Orson Welles, Vol I (39 page)

The leader of the revolt
in the Group was the actor and director Robert Lewis. He prepared and read a paper on what he considered to be its limitations: ‘I say that Group productions lack music, colour, rhythm, movement – all those other things in the theatre besides psychology, and all the things which in theatrical form clarify and make important one’s psychology – not that colour, movement, rhythm etc are not present
one by one on our stage – they are, but they are not fused into a single style which in each production is peculiar to the expression of the talent of the particular author.’
²⁹
There were limits, evidently, to what could be achieved democratically. In a piece in
Theatre Arts Monthly
on the rise of the director, Edith Isaacs, one of the clearest-headed theatrical analysts of the day wrote: ‘twenty
years ago, the director was an apologetic person whose business it was to evoke a harmony between an egotistic actor and a stubborn playwright. Tact and patience and humility were his chief requisites for success. Today he is the guiding, unfolding, unifying spirit in the theatre. The greatest men in the theatre today are all directors.’ She was speaking of the European theatre. In a lengthier
analysis of the American scene, John Mason Brown summed up (in 1930) the current crop of directors: ‘the painstaking love of detail and the infinite patience of Mr Belasco’s work … the less certain but far more imaginative contribution of such a man as Mr Hopkins … skillful but unobtrusive practitioners such as Guthrie McClintic, Gilbert Miller, Dudley Digges; uncanny showmen: the three Georges:
Abbott, Cohan, Kaufmann. Jed Harris’s jubilant toughness; Mamoulian’s gift in handling crowds’.
³⁰
Despite all this talent, something, he feels, is missing. ‘The touch of our directors is varied, even if their virtuosity is small. It is in the scope of their ambitions rather than the limits of their power that our American directors differ from their European contemporaries. Their talents are of
a lesser kind, and their originality is less marked. Unlike the
directors who dominate the stage of the continent they feel that their first duty is the intention of the author rather than the interpretation they may bring to it.’

Enter Orson Welles. With his first professional production he created, at a stroke, and for better or for worse, the ‘concept production’. It was Houseman who offered
him the job, but the framework for it was something much bigger than both of them; one of the most extraordinary events in theatre history, in fact: the creation of the Federal Theatre Project. Orson Welles’s achievements in the theatre of the thirties can only be understood in the light of it.

T
HE FEDERAL
Theatre Project was an offshoot of Roosevelt’s second New Deal programme. The first New Deal programme (1933–5) had initiated various relief schemes, one of which included a scheme for unemployed theatre workers; but the second programme (1935–9), including the creation of Harry Hopkins’s Works Progress Administration, sought to implement a much wider-ranging
policy of productive redeployment. ‘For the first time the skills of the worker and his self-respect became the cornerstone of a relief programme,’ write O’Connor and Brown in their history of the project,
Free, Adult and Uncensored
. There was a Federal Music Project, a Federal Art Project, and a Federal Writers’ Project in addition to the Theatre Project; together they employed 40,000 people.
As head of the Theatre Project, Hopkins appointed, in the face of considerable opposition, a forty-five-year-old theatre academic, Hallie Flanagan, head of the Experimental Theatre at Vassar Women’s College, and author of a survey of the European theatrical revolution,
Shifting Scenes
. Hopkins’s instinct was sound, not to say inspired. She brought to the job a sinewy strength, undentable enthusiasm
and a very clear brain; but the quality above all that she contributed was vision, and it is that which transformed the Project from a practical and a useful undertaking into a crusade whose generosity of spirit and breadth of purpose still has the power to move.

From the start she insisted that, though ‘the arts projects were being set up to deal with physical hunger, was there not another
form of hunger with which we could rightly be concerned, the hunger of millions of Americans for music, plays, pictures, books?’
¹
The Theatre Project would bring jobs to as many out-of-work artists as possible, but the opportunity would be seized to create a national network of easily accessible theatres in places where there had been none before, for people who had never dreamed of attending
one. At a time like the present, when the notion of state support for the performing arts is being quietly dropped even in those countries where it has from time immemorial been an unspoken assumption,
her vision is especially moving. ‘Belief in the theory that the work of the artists was a part of the national wealth America could not afford to lose, belief in the new pattern of life this work
could create for many people – these were the passionate affirmations underlying the alternate despair and laughter of those gargantuan days.’ The size of the task never seemed to trouble her. What she was proposing was the establishment of a national health service of the theatre arts – to benefit audience and performers in equal measure.

The range of work that she sponsored is astonishing:
in some cases she sought to revitalise an ailing branch of the performance arts (the circus, for example), in others to create something entirely new, like the theatre of the blind in Omaha. There were, across the country, vaudeville projects, and variety projects; there was a special division for marionettes. Educational projects were part of every production; old and young artists were brought
together in apprentice-master relationship. ‘Perhaps,’ as O’Connor and Brown say, ‘the real measure of the Federal Theatre should not be the now-famous names, but rather the thousands of unknown people in rural towns, CCC camps, and city parks who saw live theatre for the first time, and the hundreds of people who had given their lives to the theatre, who were able to end or continue their careers
with pride, doing what they were trained to do and did well.’

At the time, there was immense scepticism on all sides. The Project was seen as a) utopian and naive, a further waste of taxpayers’ money (boon-doggling, in the expressive phrase of the period); b) liable to draw people away from the legitimate, unsubsidised theatre, since prices were pegged at 75c or less; c) in danger of fostering
tenth-rate work, since only the unemployed were being used, and good actors were never unemployed for long, were they? Above all, the Project was perceived, like the New Deal itself, as another form of ‘creeping socialism’. If the theatre couldn’t survive without government aid, then too bad; let it go to the wall. This perception was reinforced by the nature of much of what was produced: Hallie
Flanagan didn’t bother to conceal her conviction that ‘the theatre must become conscious of the implications of the changing social order, or the changing social order will ignore, and rightly, the implications of the theatre’.
²
Every FTP show had something to contribute to the national debate; it was a truly public theatre. Plays by the people, of the people, for the people; being an actor, a
writer or a director did not stop you from being a citizen.

For Hallie Flanagan, the Federal Theatre was a part of ‘the tremendous rethinking, redreaming and rebuilding of America. Our
people are one, not only with the musicians playing symphonies in Federal orchestra; with writers recreating the American scene; with artists compiling from the rich and almost forgotten past “The Index of American
Design”; but they are one also with thousands of men building roads and bridges and sewers; one with doctors and nurses giving clinical aid to a million destitute men, women and children; one with workers carrying travelling libraries into desolate areas; one with scientists studying mosquito control and reforestation and swamp drainage and soil erosion. What has all this to do with the theatre?’
she asked, and then ringingly answered herself: ‘It has everything to do with the Federal Theatre. For these activities represent a new frontier in America, a frontier against disease, dirt, illiteracy, unemployment, despair, and at the same time against selfishness, special privilege and social apathy.’

There were plays about syphilis, and about housing, about the conditions of the agricultural
industry, the history of labour unions, and public ownership of utilities. There was a marionette play about careless driving (
Death Takes the Wheel
); even the children’s plays were socially conscious. Of
Revolt of the Beavers
, Brooks Atkinson wrote in
The New York Times
: ‘Mother Goose is no longer a rhymed escapist; she has been studying Marx.’
³
Flanagan was very firm about the political neutrality
of the Project, but there was no mistaking the progressive – as Gassner would say, the leftist – bias of the great majority of the work. For precisely this reason, it would not be tolerated for long. The rumblings started very early; when the time was ripe, the Project had made enough enemies on the right for it to disappear virtually overnight.

But in 1935, heaven was still there for the
storming. Not that it was easy. The alliance of the arts with public services was an uncomfortable one. ‘Imagine an organisation producing in a season nearly as many plays as all the commercial theatres on Broadway,’
⁴
wrote the former head of production services for the FTP. ‘On top of that, imagine that organisation being required constantly to adapt itself to the same rules and regulations set
down primarily for engineering projects. Then imagine those rules and regulations enforced by people completely without a knowledge of the theatre and theatre practice – and you have precisely the position of the FTP.’ Flanagan herself gave an example of the failure of the organisation to grasp the nature of its tasks: a theatre which had spent the entire rehearsal period trying to secure a loaf
of bread for each performance of a projected run of thirty, received, on the first night, thirty loaves.

In view of the scale of the operation, and the suddenness of its development, she and her lieutenants were none the less miraculously successful in achieving their goals. The New York Project presented problems of its own; inevitably. It became ‘the best and the worst of Federal Theatre.
It presented the widest range of productions, talents, taste, attitudes, races, religious and political faiths. It was everything in excess. In short, it reflected its city …’ New York had six Project theatres, and a number of first-time ventures: a bureau of research and publication; a Federal Theatre Magazine; the Living Newspaper, in a way the most famous and characteristic of all the Project’s
enterprises; and the Negro Theatre Unit.

John Houseman was appointed to run this; and he, naturally, approached Orson Welles to direct a play for him. Houseman’s appointment was not without controversy: within the black acting community there were distinct factions, some of whom (notably the former members of the now defunct Lafayette Players) believed that the director of the unit should
be black, while others (the intellectuals, teachers, social workers and so on) believed that, realistically speaking, ‘a white man was needed to guide the project through a white man’s world’.
⁵
Among the latter was the great black actress, Rose McLendon, star of
Porgy
and Langston Hughes’s
Mulatto
. If the leader of the Negro Theatre project were to be black, she was the natural choice; and she,
having admired Houseman’s skills as co-ordinator on
Four Saints in Three Acts
, in which she had appeared, nominated him as the person she felt most likely to make a go of things – at which point, she died of the cancer with which she had struggled for years, and Houseman was appointed, unopposed; endorsed, in fact, from beyond the grave. He ran the Negro Theatre project, in the not unadmiring
words of a black colleague, ‘like a colonial governor’.
⁶

He surrounded himself with talent. His black team consisted of the writers Countee Cullen, Zora Hurston Neale; the dancer Clarence Yates; the designer Perry Hopkins; Eubie Blake, Joe Jordan, Leonard de Paur, musicians. All of them were already distinguished in their respective spheres, and as a result of the Federal Theatre Project,
became part of the mainstream of the theatre. White colleagues included Houseman’s friend and now house-mate Virgil Thomson, Abe Feder, the lighting designer of
Panic
, and a new colleague, the designer Nat Karson who had created sensational extravaganzas at Radio City Music Hall. All were paid exactly what Houseman himself was paid: $23.86 per week. As assistants, he chose Carlton Moss – ‘bitter,
but brilliantly
clear about “the negro mind”’
⁷
– Edward Perry, his stage manager from
Four Saints in Three Acts
, and, as his secretary, the ‘plump, pink-cheeked, bouncing Jewish virgin’ Augusta Weissberger. For the rest – for the personnel of the unit, actors, stage-hands, set-builders – he held open recruitment sessions. The result was pandemonium. Just as with any other division of the Project,
the Negro Unit was inundated with applications from people who, desperate to work, were often only vestigially connected with the theatre – if at all. Since so many black performers were driven to pursue their careers in a sort of twilight zone out of the professional mainstream, it was especially difficult to determine whose application was legitimate, and whose was not. Carlton Moss, with his
bitter brilliant clarity, was particularly ruthless in weeding out the pretenders.

The arrival of the Negro Unit in Harlem was greeted with controversy. On the one hand, any activity, any sign of hopeful life, any possibility of employment and confidence, was to be welcomed in that desperate quarter, so recently the scene of riots. With a population 80 per cent of whom were out of work, endemic
prostitution, gambling and bootlegging, and with rents, as Houseman observes, ‘double those for the equivalent white dwelling’, it was a very different place from the Renaissance Harlem of even ten years before, where there had existed for the first time in America a black community of artists, intellectuals and entrepreneurs – businessmen, property owners, responsible politicians – a life unforgettably
recorded by the camera of the great black photographer James Van Der Zee. This black Montmartre and Champs Elysées rolled into one had disappeared pretty well as suddenly as it had arisen, a casualty of the depression; and no amount of ‘momentary tranquillisation by the New Deal Relief’ could compensate for the loss of dignity and self-respect. There remained, of course, the clubs and
the dives, frequented by down-there-on-a-visit whites; Harlem was not yet a no-go area. But the place was seething with anger and despair.