LEST WE FORGET HALLIE FLANAGAN
(August 27, 1890 - July 23, 1969)

National Director of the Federal Theatre during its entire life (1935-1939). She was a pioneer in college theatre work, head of the Vassar Experimental Theatre and later served as dean of Smith College and director of its drama department.

From a speech delivered at the national office of the Federal Theatre Project at the first meeting of its regional directors, she inspired her audience with these prophetic words. (Oct. 5, 1935)

"We live in a changing world: man is whispering through space, soaring to the stars in ships, flinging miles of steel and glass into the air.  Shall the theatre continue to huddle in a painted box? The movies, in their kaleidoscopic speed and juxtaposition of external objects and internal emotions are seeking to find visible and audible expression for the tempo and psychology of the time.  The stage too must experiment--with ideas, with psychological relationships of men and women, with speech and rhythm forms, with dance and movement, with color and light---or it must--and should--become a museum product."

BEFORE THE COMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES

By the autumn of 1938, a major miracle to save the Federal Theatre Project from its critics in Congress was not forthcoming.  Over the summer, the project had come under congressional attack, instigated by Martin Dies's House Committee which tried to show that Ms. Flanagan, because of her early interest in Russian theatre, was a Communist and that some of those employed in the FTP were also Communists.  She testified; others also defended the project.

The tiny soft-spoken redhead from Vassar College persisted but was denied a final statement; her brief in defense of the project was not printed, as promised, in the published reports of the hearings. By the simple expedient of not renewing its appropriation, Congress shut down the Federal Theatre Project on June 30, 1939, giving its director only a month to wind up its affairs.
             (Resource:  Notable Women in the American Theatre. 1989)  Fran Hassencahl

FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT by Hallie Flanagan  (November, 1935)
           "The Federal Theatre Project is based on the belief that there is intelligence, skill, experience and enthusiasm in the thousands of theatre people now on relief rolls, and in the hundreds of other theatre people who will cooperate with them.  It is based on a belief that this intelligence, experience and enthusiasm will swing in under a nationwide plan in which such elements of strength are needed.

           We need throughout America a number of theatres, experimental in nature, specializing in new plays of unknown dramatists, with an emphasis on local and regional material.  We need Negro theatres in Harlem, St. Louis, Alabama; vaudeville and specialty acts in connection with some of the great recreation centers where dance orchestras, recruited from ranks of unemployed musicians, will play for unemployed youth. We need a theatre adapted to new times and new conditions; a theatre which recognizes the presence of its sister arts, and of the movies and the radio, its neighbors and competitors, a theatre vividly conscious of the rich heritage of its past but which builds towards the future with new faith and imagination.

         These projects will be as various as the needs of the localities planning them, and the creative imagination of their directors.  Plans are under way for an Ibsen repertory theatre in Minneapolis; a traveling Shakespearean company in the Dakotas; a cycle of Restoration drama in a great university in the mid-west; historical and regional projects including a marionette theatre dealing with the local history of New York State; one for remodeling the oldest theatre in the United States to house presentations, in period, of the plays of the first theatrical seasons in America.

 Because it deals directly with human beings, the theatre, of all the arts, should be the most conscious of economic changes affecting human beings. Painters during the last few years have turned increasingly for subject matter and technique to industry and economics; William Lescaze writes: "The social scene and its implications dictate my architectural renderings"; Martha Graham in her new ballet, Panorama, presents "three themes of thought and action which are basically American," that is Puritan religious fanaticism, Negro exploitation and awakening social consciousness.  The theatre, however, aside from the rapidly developing left-wing group, has remained curiously oblivious to the changing social order. It is time that the theatre is brought face to face with the great economic problems of the day, of which unemployment is one...."
      (Excerpt from article in Theatre Arts Anthology, edited by Rosamond Gilder, Hermine Rich Isaacs, Robert M. MacGregor and Edward Reed.  Theatre Arts Books.  1948)

   
FOR MORE INFORMATION

Flanagan, Hallie.  Shifting Scenes of the Modern European Theatre. 1928
Flanagan, Hallie. Arena.  1940
Flanagan, Hallie.  Dynamo: The Story of a College Theatre  1943
Bentley, Joanne Davis.  Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the American Theatre.1988
Matthews, Jane DeHart. The Federal Theatre, 1935-1939: Plays, Relief, and Politics. 1967