American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work (28 page)

3. THE CURTAIN RISES

E
thiopia
was to have been the New York project’s first original production. The Negro Theatre filled the void with
Walk Together Chillun!
by Frank Wilson, a well-known black actor. Houseman didn’t like the play, but it was politically inoffensive; it opened to lukewarm reviews on February 5, 1936, and ran a month before modest audiences. Another New York unit mounted a poor production of
The Comedy of Errors
—so inept that Flanagan thought Shakespeare’s title could be applied across the board to all of the early New York productions. The worst of these laughable embarrassments, in her view, was
Jefferson Davis,
a biographical play forced on her by the Daughters of the Confederacy, who were sponsoring its southern tour.

But March saw quick improvement. That month, eight productions opened at the various New York project theaters and in community spot bookings, and they brought both crowds and reviews that ranged from decent to enthusiastic.
Everyman,
a noted fifteenth-century morality play, started traveling to schools and churches. The Tryout Theatre opened
Woman of Destiny,
and one of the Hollywood studios paid $25,000 for an option on the script.
Chalk Dust,
the first of the Experimental Theatre offerings, depicted bumbling teachers and high-handed administrators as a way of calling for reforms in public education. The Yiddish Theatre, another of the New York project’s units, opened
The Idle Man
to community spot bookings.
Conjur’ Man Dies,
a comedy mystery filled with inside jokes that black audiences appreciated, drew huge crowds at the Lafayette and rocked the house with laughter.
In Heaven and Earth
followed
A Woman of Destiny
at the Tryout Theatre and won critical applause. The poetry of T. S. Eliot’s
Murder in the Cathedral
at the Manhattan revived the 300-year-old story of Archbishop Thomas à Becket’s assassination at Canterbury Cathedral.

The Theatre Project was allowed only limited advertising, another of the rules designed to ease the commercial houses’ fear of competition. It could list its offerings only in the theater classifieds—no display ads—and only on Mondays, when theaters traditionally were dark. But Halsted Welles’s direction of
Murder
as “a kind of religious ritual” and Harry Irvine’s performance as Becket won rave reviews and word of mouth. The buzz, plus the fact that it was a limited run, made it the hottest ticket in town. Well-heeled Broadway crowds snapped up the 50-cent and $1 tickets. So did scalpers, who resold them for going Broadway prices.

March also saw the first opening of a Living Newspaper. This time, the writers turned their attention homeward. Its title,
Triple-A Plowed Under,
referred to the Supreme Court decision invalidating the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, placed against the backdrop of recent farm history—the overproduction that had killed prices, land and equipment mortgaged to produce still more, drought and dust storms that had destroyed 50 million acres of farmland, the mortgage sales that evicted families from their farms and homes, and the middlemen who squeezed the farmers and jacked up prices to consumers that the AAA had tried to regulate. And with all this material to work with, the writers still took dramatic license, raising the stakes with a real-life tabloid tragedy.

A young mother, Dorothy Sherwood, was the centerpiece of this depression parable. Born in a small town in the West, she lost her mother at nine and spent the next seven years between orphanages, her itinerant father and his succession of wives, and Salvation Army foster homes, working as a household drudge and receiving “scattered and interrupted schooling.” At sixteen, she became a chorus girl in traveling shows in the Midwest. At nineteen, she met and married a stage electrician named Fred Sherwood, and at twenty bore a daughter. The family settled in Newburgh, New York, a small city on the Hudson River. Her husband worked in a movie theater, and they had a second child, a son who they named James. Then Fred Sherwood contracted tuberculosis. He was sent to a sanitarium, and his mother took their daughter, while Dorothy moved to a rooming house with her young son, leaving him in the landlady’s care while she waited tables in a restaurant. Fred Sherwood died in April 1935. Soon another man appeared who promised to take care of her and raise her son. He fixed a date that he would take her away, back to the West, and she packed, quit her job, gave notice to her landlady—but her savior never came. Weeks passed as she tried to find another job. She and the boy grew hungrier, and she could not pay the rent. On the morning of August 20, 1935, the landlady gave her notice of eviction. At around noon, she put two-year-old James into a stroller and walked three miles to nearby New Windsor, to a spot where a brook ran near the road.

Later that day, a Newburgh lieutenant looked up to see the twenty-seven-year-old woman standing at his desk, holding a toddler dressed in a clean suit. She held him out to the officer and said dully, “Here he is.”

“You killed him?” said the shocked lieutenant when he realized the boy was dead.

“Yes, I drowned him.”

“What did you do that for?”

“I couldn’t take care of him any longer and I thought he would be better off dead.”

The Living Newspaper played this moment for more drama still.
Triple-A Plowed Under
gave its audience short scenes in quick succession, using pantomime, skits, and radio broadcasts, among other techniques, to recount the devastation of the farms. Drought was conveyed by a farmer repeating a forecast of dry, hot days and then letting soil trickle through his fingers to his defeated exclamation, “Dust!” Dorothy Sherwood, played by a relief actress named Jane Johnson, handed her dead son to a policeman, but she was angry, not defeated, when she said, “He was hungry, I tell you. Hungry, hungry, hungry!” The real Dorothy Sherwood may never have heard of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, but conflating her son’s suffering and his mercy killing with the ruling striking down the AAA amounted to accusing the Supreme Court of murder.

Upping the ante proved effective. The cast had wondered whether New York audiences would care about problems in the faraway farm belt, but when
Triple-A Plowed Under
opened at the Biltmore on March 14, it attracted an audience that was not only younger and more aware of social issues than was typical for Broadway but also less reserved. By the time the black-robed actors playing the Supreme Court took the stage, the house was primed, and greeted them with waves of boos and hissing.

Brooks Atkinson, the theater critic for the
New York Times,
applauded the show’s conviction, contrasting it to Broadway’s usual reluctance to take stands on social issues. He called it “hard-hitting” and “frequently brilliant.” The Hearst newspapers, predictably, decried it as Socialist propaganda. But it was a hit, proving to Flanagan that the Federal Theatre could make drama from complex events. Her conviction would produce more plays that dramatized, as she put it, the “struggle of many different kinds of people to understand the natural, social, and economic forces around them and to achieve through these forces a better life.” It was inevitable that they would draw political reaction.

4. THE VOODOO MACBETH

A
s the winter of 1936 turned into spring, the Negro Theatre’s
Macbeth
was in final rehearsals. Welles had finally honed the production sufficiently to let Houseman attend. Other rising stars in the theatrical arts also had been hard at work: Virgil Thomson writing and rehearsing a musical score, Abe Feder setting up the stage lighting, and Nat Karson designing and supervising the construction of the set. As the set took shape backstage at the Lafayette, it edged the actors in the still-running
Conjur’ Man Dies
ever closer to the footlights. Meanwhile, the
Macbeth
cast rehearsed in the hall of the Monarch Lodge of the Elks Club on 137th Street. Finally, its 137 actors, understudies, and support staff shifted to the Lafayette and rehearsed between midnight and dawn. Jack Carter, cast in the title role, joined Orson Welles in whipping the cast and crew through the killing schedule. The opening was set for April 14.

Rumors raced through Harlem as the day approached. One claimed the play was a white man’s trick to embarrass the black community, another that the set and costumes would bankrupt the Negro Theatre and force it to close. Curiosity spread. Anthony Buttitta, a writer for the theater project magazine, caught the subway uptown a few days before the opening to take notes for a story and walked into a buzz of expectation. He realized that painters had been at work on the sidewalks, stenciling “Macbeth” in glowing letters at the corners of each block. A sign in the box office window announced that opening-night tickets were sold out. Bystanders had clustered around the stage door to watch the delivery of vividly colored costumes. And he learned that Karson had sent assistants to forage in Central Park and suburban woodlands for foliage to forest the Haitian Birnam Wood.

Two days before the opening, Houseman staged a free dress rehearsal. The theater filled so quickly that 3,000 people crowded outside, jostling and protesting, until a squad of riot police arrived to disperse them.

Early on opening night, eighty-five members of the Monarch Lodge Elks band assembled in formation outside their recreation hall in their light blue, gold, and scarlet uniforms. At a signal, they set forth in two groups for the Lafayette, four blocks away. The lead marchers carried crimson banners that stretched across the width of the street: “Macbeth, by Wm. Shakespeare.” The bands reached the Lafayette about six-thirty. By then there were 10,000 people milling around the vicinity of the theater, and the police struggled to keep the entrance clear. Every major drama critic in the city was attending—although one of them had asked that he and his wife be seated “not next to Negroes”—and the audience wore jewels and furs. Hallie Flanagan, no stranger to the pomp of opening nights, appeared with her customary corsage pinned to the cape draped across her shoulders. Truck-mounted floodlights beamed a path into the lobby, and popping flashbulbs and grinding newsreel cameras marked the passage of dignitaries and celebrities as they made their way inside.

The curtain rose to the thunder of drums and an orgy of voodoo incantations. From the opening moment, the production’s furious action, lush set, lavish costumes, and compelling performances mesmerized its audience. When the final curtain fell it erupted into tumultuous cheers and applause.

The reviews, as Houseman later wrote, “were a joy to read.” With one exception, they praised the performances and the concept of what was being called the voodoo
Macbeth.
Reporter Martha Gellhorn, previously one of Harry Hopkins’s field investigators dispatching their views of the depression from around the country, described “a hot richness that I have almost never seen in the theatre or anywhere else” the audience watched and listened “as if this were a murder mystery by Edgar Wallace, only much more exciting.”

The exception was Percy Hammond’s review in the politically conservative
Herald Tribune.
Hammond echoed the paper’s anti–New Deal stance with an article in the next day’s paper that was basically a political screed: “The Negro Theatre, an offshoot of the Federal Government and one of Uncle Sam’s experimental philanthropies, gave us last night, an exhibit of deluxe boondoggling.”

That afternoon, Houseman came upon the witch doctor and drummers studying the notices. They had singled out Hammond’s and wanted to know if it was “evil.” Houseman agreed that it was. Was it the work of an enemy? they asked. Was he a bad man? Houseman agreed on both counts, then left to celebrate the block-long line outside the box office.

The house manager reported to Houseman the next day that he had heard angry drumming and “weird and horrible” chants issuing from the theater basement deep into the night. Houseman knew the Africans took their voodoo seriously. After he and Welles had cast them, they had requisitioned five live black goats, which they ritually sacrificed, then turned the hides into drumskins. And when Houseman and Thomson had asked during rehearsals if the voodoo numbers could sound more wicked, the witch doctor warned the spell might become too strong, darkening the incantations only after Houseman insisted. But he was stunned to read the news on the afternoon of the sixteenth that the critic Percy Hammond had suddenly fallen ill. He died several days later, reportedly of pneumonia.

By the time
Macbeth
opened in Harlem in April 1936, the Federal Theatre had put 10,700 theatrical workers back to work across the United States, 5,000 in New York alone. Actors, including vaudeville and circus performers—one was a young acrobat and gymnast named Burt Lancaster—accounted for nearly half the total, along with directors, costume and scene designers, playwrights and researchers, costumers, ushers, theater and box office managers, ticket takers, stagehands, clerks and office workers, watchmen and janitors, and teachers. Like Lancaster, Joseph Cotten, and Sidney Lumet, some of the performers would become household names.

Theater project units operated in thirty-one states. Eleven cities had black companies. Like New York, California had its own Yiddish group. In heavily Cuban Tampa, Florida, Cuban performers formed a Federal Theatre unit and served up a song and dance revue and plays in Spanish. Units in Chicago and California revived theatrical milestones such as
Under Two Flags
and
Shenandoah,
produced by older actors who gave the productions the look of the originals. In half a dozen units, playwrights labored to build dramas around local historical events. Classics such as Euripides and popular repertory from Shakespeare to Ibsen, Gilbert and Sullivan, Shaw, and Oscar Wilde were being mounted. Circus, marionette, and dance troupes toured in every section of the country.

In the March 1936 issue of the
Federal Theatre Bulletin,
Hallie Flanagan wrote, “No one who has seen these thousands of theatre workers rehearsing in barns, lofts, and studios, spending far more than the required hours, working with energy and devotion to re-learn the exacting techniques of the stage, can believe that the Federal Theatre as it gathers momentum will be any the less potent because it has the remembrance of hunger in its stomach.”