The WPA appointed theatre educator Hallie Flanagan as national director of the Federal Theatre Project. She argued that relief theatre should preserve professional skills and build local theatre institutions that could survive after federal support ended.
The FTP created “Negro Theatre Units” to employ Black theatre professionals and reach Black audiences, while challenging segregation in cultural life. One of the best-known units formed in Harlem, with major roles for Black artists both onstage and behind the scenes.
Congress passed, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed, the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935. This major New Deal law funded large work-relief efforts, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which later housed arts programs like the Federal Theatre Project (FTP).
President Roosevelt established the WPA by Executive Order 7034. The agency’s goal was to provide paid work for unemployed Americans during the Great Depression, creating the administrative structure that would soon include Federal Project Number One and its theatre division.
The Federal Theatre Project was established as part of the WPA’s Federal Project Number One, designed to employ artists and bring affordable theatre to a wide public. Its central mission was job relief for theatre workers, while also supporting new forms and community-based productions across the country.
The FTP’s Living Newspaper unit premiered Triple-A Plowed Under on Broadway, dramatizing the farm crisis and New Deal agricultural policy using research, headlines, and staged “facts.” This form became a signature FTP approach for explaining current events through theatre.
An all-Black cast production of Macbeth, directed by Orson Welles and produced through the FTP’s Harlem unit, opened at the Lafayette Theatre. Often nicknamed “Voodoo Macbeth” because of its Haiti-inspired setting, it became one of the FTP’s most famous and widely discussed successes.
The FTP staged Sinclair Lewis’s anti-fascist play It Can’t Happen Here in a coordinated national event, opening in dozens of venues on the same night. The scale of the launch showed how federal theatre could function as a rapid, nationwide public forum on democracy and politics.
A few days before its scheduled opening, the WPA ordered a pause on new productions in New York amid budget cuts, and The Cradle Will Rock became the most famous case. The show still went on (in an improvised performance), and the incident became a lasting symbol of political pressure and censorship concerns around publicly funded theatre.
The Living Newspaper production One-Third of a Nation opened at the Adelphi Theatre, focusing on slum housing and public policy. Using documentary-style material (including text drawn from public records), it became the most successful Living Newspaper, combining civic education with mass entertainment.
The House Committee on Un-American Activities (often associated with chairman Martin Dies Jr.) publicly attacked the FTP, alleging political bias and radical influence. The hearings intensified scrutiny of federally funded theatre and helped build momentum for ending the project’s funding.
Congress terminated federal funding for the Federal Theatre Project effective June 30, 1939, shutting down productions and putting thousands of theatre workers out of jobs. The closure ended the most ambitious U.S. experiment in nationally funded theatre, but its innovations—regional production networks, accessible ticketing, and documentary forms like the Living Newspaper—continued to influence American theatre long after.
Federal Theatre Project (1935–1939)