The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama by Cecelia Moore (review)

At the height of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deployed the Works Progress Administration with the intent of providing relief to the unemployed by putting them to work in their fields of expertise. One arena was the Federal Theatre Project (FTP, 1935–1939), a nationwide network of theaters linked by goals, ideology, and resources but centered on the regional and local needs of their communities. Cecelia Moore's The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama focuseson the FTP in North Carolina, using clear and comprehensive archival labor to demonstrate the connections between the FTP and local and educational theater work already in place, as well as the conflict between national political forces and regionalism.

Moore introduces the FTP through national director Hallie Flanagan's oft-quoted description of the different regions, highlighting Flanagan's assertion that the FTP's work in the South would be "'a folk play'" (p. 5). This description serves as inciting incident to Moore's explication and leads her to consider amateur, educational, and professional theater. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the history of the Carolina Playmakers, an outgrowth of the little theatre movement and spearheaded by Frederick Henry Koch (no relation to Koch Industries) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chapter 2 builds on this discussion, offering a more focused interrogation of the role of race in community dramas and the various complications that confronted the FTP in the state. The third chapter concentrates on The Lost Colony, a hit historical pageant staged in Manteo, on Roanoke Island, as a case study for regional success. Chapter 4 highlights playwrights such as Zora Neale Hurston and two virtually unknown women writers, Loretto Carroll Bailey and Betty Smith, as one way of uncovering the vital work of largely unknown individuals. The final chapter traces the regional repercussions of national politics when the arts strive for local relevance, focusing on the FTP's downfall and the shortcomings of a regional model for a national theater.

Moore's strength is her ability to dig deeply into the archival record and to flesh out the politics, social norms, and impacts of competing objectives and personalities. Her chapter on The Lost Colonyshowcases this skill. In it, she considers the "Manteo pageant venture [as] an attempt at people's theatre. . . . It would put the working-class people of Manteo onstage in a dramatization of their history and draw similar kinds of people to see it" (p. 85). In this effort, The Lost Colonyserved as a way to integrate theater and U.S. history, "to use the past to promote an inclusive, democratic future for the nation" (p. 85). Moore's detailed case study reveals intriguing information about how and why The Lost Colonywas created, the stakes of its success, and the troubling link between that success and the promotion of Roanoke as "the cradle of Anglo-Saxon civilization" in the United States, at the expense of Native and minority populations (p. 107).

Moore's research is compelling and thorough, incorporating the major FTP archives at the Library of Congress and the National Archives, as well as numerous local collections that contribute to a deep understanding of North Carolina activities during this period. Yet there is a notable absence of secondary scholarship on theater history in general and the FTP specifically; works by Barry B. Witham, Amy Brady, Ann Folino White, and myself would have offered helpful insights into the many ways that theater intersects with issues of regionalism, censorship, American identity, race, and gender. Nevertheless, Moore's work should appeal to historians and students looking to learn more about this exciting moment in North Carolina and theater history.