. At the beginning I had to agree ... during the serious opening segments portraying the farmers and workers in their crisis, it was confusing to see a much older man with a salt and pepper mustache playing a kid and a young woman playing his brother. Women in suits playing men without any irony suggests high school productions where you just can't get enough boys to audition.

However, as the play went on, and moved into high gear with these hilarious scenes of high society girls and men being their decadent selves - doing period dances (oh! those early 30s dance moves!) with women in tuxedos and tall, bald guys in dresses, "necking" on the stairs (I found the repeated use of the word "neck" to be scandalous) these decisions made more sense. My date for the evening remarked how it really made the ensemble feel like a company that works together and takes on all responsibilities together. And I'm all for that.

"Can You Hear Their Voices?: A Play of Our Time" by Hallie Flanagan and Margaret Ellen Clifford, adapated from a story by Whittaker Chambers, was produced at a pop-up retail space at 2 Great Jones Street, NYC, June 3 - 27, 2010

Can You Hear Their Voices?

Produced by the Peculiar Works Project

Depression-Era Woes, Echoing in the Present
- NY Times, June 11, 2010

There’s nothing for sale in the vacant store where “Can You Hear Their Voices?” is being performed. No shelves, registers or clerks, either. Yet there’s constant talk of money, of business, of labor. The play, a nifty piece of agitprop from the Depression, isn’t shy when voicing ideas about the American economy, and this production, as heavy-handed as it sometimes turns, doesn’t have to stretch too far to find parallels to current events.

First staged in 1931, “Voices” was adapted by Hallie Flanagan and Margaret Ellen Clifford from a short story by Whittaker Chambers, who was then an avowed communist. The tale, based on real incidents, documents a group of Dust Bowl farmers and their growing frustration over the lack of a government response to their plight.

Throughout the play, scenes of the farmers’ suffering alternate with episodes of the decadent rich enjoying lavish lives. One group debates socialism. The other denounces state-run aid. While there is never a question where your sympathies should lie, the script features a few powerful moments, including a final scene that stirs plenty of passion. (more)

Recently I have been hitting a number of mental and emotional blocks to continuing my study of this period, and was considering abandoning it entirely. This morning, reading this review, it was like I was sitting on an atomic bomb, waiting for it to go off.

Sorry - saw THE ROOM for the first time last weekend.

My recent impulse has been to throw over the 1936 project, for which I still had not solidified a plot and resume work on a piece about Cleveland in the 1950s. And I have suddenly realized that the to are not mutually exclusive.

My wife, apparently, figured this out a long time ago, but neglected to tell me.

It Can't Happen Here

"It Can't Happen Here" is a semi-satirical political novel by Sinclair Lewis published in 1935. It features newspaperman Doremus Jessup struggling against the fascist regime of President Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip. In 1936, Lewis and John C. Moffitt wrote a stage version which is still produced. The stage version premiered on October 27, 1936 in several U.S. cities simultaneously, in productions sponsored by the Federal Theater Project. - Wikipedia

Complete text at Project Gutenberg

The play opened in 18 different cities, including a Cleveland production at the Carter Theater on East 9th Street, directed by Theodore Veihman. This production brought the story from Vermont to central Ohio, and included references to Akron and Cleveland.

The three-week run featured the Federal Music Project Marching Band on its sold-out opening night, and critic William McDermott (no fan of the FTP) wrote in the Plain Dealer that the show "sometimes moves slowly, but it moves." - Showtime in Cleveland

"We Want to do 'It Can't Happen Here' because it is a play by one of our most distinguished American writers. We want to do it because it is a play about American life today, based on a passionate belief in American democracy.

The play says that when dictatorship comes to threaten such a democracy, it comes in a harmless guise, with parades and promises; but that when such dictatorship arrives, the promises are not kept and the parade grounds become encampments.

We want to do 'It Can't Happen Here' because, like Doremus Jessup and his creator, Sinclair Lewis, we, as American citizens and as workers in a theatre sponsored by the government of the United States, should like to do what we can to keep alive the 'free, inquiring, critical spirit' which is the center and core of a democracy."

- Hallie Flanagan from "Free, adult, uncensored: The living history of the Federal Theatre Project"

Would you know a dictatorship coming if you saw one? I mean ... really?