The Federal Theatre Project

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too.

 On May 6, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7034, which created the Works Progress Administration or WPA,  coming out of the Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, which he had signed into law just under a month earlier.  Of the nearly $5 billion allocated by the act, $27 million was approved for Federal Project Number One, which would employ artists, musicians, actors and writers, with the understanding that, as Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins quipped, "Hell, they've got to eat just like other people!"  Like all WPA projects, the idea was not just to provide relief, but rather to provide jobs and  income to the unemployed.  Federal Project Number One, often called Federal One, was divided into five separate projects: the Federal Art Project; the Federal Music Project; the Federal Theatre Project; the Federal Writers' Project; and the Historical Records Survey. At least in theory, these five projects were to operate without racial, ethnic, religious, or political discrimination.   A few months after the creation of the WPA, Harry Hopkins tapped Hallie Flanagan to lead the Federal Theatre Project. Hopkins had known Flanagan at Grinnell College in Iowa, where she was a member of the Literary and Dramatic Clubs. Flanagan later studied in George Baker’s Workshop 47 dramatic production studio  in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After completing her MA at Radcliffe College, Flanagan taught at Vassar and then became the first woman awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which she used to travel Europe for over a year, studying modern theater there, before returning to Vassar. That research became the basis for her book, "Shifting Scenes of the Modern European Theater."  In Flanagan’s instructions for the FTP in 1935, she noted the goal of employing actors, directors, playwrights, and stage technicians, but also stated a loftier aim: “The far reaching purpose is the establishment of theatres so vital to community life that they will continue to function after the program of this Federal Project is completed.”  Flanagan established five regional centers: New York, Northeast (headquartered in Boston), Midwest (headquartered in Chicago), West (headquartered in Los Angeles), and South (headquartered in New Orleans). Because the goal was to employ people who had previously been professional theater employees, not every state had sufficient theater professionals to support the program.  Within a year, over 12,000 men and women worked for the FTP, earning just over half of what they would have at Actors Equity Association minimums. They rehearsed four hours per day, and performed six days a week.   The FTP’s goal was to employ people in the theater, not to make money, so some performances were put on free of charge to the audience, and when there was a charge for admission, the ticket price was generally much cheaper than at most professional productions. In its four years of existence, the FTP put on 1200 productions in 29 states, admission to 65% of which was free of charge. An estimated one in four Americans attended FTP performances over the four years.  Some of the performances were smash hits. In 1936, the Federal Theatre Project Negro Unit in Harlem, put on an all-Black production of Macbeth, directed by a 20-year-old Orson Welles. It was Orson’s wife, Virginia, who conceived of the idea of setting the play in 19th Century Haiti, with the play's witches turned into voodoo priestesses. The production, which came to be known as Voodoo Macbeth, was wildly successful, with 10,000 people trying to attend opening night in the 1200-seat Lafayette Theatre. After running for 10 weeks at the Lafayette, the play went on tour to FTP theaters in places like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. When local authorities in Cincinnati said that the audience at a production there would need to be segregated, the city was dropped from the tour itinerary. Video of scenes from the play can be found on YouTube.  The Federal Theatre Project achieved its goals, using only a small fraction of the total WPA budget, it employed theater professionals; entertained audiences, some ⅔ of whom had never attended theater before the FTP; and helped launch the careers of people like Welles, playwright Arthur Miller, and actor John Houseman.  Despite its success and its relatively small budget, the Federal Theater Project, was controversial, both for its supposed communist affiliations and because of the perception that theater wasn’t worthy of receiving federal tax dollars. According to Flanagan’s stepdaughter, a congressman at the time jeered: “Culture! What the Hell---Let ‘em have a pick and shovel.”   On December 6, 1938, the recently formed House Un-American Activities Committee, also known as the Dies Committee after its chairman Texan Martin Dies, called Flanagan in to testify about the FTP; they were already suspicious that Flanagan may be communist since she had made Russian friends during her European travels. After Flanagan admitted that some of the plays raised issues about social class – theater, after all, regularly questions the status quo, Dies, a precursor to Joseph McCarthy, asked Flanagan whether taxpayers should be forced to fund plays “that portray the interest of one class to the disadvantage of another class.”     Six months later, on June 30, 1939, Congress pulled the FTP’s funding, abruptly putting 8,000 people around the country out of work.   After organizing the FTP papers and publishing "Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre," Flanagan went on to become head of the theater department at Smith College, where she remained until her retirement in 1952. About a month before the FTP was shut down, theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote a long and sometimes critical piece about the FTP in the New York Times, concluding, "Although the Federal Theater Project is far from perfect, it has kept an average of 10,000 people employed on work that has helped to lift the dead weight from the lives of millions of Americans. It has been the best friend the theater as an institution has ever had in this country. It has brought the theater and people together realistically. In short, it deserves to be rescued from partisan politics, which on the one hand, are creeping into its administration, and on the other are threatening to put it out of business." Joining me now to help us understand more about the Federal Theater Project is is Dr. Paul Gagliardi, Teaching Associate Professor at Marquette University and the author of, "All Play and No Work: American Work Ideals and the Comic Plays of the Federal Theater Project." 

Hi, Paul, thanks so much for joining me today.

Paul Gagliardi  10:47  
It is a pleasure to be here. I'm super excited.

Kelly  10:50  
So I had never heard of the Federal Theater Project before I read your book. I thought I knew a lot about the New Deal and WPA, so I am super excited. I want to hear how you first came to know about the Federal Theater Project and started thinking about writing it and got launched on this project?

Paul Gagliardi  11:09  
Well, that's a good question. I don't know, when I first heard the Federal Theater Project. I did my master's degree with an emphasis on on on theater. And I guess I had seen reference to it at some point. I never really put a lot of thought into it. And when I was in graduate school for my doctorate, I wanted to focus on on film, and very broad like cultural, cultural interactions with with the 1930s. And I had this mess of the project idea. And I had a I found a reference to the Federal Theater Project. And I was like, "Oh, that's like some weird, weird side point of history," and totally forgot about it. And my advisor eventually said, "You know, what? That might be the basis for a dissertation." And that is really in my mind, where I came to understand it or my, my, my, my Genesis point. Yeah, totally accidental. I wish I could say like, this is something I had been interested in for for decades. It wasn't it was a, it was a cross reference in some book, a throwaway line. And, and then what I discovered was this fascinating moment of American theater history and federal governmental history, too.

Kelly  12:33  
So this project, of course, we have the text of the plays, and being a government project, I'm sure there's, you know, relatively voluminous archives about the project. But in some ways, of course, the plays themselves are ephemeral, right? Like, we can't go back and watch the the theater presentations themselves. So could you talk a little bit about your approach to looking at these plays to researching and analyzing what's going on? You know, what, what we can sort of determine from what we do have about what the experience was? 

Paul Gagliardi  13:05  
It's a great question. I think my first approach was, I knew I knew there were archives at George Mason University and the Library of Congress. The materials, play scripts, programs, in some cases, reports that directors of individual projects had to send back to the central office in Washington, DC. So that was a treasure trove. They are ephemeral. And that is, aside from the Orson Welles production of "Macbeth" in Harlem, in I think 1937, I don't even think there's any film of any Federal Theater Project production. So like any good theater scholar, I'm looking at your what press reviews are in newspapers for local productions. I'm looking in some cases of oral histories. I'm looking at other histories written by other professors, and the archival materials, especially the Library of Congress. You always go into it thinking though, it's incomplete, right? Because a theater director is not going to say this production was terrible. Like they're going to promote how great the production was. In some cases, in these reports that were sent back to the main FTP office in DC, you'll get audience surveys that were sent out, I think, and as people are walking out of the theater. And it's funny, today, I just got my teaching evals for the semester, so I keep the same thing in mind, like the people that feel the most that feel the need to write the responses usually have an axe to grind. So sometimes you get these very colorful interpretations of the plays. My favorite is this production in Omaha, Nebraska, and clearly the theater director in this report to the, to the federal to the FTP main office said, audience reaction is just in giant capital letters very favorable. So I often wonder about what actually he they thought. So it's, it's incomplete, right. And that's kind of to me the fascinating way of doing theater research is we're only getting a segment of what people thought about the play, little snippets and photo stills of productions. So a lot of our ephemeral materials and then in  on my end, are just filling in the blanks of what's not said by theatre directors and, and audiences and making some admittedly, some assumptions about how people are receiving these plays.

Kelly  13:48  
So you write a lot about the ways that these plays are talking about labor and work. And so I wonder if we could take a step back and talk a little bit about the goals of the New Deal programs in general. You know, I, in my mind, it's always like, "Oh, this is super progressive, and we would never have nationalized anything nowadays," but, you know, it's not for all that some people may have criticized it for being communist or socialist or something. It's not actually that progressive. So can you talk a little bit about kind of the overall goals of the New Deal and the way it's viewing things like work and labor?

Paul Gagliardi  16:26  
Yeah, that's a great point. I, and certainly for me, when I was growing up, and, and learning about history in high school, and then even through my undergraduate career, that's the reputation of the New Deal is this progressive, almost socialist series of programs. But also, I think people often often think of it as one centralized, unified vision from the mind of Franklin Roosevelt. And it's not that at all. It's a series of contradictory programs that in some ways are, are giving blanket amounts of cash to businesses. In other ways, they're trying to transform the agricultural industry. And over here, they're giving, you know, electricity to the Tennessee Valley. It's not uniform. And and you're right, it's not at all, as socialist and communistic and progressive as, as it was. Some some play, some programs were to be sure. But ultimately, I think Roosevelt's intention with the New Deal, and his brain trust in his administration was, we have to restore capitalism. A lot of the influences for the New Deal come from the German Elberfeld system in Germany, the late 19th, early 20th centuries, which was, in essence, you give money to the dispossessed, and the unemployed, and work to those to those groups, only as a way to kind of get them back into the labor force. The New Deal was in my reading, and a lot historians as well, very conservative, right. Roosevelt, in his speeches and his inaugural addresses, because he has four of them, says, in essence, right, repeatedly that work restores the mind and the body, and that's very, a very kind of old school, American perspective of labor, like labor is how we fundamentally define ourselves. In   interactions with society is what work do you do. And for him, it's and I think a lot of the New Dealists, it's restoring the worker to get them back into the marketplace. If you look at a lot of the policies of New Deal programs, they are very conservative, especially socially. The driving force of most New Deal programs is to restore the male as breadwinner ethos to American society. The Depression hits male workers especially bad, but also women workers. And yet most New Deal programs are we need to privilege the unemployed male worker. That also extends to a lot of non white groups. Most New Deal programs privilege white labor forces as opposed to Black labor forces, especially in the south. And that's not to say there are things the New Deal is trying that are trying to rectify and modify capitalism in the 1930s. The National Recovery Act is in essence, you know, as a sort of quasi socialist or social democratic approach to fixing the the economic and labor market, but that's kind of unusual for most of the New Deal. It's it's about pumping money into the economy, this very Keynesian approach to society which we would read now as progressive, but in in its roots, it's fairly conservative.

Kelly  20:02  
It's probably a good moment to remind ourselves that people who work in theatres are labor. Like this is, you know, it's easy to forget sometimes that art and labor are related. But this is these people's livelihood, they too were put out of work when theaters failed, when the the economy was suffering. So let's start there before we talk about the plays themselves and what they say about labor, what it is that the Federal Theater Project itself is doing to help these people get back to work, what what that work means for them.

Paul Gagliardi  20:40  
That's a great point. And I was it's funny that not funny but you know, we we came through in the last year the the massive strikes in Hollywood, and every few years, we're reminded that theater work, film work, acting work, is labor. One of the odd things about the FTP and and why it was so controversial is we've always had in American society, a kind of is very complicated relationship with viewing acting as labor. We have our roots in the Puritans in New England and on and on the East Coast, who vehemently thought that acting was antithetical to labor. And we've often maintained that throughout American history, right. But the old adage that you'll often hear theater historians say is, women that worked in theaters in the 19th century, were thought of it on the same social strata as prostitutes, like this was something that was just antithetical to everything that was American. One of the things I argue in my book is by the 30s, that's starting to change. People start to see acting as both something that's very democratic, and also something that is a form of leisure, right. You start to understand that our leisure activities are often built on some form of labor, whether you're going to a baseball game and seeing people playing baseball and engaging in work or going to the theater or seeing it on screen on a movie screen. When the depression hits, it's really bad for for theater. Huge percentages of theaters close across the country. Broadway barely stays afloat. In major cities like New York and Chicago and Philadelphia, theater does, okay. But St. Louis, Milwaukee, Detroit theaters are really hit hard. Amateur theaters across the country just don't have money to stay afloat. So one of the appeals for many theater workers was this is a lifeline from the federal government. And this is where I think the kind of radical notion of what the, the long view, historiography of the New Deal partially comes from is you do have programs like the Federal Theater Project and federal arts projects that are giving federal dollars to avenues of labor that historically haven't been thought of as as labor. And that's a very radical concept during the time. And for many theater workers, this is this is a fantastic idea, right? Like this is this is wonderful. But complicating that, too, is a lot of theater workers are uncomfortable with some of the some of the art being produced by the Federal Theater Project. And I see a tension between someone who's trained on Broadway to do a very, very crowd pleasing sort of musical versus someone who's come up through the college university or the University Theatre system, which is more avant garde, and there's a kind of natural tension over what this labor should look like.

Kelly  23:51  
So how were the plays themselves chosen? Because you just mentioned that, you know, there, there is a bit of a tension of like, is this the work we should be doing? There's a tension both among the theater owners and then later Congress asking like, yes, why is this what we're funding? So could you talk some about what that process looks like to actually select the plays that were going to be produced?

Paul Gagliardi  24:14  
It's complicated, because originally, when the FTP is established, the guiding ethos from Harry Hopkins to Hallie Flanagan was free, adult, and uncensored. There's not going to be any sort of government censorship or government mandate as to what plays you can produce. Initially, I'd say the first couple years of the FTP is very decentralized, and it's focused or the focus comes from the theaters themselves sort of organically. So theaters are set up regionally, or their district set up regionally and then individual theaters, individual cities, and so those theater directors are given a lot of leeway as to what plays they can, they can pick. Many of them pick plays that they think are just going to play really well in that market as theater directors do today. Other theater directors are doing something very, you know, in vogue and very, I mean, in vogue but very abstract and very avant garde and very niche. I live in Milwaukee now, and the Milwaukee Federal Theater only lasted about a year because the theater director picked stuff that did not play in any way, shape, or form. And that also leads to these problems, because sometimes, these directors would pick plays that were very popular, and the 1920s were very racist, and very problematic. And Hallie Flanagan wanted something that was both wanted theater that was challenging. She wanted to give theater directors the opportunity to pick plays that fit the marketplace where they were, but she also didn't want reactionary theater either. And so what starts to happen is there's more centralized control over what plays are cataloged and available for theaters to produce. In the archives, the Library of Congress, there are these amazing play reader reports. So people working for the FTP in DC would get plays. They were plays that were suggested to them, and they would go through and read through the plays, offer their suggestions. As a cultural historian, this is like Shangri La, to me, I love this stuff so much. And then they'll approve those plays, even then, there's still issues with those plays, especially with theater units that were focused on hiring Black workers, portrayals of women sometimes are highly problematic in these plays. So to answer your question, it starts very decentralized and becomes more centralized as the FTP goes on.

Kelly  26:55  
You focus in your book on the comedies or some of the comedies that are being produced. Could you talk a little bit about why you were looking specifically at comedies, and then you sort them into kind of genres of comedy. And so you know, how you sort of made those sortings and figured out how you wanted to look at these and analyze them?

Paul Gagliardi  27:16  
Why comedy? Comedy has always been something that's been fascinating to me. And I think I've heard this said by guests on your show quite a lot. Like there's, there's also like, this is the avenue I can I can research something. It was very startling to me that there wasn't a whole lot written about the comedies during during this time. And I guess intellectually too, it was interesting, because comedy is often the least discussed or kind of dismissed. In critical in academic circles is it's always the lowest common denominator. There's what makes people laugh. You know, I have, I have three kids. And what makes my kids laugh is often the lowest common denominator, it's fart jokes. It's someone getting hit in the face with a baseball. It and there's something to that I'm not gonna lie. The Three Stooges are so funny to me. So, no, I'm not being elitist about it. But, but there was something that I, I think, for me, like, these comedies were popular, and it's also, you often will come across this, this critique of comedy of the 1930s is all about just letting people forget about their troubles. And I think that's kind of dismissive in some ways, because it's true to be to be absolutely sure. Like if I watch the Marx Brothers for two hours, I might forget about, you know, my economic deprivation, right in 1935. But to me, there was what I started to see in reading these comedies was there was more there. I was very shocked at how many of these comedies were dealing with work, for instance, which just seems completely strange to me, right? That it that comedy often is dismissive and incongruous to social or it deals with social issues, but often is engaged in incongruous reactions for audiences, like what you're expecting to happen doesn't happen. And yet, these weren't farces necessarily. These weren't slapstick narratives. They weren't they were often very realistic in their structure, and then being produced by the federal government, which is very concerned with getting people back to work, and, and here are these comedies that are offering like critiques of labor in a lot of ways. How I came to group them together was I just started honestly seeing these patterns between these plays, like there are a lot a lot of plays focused on theatrical labor. There were a lot of plays focused on the ideas of chance. There were a lot of plays focused on middle class life and there were a lot of plays focused on con artists comedies. And again, I wish I could say it was like some divine like high labor on my part, there was just I started to see these patterns and why these groups of plays became so popular in the 30s is really what I started doing interrogate.

Kelly  30:13  
You mentioned that some of these plays,a fair number of them are actually from the 20s. And they're reflecting in some ways, maybe an earlier mindset, or maybe earlier thinking about both what's funny, but also views of labor, so before the market crashes. Could you talk about how that plays out, when you know, these, these actors in these theatre companies are taking what maybe comes from an earlier time and then making it work for an audience in 30s?

Paul Gagliardi  30:45  
That's part of what was so fascinating to me. Again, because a lot of these theaters are given some leeway as to what they can produce, their natural tendency is to go with what was popular, right? There's a playwright, whose work appears a lot in my book named George Kelly, who is kind of like the big one of the major players of Broadway in 19 1920s. And what's interesting is his plays in the 1920s tend to be read just as comedy and these goofy characters that aren't serious. There's not really a tragic element to them. And that's how, you know, those plays are read by the press, and typically audiences during that time. After the depression, what become, I always, I guess the easiest way to say that is is the classic Mel Brooks line, right? Comedy is, or tragedy is when I trip over a banana, I'm paraphrasing here. Tragedy is when I slip on a banana peel. Comedy is when you slip on a banana peel and fall into an open sewer and die. And, and yet, it's it's once we start to realize, I think for audiences, or when audiences of the 30s started to realize that these characters, like in a play like "The Showoff," and "The Showoff" is focused on this character, Aubrey Piper, who is a braggart and kind of lazy and is fascinated with get rich, quick schemes. In the 20s, that's funny. In the 30s, everyone's gone through the stock market crashes. They've gone through the inflation bubble, bursting. They've gone through the the creditors, and everything, this character was kind of like satirical in the 20s becomes a tragic figure in the 30s. And he's not nearly as funny to depression audiences. And actors and directors kind of kind of play that up a little bit. There's a version of the show off, done by one of the Black units of the FTP, and they change the dialogue. They make him more central, I think it's a production in New York City and Heartland heartland. And there, he kind of works as a figure of  Black culture, but also like he's not as he's more sympathetic in some ways, right? And you see that throughout these plays is, in 1920s context, the characters are satirical and fun. We can make fun of them. In the 1930s, they're more sympathetic, and people recognize them through their own experiences.

Kelly  33:23  
I think it's interesting, several times when you have like notes from the readers that you mentioned, that people choosing, you know, with, these be good plays and stuff, that they're often looking for things that are apolitical. But art is never apolitical, you know. Even comedy, even slapstick comedy is not necessarily apolitical. So how did that play out? And was it different in different you mentioned that were regions in different parts of the country? Or if it was like a Black theater versus, you know, white theater, like it was, was the political implication or the political reception of these things different?

Paul Gagliardi  34:03  
Oh, for sure. And I wish I could summarize as quickly as I could, but it really depends on who's staging it, who the audience is, and where it's being produced. There's a there's a play I'm very fond of, it's called, "A Moral Entertainment." And it centers on a theater troupe in Puritan New England, who is starving, and they run afoul of a local Puritan magistrate. And in essence, like they're forced to give up acting or be, you know, put put in stocks or put to death in some cases. And I think that the play is very satirical, and I think it in its own way kind of goes to what I mentioned earlier, this sort of conflict over how theatrical labor operates and what kind of plays the FTP is doing because the Puritans are all around us. Like if we do stuff that's too political, were the agencies going to be threatened? When it appears in Massachusetts, the audiences hate it, because they don't see that comedy that's political, that political argument. I think they just kind of see, they're making fun of our Puritan heritage. And that's the thing that's hard about these plays is once they're once they go out into the ether, it's very hard to control, you know, the content, so to speak. There are other plays, and I found this, I found this throughout my research is a play in San Diego. California was very much a conservative hotbed in the 1930s, and audiences would either see a play as kind of reinforcing, like conservative ideals. But there was also audiences that saw like, I think there's, I think there's something going on here that we might be missing. It's all over the place. And it totally changes on context, and where the play is being produced. A lot of Black, were called the Negro units and Black performers and plays that are aimed for Black audiences, the same dynamic occurs where some audiences will see a play and see it being really subversive and really critical of white culture. Other Black audiences would just see it as is kind of reinforcing white stereotypes of Black America. And that, to me is what makes these plays incredibly fascinating is there's just a very, there's like, there's a debate among audiences as to what the political content of these plays are. Because again, as you said, oftentimes audiences also see them as just like comedies. Right? They're just trying to make me laugh. But many audiences are very in tune to something else being said by these plays.

Kelly  36:53  
And then ultimately, the Federal Theater Project doesn't last that long. It's I think, about four years. And, you know, however much they tried to bring good into the country, however much they tried to be apolitical, eventually Congress says, "Whoa, whoa, what's going on here?" So can you talk a little bit about the end, you know, how, how this is eventually, you know, just just too much for the government to support?

Paul Gagliardi  37:17  
The Federal Theater Project, in some ways, was always on a very short leash, you know, in I'm not sure, in hindsight, and this is almost 100 years in hindsight that was ever necessarily going to work as it was, it was structured. It was an almost immediately a lightning rod of criticism. And some of that definitely is the we don't want to pay for, for acting. Right. It's part of the FTP as part of a group called Federal One, and there's, you know, arts projects and writing projects, and I think those were more acceptable to people because they're tangible. Theatre is ephemeral, right? If you don't see the play, you've, you've missed the play, right? You've missed the labor. So there's always that tension to it. We don't want to pay for something that is only going to you know, adhere to the elites or people in big cities. So like the regional politics play into it. There's also if we have the idea of the New Deal as communists and socialists, the new the FTP doesn't really help that because there are a lot of plays that are very left leaning, that are very socialist. Hallie Flanagan, herself had gone to Europe in the 1920s, and studied extensively in Russia and really felt Russian theater was should American theater should adopt Russian theatrical techniques. A lot of plays were directed at the economic situation of the era. A lot of the plays did operate as sort of New Deal propaganda, they promoted New Deal agencies, overtly or subversively. So they become a very easy target for the Republican Party. They become a very easy target for the press. A headline is, is much more interesting if you say there is a play about beavers that is a parable for communism. There was one called "The Revolt of the Beavers." That plays better. You get more mileage out of that, than here's a painting done by an artist in a post office in you know, small town Wisconsin, right. So the FTP is always under attack. I feel bad for Hallie Flanagan because she has to deal with everyone underneath her kind of undermining her at all points, but also constantly being the target of political attacks and budgets being slashed, and, and everything. So the writing was on the wall for the FTP, and there are congressional hearings in the 1939, where, you know, they're calling out all these plays for being communist.There's a play I adore called, "Help Yourself," which is centered on a guy walking into a bank without any banking training and working at the bank. And it's called out in congressional testimony as like you're, you're saying capitalism is bad. And when the 1940 budget comes, the Republicans have taken over the house in '38. You know, it's going to be one of the programs cut. It's just an it's the easiest one to get rid of, in some ways, because it has been the target of so much criticism.

Kelly  40:35  
As a longtime theater lover, and the parent of a theater lover, what could have been if it had kept going? 

Paul Gagliardi  40:43  
Yeah, and it's funny, because like, Hallie Flanagan like, is thinking about ways by the end of like, what she would do differently. And you often think, like, could the FTP exist today? And I'm very skeptical of it. I just don't think we have the political will to, to do that. But I do think it could work. I do think that if you took the lessons of, you know, what the FTP did wrong? Maybe, then I think you could have a National Theatre in the same vein and balance that what works in in Peoria versus what works in New York City. I think I think it could happen. Is it going to happen? No, I am not. I'm saying not taking that bet in any way, shape, or form. But I it's, and I guess, to me, it's like this. It's a sad little moment in American theatre history. But also, like this pinnacle of American theatre history too, like, this is the time we had it. We had federally subsidized theatre that was doing radical things, even with their comedies. And, and it's only four years, but it was a hell of a four years.

Kelly  41:53  
So, I would love if you tell listeners, how they can get this exquisitely named book, "All Play and No Work."

Paul Gagliardi  41:59  
Thank you. Thank you. That was my dissertation advisor title years ago, and it's perfect. And I hate him for it. Because it's so good. You can buy my book from Temple University Press or other online retailers. And I encourage people to try to get it through their local bookstore, because we need to support local bookstores.

Kelly  42:19  
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about?

Paul Gagliardi  42:22  
I think for me, and, and I guess this is something that keeps eating at me for lack of a better word. You know, I want us to also kind of just very broadly think about how we think of work, you know, that work is not as sort of universal. Like we will all come to work from, from different different different ways. And work is changing. And work has become, in some ways, far more consuming of us than even the 1930s, in some in some regards. I guess that was part of the reason I wrote the book, in hindsight was I want us to think about where work is going. And you know, how we celebrate work in its own way. I'm not I'm not encouraging people to become con artists or to gamble their, their financial security away as several of the characters in the plays of this book do. But like we celebrate those those folks in in many regards. And I think there's there's a fine line between celebration of certain approaches to that and celebrating the more nefarious and dangerous elements to that. And also, like, I always think of this example from my youngest who said, several months ago, I was I was taking him and the dog for a walk. And I said, "We can't go out too long, because I have to go back and work," and this was a Saturday. He's like, "What do you mean? Why are you working? You don't work on Saturday." I said, "I do work on Saturday." And I guess just I want to start our larger conversation about just where we place work in in society and how work is going to have to change and if we're not gonna have the Federal Theatre, maybe we should push for different conceptions of work. So that's my little radical, you know, take on this.

Kelly Therese Pollock  44:09  
I love it. Well, Paul, thank you so much. This was it was great fun to learn about the Federal Theater Project and it's been a fantastic conversation.

Paul Gagliardi  44:17  
Thank you, Kelly. I've I've loved the podcast for a long time and this was this was a thrill. So thank you for having me on.

Teddy  45:03  
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