Schwartz, an accomplished Broadway stage, film and television producer, examines the Federal Theatre, a Depression relief experiment of the Roosevelt administration, and its widespread influence on American arts and culture. Opening with an informative foreword by Robert Brustein, founding director of the Yale Repertory and American Repertory Theatres, the book follows the project's 1935 origins under the directorship of Hallie Flanagan with a series of dramas, musicals and vaudeville, to its 1939 demise, a result of the work of Rep. Martin Dies's congressional House Un-American Activities Committee. Schwartz shares interviews with former Federal Theatre actors, playwrights, directors, designers, producers, variety artists and dancers to present a distilled look at a creative peak in American culture, when the project employed over 13,000 jobless creative people in the arts, producing a continual series of innovative plays and other entertainment throughout the country. The book's strength emerges in these interviews, where Federal Theatre alumni such as actor Norman Lloyd, writer Studs Terkel, director Jules Dassin, producer John Houseman and playwrights Arthur Miller and Woodie King Jr. speak candidly of the cultural climate of that time. The theater project, though supposedly free of political influence, confronted a number of social issues in its productions and opened new horizons for black performers during the Jim Crow era. Although some of the interviews lack substance and depth by not addressing any of the shortcomings that opened the door for the theater's extinction, this is a fine survey of an important, though brief, project in American history.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"Chicago had a big Republic Steel plant on the Southside. Memorial Day in 1937, the strikers had a picnic on those grounds. There was fried chicken, potato salad, women, kids, songs, baseball, and there was some cops there. . . . Someone threw a stone, and you know cops started shooting, shot ten guys in the back, and they killed those ten guys….
Here’s where the Federal Theatre came in. Cradle Will Rock was about a steel strike. Cradle Will Rock was metaphorical, a pro-union play and was considered evolutionary and outrageous. So that’s the kind of stuff we used to do."—Studs Terkel

"I was in Macbeth. I played one of the witches. I also remember so many fights in the lobby about having people of black skin play Shakespearean shows. If it was a maid’s role go ahead, but if it was something like that from the classics. . . . Mr. Welles would raise hell if anybody was in the least nasty to me or tried to ignore me or tried to confuse me. Orson Welles was something else I’m telling you."—Rosetta LeNoire

"The Federal Theatre was a part of a movement in America to put people to work.  Among the unemployed people, as well as mechanics and metal workers, were actors and artists.  And this wonderful idea to put them to work in the cultural field was such a big moment for America—for education . . . for culture—that we still mourn the loss."—Jules Dassin

"The miracle of the Federal Theatre lies precisely in this—that from a drab and painful relief project there sprang the liveliest, most innovative, and most original theatre of its era."—John Houseman

"In the Depression, it was all but impossible for a Left writer not to think of the act of writing as a fulcrum for social change."—Arthur Miller