Word: projects
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Project also sought, and won, new audiences for theater. Professional theater was brought for the first time to small towns and rural America. Record numbers attended performances in larger cities. "Children's units" in many cities revolutionized children's entertainment; young Walt Disney was one who drew inspiration from Yasha Frank's Los Angeles performances. Groups like the Spanish unit in Florida and the "Negro units" in many major cities brought series theater to audiences who had been ignored and performers who had been stereotyped...
PERHAPS MOST POIGNANT about the Project was one of its original goals, a goal that remained central--providing relief to unemployed performers. Many were aging vaudevillians; the Depression and the emergence of the motion picture industry had killed vaudeville, and its performers were stranded. As one performer described the Theatre Project to a Writers Project interviewer, "I don't know what would have happened without it. After all what can a man of fifty...
...worth considering how a seemingly pedestrian, and certainly non-artistic, purpose--giving unemployed people a job--fit into the results of the Project. Perhaps this explosion of creativity, and the Big Names that came out of it, had something to do with the way the basic need for relief--both in the Project itself and more generally in the nation--tempered artistic self-centeredness, even arrogance, to some extent...
...that forced a sense of social connectedness, a realization of the impact of social forces on the lives of individuals, a discovery of the range and complexity of human emotions in those who had been previously ignored, and an attempt to communicate that discovery. At their best, the Theatre Project and the other Arts Projects succeeded in communicating these insights...
...sure, there were problems within these Projects. Much of the output was undistinguished; many Theatre Project productions seem in retrospect one-dimensional, too self-consciously didactic. And conflicts, perhaps inevitable, arose between artistic purpose and political pressures. The political content of the Theatre Project drew the wrath of Congressional critics and ultimately contributed, at least in part, to the withdrawal of Congressional funding in 1939. Nor were pressures only external: despite the "uncensored" mandate, productions thought too controversial were occasionally postponed. By 1938, Welles and Houseman had left the Project in just such a dispute...