Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic When the Federal Theatre’s all-Black production of Macbeth opened in Harlem in 1936, it stopped traffic. Mounted police cleared the way for ticket-holders — “Harlemites in ermine, orchids and gardenias, Broadwayites in mufti.” At the end of the performance, there was a 15-minute ovation. To the delight of the show’s then-unknown director, Orson Welles, barely out of his teens, the audience stormed the stage to congratulate the actors.Yet just three years later the Federal Theatre was shut down — an early victim of America’s culture wars. That, argues James Shapiro in his fascinating and energising history of the project, is why more of us should know its story today. In The Playbook, Shapiro, professor of English at Columbia University and author of several acclaimed books on Shakespeare, challenges the common assumption that our “culture wars” date back to the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. He argues that the Federal Theatre is an example of the phenomenon from before the second world war, complete with the methods to halt change that modern culture warriors deploy. “A defining legacy of this culture war is how these strategies coalesced into a right-wing playbook, widely used today, for securing power and challenging progressive initiatives,” writes Shapiro.The Federal Theatre was part of the Works Progress Administration, set up under president Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal to invest in public works and provide employment for millions who had suffered in the Great Depression. Many WPA jobs were in construction — but there were also federal projects for music, writing, art and theatre. “It was the product of a moment when the arts, no less than industry and agriculture, were thought to be vital to the health of the republic and deserving of its support,” writes Shapiro.A fundamental problem was that these congressmen didn’t quite grasp how plays worked or how dramatists pitted competing points of view against each otherThe numbers imply dazzling success. From 1934, the Federal Theatre employed 12,000 people. It staged more than 1,000 productions in 29 states, including plays by established names such as Eugene O’Neill and George Bernard Shaw. One in four Americans saw a Federal Theatre show, many for free at hospitals, orphanages, prisons and veterans’ homes. Its weekly radio broadcasts attracted 10mn listeners.The woman appointed to run the Federal Theatre was playwright and professor Hallie Flanagan. She hoped the programme would produce “free, adult, uncensored” theatre. In fact it was censored from the start. Its Broadway debut, Ethiopia, a dramatisation of Mussolini’s African invasion, managed one performance before the State Department cancelled the rest of the run. Instead, they were obliged to stage Jefferson Davis, a paean to the president of the Confederacy, in which one of Davis’s slaves begs not to be freed. “When I think this is our first Broadway show . . . I am ill,” Flanagan wrote to her husband. “If I were any reporter I would pan the life out of it.”Yet the fact that a large African and African-American theatrical company had been assembled for Ethiopia presented an opportunity. The Federal Theatre transferred them to Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre, and hired the wildly arrogant yet talented Welles to direct them in Macbeth. Welles set the production in 19th-century Haiti, leaning into the mysticism of Haitian Vodou.Expectations were low, and not just from a few racist critics who claimed Black actors could never perform Shakespeare. One disgruntled Harlemite, who assumed Welles was producing an insulting blackface comedy, attacked him in the lobby of the Lafayette with a razor blade. Welles was rescued by his own Banquo: former boxer Canada Lee.The “Voodoo Macbeth” was a smash hit. After 11 weeks in Harlem it had a three-month national tour. Looking back in 1982, at the end of a career that produced Citizen Kane, The War of the Worlds and The Third Man, Welles said: “By all odds my great success in life was that play.”Reading Shapiro’s accounts of a few standout Federal Theatre productions, it’s not hard to see why some might have irked the American right. Sinclair Lewis adapted his own remarkable novel about an American fascist-style dictatorship, It Can’t Happen Here. Meanwhile, Abram Hill and John Silvera’s script for Liberty Deferred set the filibustering of an anti-lynching bill in the Senate against “Lynchotopia”, where the ghosts of murdered Black people compare brutalities that have been inflicted on them. Controversy around the latter play ensured it was never staged.Opposition to the Federal Theatre was not just about the content of some of its plays, but sprang from a broader ideological objection to public spending and the centralisation of power in federal government. Much of Roosevelt’s New Deal was anathema to the right of his own Democratic party. Roosevelt’s vice-president John Garner helped pass much of the New Deal legislation, yet turned on Roosevelt in 1937. Garner chose the “charming, bigoted, and ambitious” Texas congressman Martin Dies as a tool to attack the New Deal: a fire-breathing anti-communist who, as Shapiro puts it, “badly needed a winning issue that would keep him in the public eye”.In 1938, with Dies as its chair, a new House Un-American Activities Committee identified the Federal Theatre as a hotbed of communism. Dies presided over the hearings, smoking his way through eight cigars a day. He was determined to shut down as much of the WPA as possible, and the Federal Theatre proved a sitting duck. As Shapiro notes, it was easy to cherry-pick passages from plays that out of context sounded shocking to conservative sensibilities. “A fundamental problem, Flanagan realized, was that these congressmen didn’t quite grasp how plays worked or how dramatists, through their characters and dialogue, pitted competing points of view against each other.”The committee hearings were a politically sophisticated exercise — and that required them to be intellectually unsophisticated. Responding to Flanagan’s assertion that workers’ theatres had “a certain Marlowesque madness”, Congressman Joe Starnes of Alabama asked her: “You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?” Flanagan said she meant Christopher Marlowe, but this meant nothing to Starnes. She was obliged to explain: “the greatest dramatist in the period of Shakespeare, immediately preceding Shakespeare”.Although some of the Federal Theatre’s productions were certainly radical, as good theatre often is, accusations of communism were farfetched. This was no fair trial, though. The committee set out to scupper the project, and the anguish Flanagan went through under attack made not a jot of difference to them. Shapiro’s bracing and sometimes jaw-dropping account of the rise and fall of the Federal Theatre is a salutary tale of politics and the arts — one which resonates all too strongly today.The Playbook: A Story of Theatre, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War by James Shapiro Faber & Faber £20/Penguin Press $30, 384 pages Alex von Tunzelmann is a historian and screenwriterJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
