The Pro-Democracy Case for a National Theater
Earlier this year, as President Donald Trump engaged in a spree of cuts to federal arts funding, alongside partisan assaults on national cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center, I found myself thinking about the Depression-era origins of government-funded art in the United States. During a time of economic and social strife, Washington responded by investing in the arts—even if it resulted in work that made some Americans uncomfortable.
The Federal Theatre Project, an arm of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, may have been the closest thing the country ever had to a true national theater. From 1935 to 1939, it engaged out-of-work actors, writers, directors, and stagehands across the country to produce plays, many of them free, that toured the U.S. and were enjoyed by some 30 million citizens, a majority of whom had never seen a live play before. Yet the most American thing about the FTP might not have been its populist spirit, but rather its tumultuous demise.
The project’s more progressive features turned it into a hot-button issue in the Capitol. Some productions involved racially integrated casting; others advanced radical visions of the country’s future, such as the possibility of a female president. Still others warned of the rapidity with which democracy could give way to dictatorship. In a dark American era plagued by Jim Crow and rampant poverty, the plays of the FTP tended to engage frankly with some of the grimmer American truths.
Naturally, the House Un-American Activities Committee—which was formed to find and punish Communist influence everywhere—suspected plenty of it here. And one congressman, Representative Martin Dies of Texas, saw the FTP as a useful scapegoat in a crusade against any culture that was critical of America’s absolute goodness. Such a campaign was an opportunity for a particularly cynical type of politician to gain power and influence. Never mind that Dies’s target consumed less than 1 percent of the WPA budget—the press couldn’t look away. An overwhelming majority of the House voted to end the program, and its funding was canceled. Goodbye to the last great effort to give Americans in many regions significant access to excellent, original American theater.
Trump’s broad cancellation of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts amounts to pennies when compared with the budget of the FTP, which cost about $46 million—about $1 billion in today’s dollars—over four years. But for some theaters, the cuts were a devastating blow. The communities likely to be most affected are those where theater is scarcest: the small cities and towns where federal subsidies have helped keep a beloved but often unprofitable art form alive.
[Read: When the culture wars came for the theater]
These cuts make now a useful moment to ask why taxpayer funds should be used to subsidize theater at all. Is there any good reason it should be considered a real public good, rather than the luxury it is for theatergoers able and willing to pay ever-escalating ticket prices? One possible answer lies in an endeavor that inspired the FTP, and that survives to this day—in Ireland.
In 1911, a U.S. tour by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre unwittingly helped lay the groundwork for the FTP. A young American theater lover named Hallie Flanagan met Augusta, Lady Gregory, one of the Abbey’s founders, during the tour, and was touched by her call for the creation of an American national theater. Years later, Flanagan would become the National Theatre Project’s director.
At the time of the tour, the Irish troupe was privately funded; there had never been a national theater in the English-speaking world. But in 1925, when the Abbey was close to ruin, it made a daring request for government support from the fledgling Irish Free State. With the state just three years into independence from the United Kingdom, its leaders were busy with more fundamental questions, such as settling the Irish Free State’s borders.
But the Abbey’s founders, including Lady Gregory and the Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright W. B. Yeats, “had a concept from the start that theater could provide a way of thinking about what it meant to be a nation,” Christopher Morash, a scholar of Irish theater, told me. After a bloody civil war, that idea was persuasive to leaders seeking to give their young state a sense of direction and identity. The Abbey was allocated 850 pounds a year.
In the Abbey’s century-long history as a public institution lies a persuasive story about what a national theater could have done—or still might do—for the United States. Through the decades, the Abbey’s output has regularly showed how effectively theater can process national trauma at times when the public desperately needs an outlet. There is no replacement for the emotional immediacy of live performance; it is easier to empathize with a living character, whom you could theoretically go up to and touch, than with an idol on the screen.
From its first days as a national theater, the Abbey was determined to elicit this kind of empathy in ways that would bring the public not just catharsis, but also understanding. In 1926, with government money newly in its coffers, it made a statement about exactly what kind of institution it intended to be by producing Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars.
A decade earlier, the Easter Rising had kicked off violent efforts to establish an Irish republic free of British rule. Heretically, The Plough and the Stars depicted the Rising’s fighters—broadly enshrined in the national memory as heroes—hanging about a pub, “flirting with prostitutes and more interested in where they’re going to get their next drink” than in the conflict at hand, Morash said. Imagine, he added, if “somebody had written a play about 9/11 in 2011 that had firemen in a bar, working with prostitutes. What kind of reaction would you get?”
Instead of putting on “the idealised patriotic play that a section of the audience obviously wished for,” as Abbey’s former director Christopher Fitz-Simon told me in an email, the theater chose to provoke a weary populace with irony and irreverence. Is that what a national theater is supposed to do?
In the U.S. today, the government’s answer is clearly no. When Trump overhauled the board of the Kennedy Center—a perpetual contender for the role of unofficial national theater—he declared that the theater would host no more “ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA.” (More recently, his handpicked board renamed it the Trump-Kennedy Center, changing its facade without the required congressional approval.) In 1926 Ireland, however, the answer was yes. There were riots, and a government representative on the theater’s board argued for censoring the play. But audiences couldn’t get enough. They understood, I think, that The Plough and the Stars wasn’t anti-Ireland. Instead, it was honest about the human complexity of the new nation and the bloody era that heralded its birth.
They may have understood, too, that such honesty could be crucial to the survival of their nascent state. “If you don’t have an image of your culture that is capable of evolving and changing,” Morash said, “then you end up with images of yourself that are fossilized, that are monumentalized, that are exclusionary.”
Hallie Flanagan’s vision for a successful American national theater looked much like the Abbey’s model. Audiences needed not an unrealistically rosy reflection of their national identity, she saw, but rather an opportunity to engage with their complicated feelings about it. The project’s first great success was a play called Altars of Steel, about the southern steel industry. As Flanagan wrote in her book about the FTP, Arena, audiences in Atlanta “praised the play. They blamed the play. They fought over the play. They wrote to the papers: ‘Dangerous propaganda!’”
[Read: The lessons of the Great Depression]
Only by creating reactions that are both large and diverse can a national theater be considered important. Countries are created in violence; artistic efforts to give them a sense of shared identity must involve a kind of violence, too. In the friction, we begin to see who we are.
This understanding has been crucial to the development of national theaters throughout history. The very first were founded under royal auspices. But the idea of a national theater truly took off as a result of the nationalism that flourished in Romantic-era Europe, Marvin Carlson, a scholar of theater history, told me. As “people began being interested in a national language and a national literature,” he said, they “began to open national theaters, and they were very much connected with the modern idea of the nation”—one in which the people, not the rulers, determined the country’s character.
The question of who has the right to define a country’s character is central to the cultural battles unfolding in the United States under Trump. When it comes to the theater, the president has strong tastes. He loves Les Misérables and the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber—neither, ironically, American products. He staged a takeover of the Kennedy Center early in his second term not because its programming has so much influence over the average American, but because of its elevated status: If it is at the center of Capitol culture, it is at the center of American culture, and therefore, in his estimation, it ought to be directed by the highest power in the land.
The FTP died during a similarly restrictive political moment. It had helped people far outside the centers of power gain a sense of ownership over their national culture. Evidently, that made certain figures within those centers uncomfortable. With the project’s end, Americans “lost a place where people met across ideological and class and racial divides,” James Shapiro, the author of The Playbook, a history of the FTP’s rise and fall, told me. Now, he added, we “live instead in a siloed world, one defined by division rather than conversation, with democracy itself weakened.”
In Ireland, history unfolded differently. The Plough and the Stars was, in the end, never censored by the government. None of the Abbey’s productions has been (although the theater has sometimes self-censored)—a remarkable truth in a country where nearly every other art form has found itself at some point subjected to the government’s red pen.
[Read: Trump’s very weird night at the Kennedy Center Honors]
The theater has produced several generations of playwrights, including Brian Friel and Conor McPherson, who have helped the Irish public understand the changing nation. That doesn’t mean the work of the Abbey has always been great, but a national theater is not necessarily supposed to produce the best plays in its country. It is intended, instead, to set a precedent of original work, investigating that country’s soul, with the hope that as this mission spreads, people will come to see the cultural tropes that define their lives as active, living concepts, about which they have the right to think—and feel—independently.
“It’s like a great tree that is constantly dropping little acorns on the ground,” Morash said. “Even when the Abbey wasn’t doing great work at any one time, there were something like 600 to 700 small amateur theater companies around the country, just community groups playing in halls, and they’re looking to the Abbey for their model. You lose that,” he said, and “you lose the ability for a society to tell itself its own stories.”