As America's first and only government-funded national theatre, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) has often been dubbed a “successful failure,” a unique theatre experiment that succeeded in producing new shows and creating new audiences, but that was nonetheless stopped by an Act of Congress after only four years. In her book of Federal Theatre case studies, Elizabeth Osborne suggests that the FTP was even more successful than has been commonly characterized. It was “a viable enterprise that in many ways attained its primary objectives: to achieve a theatre that could represent the nation while putting Americans back to work in their fields” (2).
When we interpret the FTP's success by how well it staged the nation, its culture, and its people, we come to view the FTP, Osborne argues, on its own terms: as a complex organization navigating “the tensions and dialogue between national, regional, and local identities” (2). We see that its successes as well as its struggles resulted from its decentered organizational structure and its attempts to create local theatre relevant to the milieus of each of the communities in which it operated. The FTP, after all, functioned not as a monolithic institution, but as a “federation of theatres” (Flanagan, qtd. in Osborne 3), with regional centers in five major cities, and smaller groups, or “units,” in many small towns in several states. Multiple traveling units also crossed state lines to venture into Civilian Conservation Corps camps to entertain the camps' workers, most of whom had never previously seen a theatrical performance. Over five chapters, Staging the People focuses on the regionalism of the FTP, with each chapter representing a case study of a unit working outside of New York City. The regional units Osborne explores are those located in Chicago, Boston, the South (Atlanta in particular), and Portland, Oregon, as well as those that toured across state lines into primarily rural locales. Each case study discusses the form and content of the shows the units produced, but importantly, also includes the local cultural and administrative contexts surrounding the productions, thereby offering insights into how the FTP responded to various regional expectations and demands.
As we might expect, the types of theatre each regional unit produced—and the degree of tension among each of the units' workers—was as varied as the cultural histories of each area explored. In Chicago, for example, a long history of gangster activity and corrupted politics gave way to a unit daring enough to address public health issues in its performance of Spirochete, but too politically divided to stage a hard-hitting show about the worst of the city's sociopolitical problems (Chapter 1). In Atlanta, the FTP's production of Altars of Steel, a play about a workers' riot in response to an accident at a large steel conglomerate, evoked accusations of Communist propaganda (Chapter 3). Osborne's research reveals that the incidents dramatized by the Atlanta play referenced real-life events that occurred between the turn of the twentieth century and the 1930s. In its staging of these events and its articulation of the region's “Southern pride and nationalism” (102), the performance can be deemed a success. Yet, as Osborne argues, the Atlanta FTP also failed. To lead the workers to action seemed to be the point and promise of the show, but as Osborne makes clear, the unit neglected to provide a forum for workers to continue discussing solutions to problems that the performance broached.
This definition of failure is one of many throughout Osborne's book. Her distinction among different types of failure, combined with her definition of success (i.e., how well the FTP staged the lived experiences of the nation's individual regions), shifts the scholarly conversation surrounding the FTP in an important direction: away from a focus on the FTP's administrative failures and struggle to produce quality art as a relief program, and toward the ways in which the politics of the FTP workers either matched or were at odds with the dominant political sentiments of the regions in which they worked.
To grasp this shift, consider that Hallie Flanagan, in her memoir Arena, and Jane De Hart Mathews, in her early study on the FTP's structure and administrative practices, discuss in detail the FTP's struggle to produce professional shows with personnel pulled from relief rolls. We see this focus, too, throughout Barry Witham's 2003 study of the Seattle unit. Osborne, however, brings new information to discussion of the FTP by focusing on the tension between regional hegemony and the sometimes conflicting desires of FTP workers, such as that which occurred between the Left-leaning workers on Altars of Steel and their conservative regional critics. Osborne's work also suggests that the variety of styles of performances generated by the FTP was not because it couldn't locate its audiences; rather, it was because it catered to many different audiences in various locales with widely divergent expectations. In analyzing these varying expectations, Osborne resists generalization, offering instead a nuanced examination of the “tensions, triumphs, and disappointments” of each regional unit (183). By her book's end, she does not, like many of her predecessors, muse about the FTP's final days, nor does she offer a fresh interpretation of its demise. Osborne's focus, instead, is on the Federal Theatre Project's life.
In her epilogue, Osborne reflects both on her role as a researcher and on the state of the FTP's archives. Having consulted the major collections at the National Archives and the Library of Congress as well as smaller, regional archives, Osborne acknowledges the difficulty in piecing together the histories of lesser-known productions of rural and traveling units. Yet her book of exactly such case studies suggests that such archival work has been successful, and that it continues to be necessary if we hope to better understand the Federal Theatre Project as the people's theatre that it claimed to be.
