Word: projects
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MOST extensive American commitment to the arts ever undertaken, the Federal Arts Project was born in 1935 when Harry Hopkins included it--with separate Theatre, Art, Writing, and Music Projects--in his Works Progress Administration. Hopkins had two goals in mind: relief for unemployed artists and the development of American culture at a time of national depression--psychological as well as economic...
Free, Adult, Uncensored recounts the story of one of these projects, the Federal Theatre Project. John O'Connor and Lorraine Brown have put together a kind of family scrapbook, a montage of the Theatre Project. They have recovered and included long-forgotten Project "documents"--posters, picture and the like--as well as reminiscences by Theatre Project veterans. The book is loosely organized--a brief historical essay followed by some dozen and a half sections on individual productions. An intimate, insider's "feel" for the Project emerges, a feel for its diversity and its creativity, its struggles and its trials...
...Free, adult, uncensored"--such was the mandate Harry Hopkins gave Hallie Flanagan, a former classmate from Grinnell, when he tapped her to direct the Theatre Project. It was a mandate that permitted boldness, variety, innovation...
...Project's content varied from vaudeville revivals to avant-garde experimentation, its sources from Eugene O'Neill and George Bernard Shaw to undiscovered playwrights, its performers from an aging generation whose formative experiences were in tent shows, travelling troupes, and vaudeville theaters to an energetic new generation that would dominate American entertainment for years to come, a crew that included Orson Welles and John Houseman, Will Geer and John Huston, E.G. Marshall and Joseph Cotton...
...Project pioneered new concepts and directions for American theater. Many productions contained considerable political and social comment, focussing on the plight of individuals within the context of larger social problems. The concept of "Living Newspapers"--dramatizations of current problems and examinations of proposed solutions--was brought to the American stage...