Injunction Granted

Think of New Deal art and you may think of Deco murals depicting urban industry, agricultural bounty, and union organizers. But nearly 13,000 artists, technicians, researchers, and support staff in at least 40 cities were employed through the Federal Theatre Project. The FTP was established in 1935 with the stipulation that 90% of its appropriation go to wages. Under playwright, producer, director, and professor Hallie Flanagan, the project gave such luminaries as Susan Glaspell, Elmer Rice, Orson Welles, John Houseman, Arthur Miller, Martin Ritt, Marc Blitzstein, and Elia Kazan, work enacting traditional dramas, re-interpreting classics, and creating myriad new works for the Depression Era stage. Landmark productions most familiar to theater aficionados include Welles’s Voodoo Macbeth, W.E.B. DuBois’s Haiti, the Gilbert and Sullivan inspired Swing Mikado, and an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here.

More topical productions have tended to fade with the years, and among them were the productions of The Living Newspaper Unit. The unit created a new theater of current events, extensively researched (its staff included unemployed members of the American Newspaper Guild) and pointedly topical. Even at the start, this work struck some too close to the bone: its first creation, Ethiopia (1936), drew criticism from the State Department for its portrayal of foreign leaders and was cancelled by the WPA before it was staged. All of the plays produced set out to be at least as potentially controversial. “A dramatization of a problem”, in Arent’s words, the Living Newspapers’ techniques purposely eschewed the devices of psychological realism as they embraced characters who dramatized opposing social and cultural forces. Topics ranged from the labor movement to housing, racism, and public health.

Living Newspaper Plays included Triple-A Plowed Under, an indictment of the Supreme Court’s striking down a farm bill, Injunction Granted, a lampoon of business leaders such as William Randolph Hearst and H.J. Heinz, Power, exploring the control of electrical power in the US (produced at Metropolitan in 2009), and Spirochete, about the spread of Syphilis.

Ultimately, the Federal Theatre Project and all its diverse Units lost their Congressional funding. They had always been opposed by New Deal foes who disapproved of any state funding for the arts at all; but also by New Deal supporters who were leery of the productions’ leftist slants giving ammunition to the program’s enemies. Defending the program to the House Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities in 1938, director Flanagan painted an idealistic portrait of what she called “propaganda for democracy”. She wrote, “These Living Newspapers report the struggle of the modern man to understand the forces all about him; agriculture, power, law, housing, social diseases, medicine.” Even so, in 1939, the Federal Theater Project was history.

-Alex Roe


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Injunction Granted

IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES “Capital is wonderful—and Labor is wonderful, too! We cannot do without Labor, and we cannot do without Capital! They are both wonderful!” - The Demagogue, Act II The competing values embraced bya democratic society create myriad conflicts, to say the least. Privacy vs. security. Personal success vs. public responsibility. Opportunity vs. welfare. Lest we forget, these battles have been fought in America since before it was the United States. Are they irresolvable? And if they are…can we make a play out of them? INJUSTICE SYSTEM In 1937, artists of the Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspaper Unit took social dilemma head on. In the words of FTP director Hallie Flanagan, these topical plays, derived from primary sources, sought to “report the struggle of the modern man to understand the forces all about him; agriculture, power, law, housing, social diseases, medicine.” Injunction Granted is a confrontational play that champions the cause of workers’ unions. The “granted injunction” of the title is every court order that allows an employer to break a strike, stop a picket, or suppress a publication, with an injunction against, say, striking, picketing, or publishing. The argument of Injunction Granted is compelling and theatrical. Posing Labor as the protagonist and Capital as the antagonist, the play embraces the definition of drama as conflict, and shows these two forces, embodied in over 200 characters, battling across the centuries, both of them alternately aided or foiled by the courts and the government. The very cleverness of the conceit, to make economic classes characters in a drama, is beguiling. The turning of signal historical events—Bacon’s Rebellion, the Haymarket bombing, the Pullman railway strike—into scenes in a long evolving story, fascinating. The play is admittedly one-sided, and its rousing conclusion—not to give it away, but unions defy “the overlords of steel”—may seem at best naïve to today’s audience. But an ironic portrayal of its world as a circus winks at the audience from the start and takes us on a vaudevillian journey from 17th century England to 1930’s America, with wit and flare to complement its earnest indignation. The story of the play—the struggle of anyone who labors for a living to receive personal respect, adequate compensation, and health care—touches us as surely today as it did then. Indeed, while we live in a different era, when once powerful unions have withered along with the industries they organized, the issues the play highlights are hardly out of date, as evidenced by contests over collective bargaining, a national rallying to raise the minimum wage, efforts to redress the staggering gap between CEO salaries and wage earners’ annual income, protests over the power the “1 Percent” have over the 99, and movements to ameliorate working conditions at home and abroad. BITING THE HAND As compelling is the hostility the play created in the government that funded it. Even the Federal Theatre Project leaders distanced themselves from its "editorial" inquiry. Metropolitan has presented two FTP living newspapers before: Power and One-Third of a Nation. These two plays addressed national electrification and housing, but they challenged 1930s social issues by championing the government’s role, through public utilities and public housing, respectively, in solving the problems they illuminated. In Injunction Granted, the government is at best a feeble protector of the worker against his employers, and at worst a willing collaborator with industrialists. By championing the union cause, the play says the prospect of salvation for the victimized is not in the hands of an authoritative and beneficent government elected by the people, but in the peoples’ own hands, empowered by acting as one. It is hard not to see in that message a tension simply inherent in the Federal Theatre Project, and particularly its Living Newspaper Unit: the government funded the creation of art whose mandate was to explore problems of contemporary life, and that art did not always do as its creator wished. The Living Newspaper seemed to be biting the hand that fed it, and its works were certainly central to the reasons that the Federal Theatre Project’s directors were obliged to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee before funding was pulled in 1939. WORK FOR WORK’S SAKE Metropolitan presents the play with new music, projections, tumbling, and 6 actors who take on (and off) all 200 roles. Actors are laborers whose creation is the work itself. They work in order to be seen working, and like athletes, are admired for their performance, rather than any product of that performance. Our production asks its audience to see work as inherently valuable, and invites a broad understanding of the forces working against an ultimately doomed project. PROGRESS? A ninety year old play that precisely articulates dilemmas we face today, a drama starved of support because its inquiry into injustice pointed at the funders who created it, and an artistic event that asks its audience to embrace the story of its creation along with the story it tells, Injunction Granted is an ideal finale for Metropolitan’s Season of Progress The Federal Theatre Project and The Living Newspaper Unit Think of New Deal art and you may think of Deco murals depicting urban industry, agricultural bounty, and union organizers. But nearly 13,000 artists, technicians, researchers, and support staff in at least 40 cities were employed through the Federal Theatre Project. The FTP was established in 1935 with the stipulation that 90% of its appropriation go to wages. Under playwright, producer, director, and professor Hallie Flanagan, the project gave such luminaries as Susan Glaspell, Elmer Rice, Orson Welles, John Houseman, Arthur Miller, Martin Ritt, Marc Blitzstein, and Elia Kazan, work enacting traditional dramas, re-interpreting classics, and creating myriad new works for the Depression Era stage. Landmark productions most familiar to theater aficionados include Welles’s Voodoo Macbeth, W.E.B. DuBois’s Haiti, the Gilbert and Sullivan inspired Swing Mikado, and an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here. More topical productions have tended to fade with the years, and among them were the productions of The Living Newspaper Unit. The unit created a new theater of current events, extensively researched (its staff included unemployed members of the American Newspaper Guild) and pointedly topical. Even at the start, this work struck some too close to the bone: its first creation, Ethiopia (1936), drew criticism from the State Department for its portrayal of foreign leaders and was cancelled by the WPA before it was staged. All of the plays produced set out to be at least as potentially controversial. “A dramatization of a problem”, in Arent’s words, the Living Newspapers’ techniques purposely eschewed the devices of psychological realism as they embraced characters who dramatized opposing social and cultural forces. Topics ranged from the labor movement to housing, racism, and public health. Living Newspaper Plays included Triple-A Plowed Under, an indictment of the Supreme Court’s striking down a farm bill, Injunction Granted, a lampoon of business leaders such as William Randolph Hearst and H.J. Heinz, Power, exploring the control of electrical power in the US (produced at Metropolitan in 2009), and Spirochete, about the spread of Syphilis. Ultimately, the Federal Theatre Project and all its diverse Units lost their Congressional funding. They had always been opposed by New Deal foes who disapproved of any state funding for the arts at all; but also by New Deal supporters who were leery of the productions’ leftist slants giving ammunition to the program’s enemies. Defending the program to the House Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities in 1938, director Flanagan painted an idealistic portrait of what she called “propaganda for democracy”. She wrote, “These Living Newspapers report the struggle of the modern man to understand the forces all about him; agriculture, power, law, housing, social diseases, medicine.” Even so, in 1939, the Federal Theater Project was history. -Alex Roe