If the name Hallie Flanagan rings any bells in the Valley, it’s probably because the black-box theater at Smith College is named for her. She was chair of Smith’s theater department in the 1940s and ’50s, and the marquee credit honors her service not only to the college but to the nation.
She was director of the Federal Theatre Project in the Works Progress Administration, the audacious stimulus package that absorbed some of the economic blows of the Great Depression. The innovations and accomplishments of her brief tenure, and her passionate defense of the program in the face of right-wing attacks, constitute one of the great heroic stories of the American theater.
Flanagan is one of the historical figures represented in Mixed Relief, a new documentary play that “celebrates and juxtaposes,” in the words of director Linda McInerney, “the women of the WPA and a selection of contemporary women playwrights facing their own artistic and political challenges today.” McInerney is mounting a staged reading of the play at the Academy of Music next Thursday as part of the theater’s newly articulated goal of putting productions by and about women on the Academy’s stage.
The performance of Mixed Relief marks the next stage in the Academy’s reinvention of itself since it stopped being a first-run movie house and began emphasizing live performance. When the theater’s programming committee surveyed the performing arts landscape last year, they identified “gaps” in performance opportunity for artists—and availability for audiences—in three areas: children’s theater, dance and work by women. The kids’ program is already up and running, with a summertime musical theater workshop and a school-year series of educational performances. Dance programming is in the planning stage, and Mixed Relief initiates the push to bring women artists to center stage.
“At same time we were discussing this plan,” says McInerney, who is on the Academy’s board of directors, “Kathryn Bigelow won the Academy Award for The Hurt Locker—the first woman director ever to win an Oscar.” She pauses, registering surprise. “Ever? I couldn’t believe it. We take for granted that we live in a world where huge progress for women has been made.”
But in fact, according to WomenArts, an organization that works for “empowerment, opportunity, and visibility for women artists,” representation by women in all aspects of show business—theater as well as film—has actually declined since the 1990s. Despite recent high-profile commercial successes by playwrights such as Sarah Ruhl, Yasmina Reza and Suzan-Lori Parks, a sizable majority of the plays performed around the country are written, produced and directed by men—and average twice as many men as women in their casts. A 2009 study found that there was a wide discrepancy in productions of scripts by men and women playwrights (an 8-to-1 ratio on Broadway, for example) and that plays featuring women protagonists are also less likely to reach the stage. For writers—and actors—of color, the situation is even grimmer.
“As a complacent creator, living in this area, I had no idea how enormously women have fallen behind,” McInerney says. “We decided to do something about it.”
The Academy’s board wanted to start by presenting existing works before expanding into producing original work. So executive director Debra J’Anthony set out to book a professional touring production of a play written by a woman. “I did some research,” she reports, “and I found none. None!”
Mixed Relief is the Academy’s response to that impasse: an in-house production, but low-key in terms of technical and budget requirements. It will be a staged reading featuring Valley actors and “personalities” portraying prominent figures of the past and present-day artists and arts advocates. The title recalls the unemployment “relief” rolls of the 1930s, the artists whose hardship was relieved by the WPA programs, and the mixed feelings Americans had and still have about government support of the arts.
Living Newspapers
When the Federal Theatre Project and Federal Writers’ Project were established in 1935, the WPA was already putting unemployed Americans back to work at jobs ranging from paving roadways to raising hydroelectric dams. The inspiration for the new programs came from the realization that, like construction workers, cultural workers were also out of work and “on relief.” The idea was to put skilled writers and theater professionals on the government payroll to create work that would entertain, inspire and educate Americans.
The Writers’ Project compiled chronicles of towns and regions, collected oral histories from all walks of life, and produced a series of American Guides to all 48 states. The Federal Theatre set up project sites across the country and mounted hundreds of shows, from vaudeville to Shakespeare. The FTP also produced a series of Living Newspapers, original productions that documented hot-button topical issues.
One-Third of a Nation, about the slum housing crisis, echoed President Roosevelt’s lament in the depths of the Depression that a third of the country was “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Power examined the controversy over the Tennessee Valley Authority’s hydroelectric project. It Can’t Happen Here, adapted from Sinclair Lewis’s novel, warned of the rise of fascism.
The progressive slant of many FTP productions drew criticism from the right. As political pressure tightened, the project trimmed its sails and became less freewheeling, but failed to satisfy those who saw the project as conclusive proof that the WPA and FDR’s New Deal were a communist plot. Called to testify before the fledgling House Committee on Un-American Activities—the infamous HUAC—Hallie Flanagan was grilled about visits she’d made to the Soviet Union during trips to observe European theaters at work. In 1939, four years after its ambitious launch, the Federal Theatre Project was shut down.
Mixed Relief is itself a kind of Living Newspaper, a multimedia collage of first-person narrative, period images, sound effects and a distinctly progressive point of view. The short play premiered last March on Swan Day, a new international “holiday” initiated by WomenArts as a kind of V-Day for women artists, celebrating their accomplishments and illuminating their struggles. Written collaboratively by New Shoe, a New York-based ensemble of women playwrights and directors, it was commissioned to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Federal Theatre Project and the WPA.
The play tells the story of that era, and compares it to our own, through the lives and example of some half-dozen women writers, including Eudora Welty, who worked as a WPA press agent and chronicled Southern life in stories and photographs; novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston; immigrant author Anzia Yezierska; and contemporary playwrights Kara Lee Corthron and Cassandra Medley. Yesterday and today are linked by Dorothy West, who came of artistic age in the Harlem Renaissance and, at age 90, appeared on Oprah after her novel The Wedding became a TV miniseries.
The experience of working for the Federal Writers’ Project is personified by Anzia Yezierska, who was toasted as “the Cinderella of the sweatshops” after Hollywood filmed her 1920 book Hungry Hearts, about immigrant life on the Lower East Side. But after a brief fling with fame, she slipped back into obscurity and poverty, and when the Writers’ Project was formed she jumped at the opportunity to join the WPA payroll “to get my typewriter out of the pawn shop.” She was put to work cataloguing all the trees in Central Park for the American Guide series.
The contemporary sequences juxtapose the political hurdles faced by the WPA’s arts projects and present-day fights over the National Endowment for the Arts, creating a kind of cross-generational conversation. Counterpointing the WPA stories, we hear the voice of Lyndon Johnson signing the bill creating the NEA and praising artists as “the creators and the keepers of our vision,” followed by Senator Jesse Helms complaining about the “obscene plays” funded by the Endowment and this neanderthal statement by Senator Slade Gorton: “Government shouldn’t fund art at all. Art should be free.”
The Academy’s production gathers a cast of local performers and arts activists, including Lisa Baskin as Anzia Yezierska, Terry Jenoure as Dorothy West, Priscilla Kane Hellweg as Eudora Welty, Carol Johnson as Hallie Flanagan, Andrea Hairston as Cassandra Medley, Itoro Udofia as Kara Lee Corthron, Jenny Ladd as playwright Wendy Wasserstein, and Sarah Buttenwieser as experimental theater artist Ruth Maleczech.
The words of several women arts advocates are also heard, including Eleanor Roosevelt (Ladd), Michelle Obama (Hairston) and Hillary Clinton (Rep. Ellen Story). There’s one man in the cast: Bill Dwight, as HUAC chairman Martin Dies.
The evening opens with testimony from three champions of women artists: WomenArts’ Martha Richards, who was one of the “founding mothers” of the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts; Latina poet and playwright Magdalena G?mez, recently named an NEA Master Artist; and musician, writer and educator Terry Jenoure, director of the UMass Augusta Savage Gallery.
The women’s theater series continues in March with Eurydice, by Sarah Ruhl, performed by Linda McInerney’s Old Deerfield Productions. Debra J’Anthony sees both these productions as “significant plays that send a message, by having women’s work on stage, that this work is important.”
Mixed Relief: Oct. 21, 7 p.m., $5/suggested donation, Academy of Music, 274 Main St., Northampton, (413) 584-9032, www.academyofmusictheatre.com.
