It was a talented and influential group of people who gathered at a small but consequential dinner party in New York City in early 1937.

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The host, Virgil Thomson, was a strikingly original composer, famous for Four Saints in Three Acts, a surrealistic operatic collaboration with writer Gertrude Stein. Thomson’s Romanian-born and English-educated friend and roommate, John Houseman, had codirected Thomson’s opera and was well on his way to becoming one of America’s leading producers, directors, actors, and teachers. Orson Welles was, at a mere 21 years of age, already a towering Broadway figure, fresh from his remarkable productions (with Houseman) of an all-black Macbeth set in Haiti and his adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. In the latter production, Welles directed and played the title role too. The 27-year-old actor Howard da Silva was at the dawn of a shining career in which he would win fame as Jud Fry in the original production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! and as Benjamin Franklin in the Broadway and film versions of the musical 1776, besides appearing in dozens of films and television programs.

Finally, there was Hallie Flanagan. She was, in Houseman’s words, ‘a small, forthright, enthusiastic lady with strong teeth, whose matted reddish hair lay like a wig on her skull and who seemed to take her vast responsibilities with amazing self-confidence and sang-froid.’ Hers is the one name likely to be unrecognized today, but she was undoubtedly the most powerful person at the table. This 46-year-old Iowan headed one of the more fascinating–and controversial–undertakings ever established by the United States government. It was called the Federal Theatre Project (FTP).

By the time of the dinner party, the Great Depression had gripped the United States for some seven years. Following his inauguration in 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had attempted to remedy the situation with a blizzard of agencies, reforms, and legislation. One of them was the Works Progress Administration (WPA), established in April 1935 and headed by Harry L. Hopkins, one of Roosevelt’s most trusted advisors. Its mission was to provide jobs for the unemployed by building highways, bridges, and public buildings; restoring forests; clearing slums; and providing rural electricity.

The WPA also created programs that commissioned public murals, brought opera to isolated towns, and produced state and regional travel guides. For out-of-work theater people, Hopkins devised the Federal Theatre Project, and in May 1935 he asked Flanagan, director of the highly regarded Experimental Theater at New York’s Vassar College, to take charge of it. Hopkins’ choice of Flanagan also may have been influenced by the fact that they both had grown up in the Iowa college town of Grinnell and had graduated from Grinnell College just a year apart.

With the FTP, Hopkins and Flanagan saw a chance to do more than provide work. They wanted to create a national network of 100 community theaters that would bring productions to communities around the country. Flanagan also wanted to present timely productions dealing with contemporary issues, topical presentations she called the ‘Living Newspaper.’ Above all, as Hopkins expressed it, the FTP would be ‘free, adult, and uncensored.’

Flanagan set to work creating regional centers in New York, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, and Los Angeles that would send out touring productions within their respective areas and establish smaller venues. By the middle of March 1936, the FTP had 11,000 workers and 22 producing centers reaching a weekly audience of about 150,000. Inevitably, Chicago, Los Angeles, and especially New York began to dominate the FTP. In some places there were few theatrical professionals to be found, but in New York 5,000 unemployed people swarmed the Eighth Avenue headquarters following the FTP’s launch.

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