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  • Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project by Elizabeth A. Osborne
  • Johnathan Chambers
Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project. By Elizabeth A. Osborne. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. pp. xi + 240. $85.00 cloth.

In Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project, Elizabeth A. Osborne expands familiar perceptions and alters common assumptions regarding the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). As to the former, Osborne shifts the focus away from the FTP’s efforts in New York City—the region that has, along with the Living Newspapers, received the most scholarly attention by far—and instead considers a wide range of projects in Chicago, Boston, the American South, and Portland, Oregon, as well as two tours. In drawing attention to the FTP’s work in these regions and tours, Osborne shows its expansive reach, and, in so doing, demonstrates the ways in which it sought to fulfill national director Hallie Flanagan’s hope for a nationwide federation of theatres. [End Page 105] More importantly, Osborne convincingly argues that the FTP was an extraordinarily complex and vexed endeavor, one that sought to balance the agenda and aspirations of its national office—which was itself seeking to balance its efforts with the goals of the immense bureaucracy of the WPA and its subgroup, Federal Project Number One, which had direct oversight of the FTP—with the actions, hopes, and living and working conditions of regional and local artists, administrators, and audiences.

Without question, Osborne’s effort to expand the vision of where the FTP did its work, how that work in regions outside of New York was often in tension with various national and regional offices, and what that work constituted leads to a more complete picture of the project as a whole. Additionally, however, in the course of painting this more complete picture, Osborne also asks us to reconsider the way in which the FTP is frequently characterized—that is, as a “successful failure.” Instead, Osborne argues that it was “a viable enterprise that in many ways attained its primary objectives: to achieve a theatre that could represent the nation while putting Americans back to work in their fields” (2). Building on this hypothesis, Osborne’s case studies reveal that when these regional efforts and tours are evaluated in light of the FTP’s professed goals, the “so-called failures might more correctly be designated as successes” (13). In this regard, then, Staging the People may rightly be called a “game changer.” Indeed, by expanding the vision of what the FTP involved and complicating the frequently one-dimensional suppositions about it, Staging the People alters in profound ways the received history of the project.

In terms of structure, following a very useful introduction—wherein she outlines her endeavor to provide a “detailed cultural study of the FTP” (9)—Osborne divides the book into five chapters. Chapter 1, which focuses on two productions in Chicago, stands as a good example of how the whole of the study works. The first half of the chapter centers on Oh Say Can You Sing, staged in 1936, while the second spotlights Spirochete, staged in 1938. Regarding the former, Osborne carefully explicates the composition history, deftly demonstrating how various political pressures unique to Chicago led to radical revisions of the text. She shows that, in effect, the various changes altered the very ethos of Oh Say Can You Sing, making it not a biting piece of political satire but an insipid comedy.

As counterpoint, in the second half of the chapter Osborne turns to Spirochete, which took as its subject the syphilis epidemic, a national crisis that had a particularly devastating effect in Chicago. Though not an enormous box-office success, Spirochete nonetheless did inspire accolades from the local and national press, as well as local and national health officials, and was [End Page 106] held up as an example of the type of socially vital theatre a federally funded producing organization could create. Throughout the chapter, Osborne situates her readings of these texts and productions within the social and political context of Chicago, circa the mid-to-late 1930s. Additionally, she convincingly...

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