(no subject)

[skygiants]

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.

Comments

[ambyr]

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!

You may possibly enjoy Arthur Miller's Salesman in Beijing (my review), in which he diaries his experience directing a local production of Death of Salesman in 1983 Beijing as part of a cultural exchange program? It is more about art as a way of speaking cross-culturally than art as history, though.

[skygiants]

Hah, at this point, the 1980s pretty much count as history anyway, which makes Arthur Miller a fascinating primary source. But that aside, art as a way of speaking cross-culturally is also deeply relevant to my interests, so. :D Thanks for the rec - I will totally be checking this out!

[ambyr]

Let me know what you think, if you do :-).

[ceitfianna]

Another one to add to my to read pile as this looks like my kind of history.

[skygiants]

Definitely do - I think you would really like it!

[ceitfianna]

I've added it to my to read list, I love having that option on Goodreads, much simpler than creating lists.

Oh and I'm really enjoying the book I'm reading about Death and the Civil War-This Republic of Suffering. I'm going slow through it because its depressing but fascinating. Also I have a copy of Code Name Verity that I'm going to read during break.

I'll be on the east coast for break and would love to try and connect at some point.

[skygiants]

CODE NAME VERITY OH MAN SO GOOD. Brace yourself for the ride, but, I mean, it's Elizabeth Wein, you know this.

And that would be awesome! My roommates are down in Atlanta at the moment, but they get back on the 26th (I think) and I know we'd all love to see you!

[ceitfianna]

I know, I'm hoping to have a day to get lost in it and then go read something cozy after.

My break is nice and long starting this weekend and I don't have school again until January 8th, so I'm considering maybe heading up to NYC after the New Year.

[skygiants]

Sure! Shoot us an email, we can talk plans.

[newredshoes]

I'm so glad you enjoyed it! I kind of suspected you would. :-D

(I still love the idea of the Living Newspapers!)

[skygiants]

I LOVED IT. Thank you for the rec, it was perfectly tailored to me! :D

(Me too! It's such a nifty concept, and it's also really cool to see what issues were big enough at the time to actually make it into the Living Newspapers. Like, theater about congressional bills is comparatively rare!

I want to ask what your number one play to time travel back and see would have been, but given it's been longer since I've read it than since you have, that might not be fair . . .)

[lizbee]

THAT SOUNDS AMAZING. Hang on, the Kindle edition is only $2.99. PURCHASED LIKE A BOSS.

[skygiants]

LIKE A BOSS! \o/ Let me know what you think!

[surexit]

That Haiti play sounds particularly fascinating, but seriously, this book sounds so interesting.

[skygiants]

It's SUPER FASCINATING. There was actually a ton of stuff in there about black theater at the time, and how that interacted with the Federal Theater Project in a number of different ways - Hallie Flanagan actually seems to have been pretty committed to anti-racism, and one of the reasons the Project eventually came under fire was because one white actress threw a hissy fit when a black actor asked her out, and when she complained everyone else in the program was like "uh . . . he seems nice? He has a perfect right to ask you out?" So then, since no one was listening to her, she went and complained to the House Un-American Activities Committee instead.

[zopyrus]

Ahh! My ex-roommate wrote her undergrad thesis on Hallie Flanagan and I love her to pieces. Quinn's book is totally fantastic.

If you liked Quinn's blend of art + cultural history, can I recommend Steven Watson's "Prepare for Saints"? It's about the opera, "Four Saints in Three Acts," written by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson (one of the composers for the FTP), but it's also about the gay/theatrical/musical subcultures in 1920s New York and Boston.

[saelind]

Oh my goodness how did I forget "Prepare for Saints"!! Seconding that rec :D

[skygiants]

Oh man, that sounds like exactly what I'm looking for - in addition to being about cultural theater and history, I also have reasons to be building up my knowledge of the 1920s at this point. Thank you so much, I will definitely be checking this out!

[saelind]

Apologies in advance--this is going to be a long comment, and will possibly use a lot of all-caps.

FURIOUS IMPROVISATION ACTUALLY CHANGED MY LIFE. Two and a half years ago a friend gave it to me for my birthday, with the note "you love U.S. history and you love theater, read this." And I completely fell in love with Hallie Flanagan, and the FTP, and couldn't get enough of learning about this era and these plays and these people. And it's just...such a well-crafted book, and as you say, it's such a perfect presentation of art AS history.

After reading this book I wrote a paper on Hallie and One-Third of a Nation (they have a lot of primary-source material at the New York City Performing Arts Library), and received an undergrad research grant to go to the FTP archives at George Mason University and Hallie's personal papers at Vassar. I wound up writing my senior thesis on Hallie Flanagan and her pre-Federal Theater career at the Vassar Experimental Theater--I argued that the types of shows she put on there and her vision/philosophy for the Vassar Experimental Theater had a HUGE impact on how she ran the FTP.

Tl;dr, to put it mildly, I REALLY LOVE HALLIE FLANAGAN A LOT and now know a kind of frightening amount about her professional and personal life.

I also did the kind-of-creepy thing and emailed Susan Quinn, telling her how much I loved her book and asked her a couple of super-specific questions re:my thesis, and wound up meeting her super briefly in NYC--she was SO nice and gracious.

So: recommendations!! I HIGHLY suggest you check out Arena if you haven't yet--it's the book that Hallie wrote chronicling the entire FTP. It's a huge resource of practically every play they put on, and, being Hallie, she writes beautifully and often hilariously :D. Voices from the Federal Theater is a compilation of interviews with various actors, writers, and directors on the Project--I can't remember for sure, but I think they might have one with Houseman???? The Cultural Front by Michael Denning is a bit dense, and far more academic than Furious Improvisation, but it's also a really great account of what he calls the "laboring" of American culture in the 1930s.
If you want to learn more about Hallie specifically, I do also recommend her biography-- Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the American Theater by Joanne Bentley. Bentley's actually Flanagan's stepdaughter, which is both a blessing and a curse when you're reading the bio--it's a very personal touch, with stuff you might not have gotten had it been written by a non-family member, but her biases also clearly show through. BUT it is the best chronicle out there of her life and her plays.

And I have a lot more recs, but I feel like that's more than enough for now! If you DO want more, though, I've got my entire bibliography from my thesis :D.

ALSO THE BATHROOM INCIDENT WILL NEVER STOP BEING THE BEST THING. the exact same thing happened to a friend of mine a few weeks ago and I had to physically restrain myself from saying "y'know, the same thing once happened to Hallie Flanagan..." I don't think it was what he needed to hear at the time :P

p.s. There's also a biography of Marc Blitzstein that Oxford University Press just came out with!!! I bought it as my holiday gift to myself and have only read 50 pages, but so far HIGHLY RECOMMENDED :D.

[skygiants]

Oh my gosh, THIS IS AMAZING. And so exciting! (Man, I was interning at NYPL's Performing Arts Library just last semester, I kind of wish I'd read this book before then so I could have used the opportunity to poke my nose into some of her stuff.) That sounds like an incredibly rewarding and fascinating paper to research and write.

I will definitely be checking out all these recommendations -- I think Voices from the Federal Theater was on my list already but I hadn't heard of the rest of these! This is a fair amount to start with but I may well be coming back and asking you for more at some point. >.>

I WAS SO EXCITED WHEN I GOT TO THE BATHROOM INCIDENT. I don't understand how anyone could not need to hear that, I desperately wish someone had told me "the same thing once happened to Hallie Flanagan" when I accidentally trapped myself in my apartment a year or two back!