(no subject)

newredshoes recommended me Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times, about Hallie Flanagan and the WPA theater project in the 1930s.

I was already kind of in love with Hallie Flanagan and the WPA theater just from the movie Cradle Will Rock, which is an amazing film that features Orson Welles and Diego Rivera having constant artistic hissy fits, and Marc Blitzstein being haunted by the artistically critical ghost of Bertolt Brecht, and Hallie Flanagan's greatest put-down to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and which I will stop going on about now because I have already picspammed it extensively.

So this book was already deeply relevant to my interests, and the moreso because - in addition to being a history of the theater project and the WPA itself - it also served as a history of the 1930s, as told through the plays that people thought it was important to put on. This is incredibly fascinating to me. I love looking at the ways that people use art to interpret the stuff that's going on around them, I love thinking about art as history, and so this book was basically designed for me. If anyone has any recommendations for other books like this, please let me know!

I also now want a time machine just so I can break into a bunch of theaters and see ALL these plays, including but not limited to:

- the landmark production of Macbeth set in Haiti, with an all-black cast, directed by Orson Welles and starring Canada Lee, who had literally rescued Welles from being stabbed with a knife a few months before being cast in the production
- the "Living Newspaper" play about how not to get syphilis
- the dinner theater murder mystery that was written to get boys in the Civilian Conservation Corps into theater by casting popular guys from each Corps camp - "get the one everyone knows as the ladykiller to play the lead!"
- the opening night of pro-Union musical Cradle Will Rock that was sung by the actors from their seats in the audience, because they had been officially banned from performing onstage

But all this aside, I am now even more in love with Hallie Flanagan, because in addition to having an interesting and adventurous life in the theater and breaking glass ceilings in arts and administration, there was also a major incident in which she locked herself accidentally in the hotel bathroom, while wearing only a towel, when she was supposed to be at an important meeting for work.

Which is wonderful, because it means I AM NOT THE ONLY ONE! Hallie Flanagan and I, we clearly share a deep kinship on a spiritual level.