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Metropolitan
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East Fourth Street ~ New York,
New York 10009
Office: 212 995 8410 ~ Tickets: 212 995 5302 "One
of my favorite downtown theaters"
~ Martin Denton, nytheatre.com
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Power
 Metropolitan turns on the first
revival of Arthur Arent’s Power, a
“Living Newspaper” created for the WPA’s Federal Theater Project in
1937. A mix of documentary and vaudeville, this fast-paced,
many-character play, hums out of the Great Depression with panache and
surprising resonance today.
Power’s subject is a power struggle: who controls the electricity supply? In the early 30’s, about 90% of electrical generation and distribution was concentrated in urban areas, and about 90% of that industry was in the hands of private holding companies, whose complex business structures made unfair market practices practically invisible. However, a series of investigations into those practices and a devastating power failure in Newark, NJ, paved the way for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s assertion of the federal government’s “sovereignty … [and] control of its power resources.” As access to electric power became more and more a necessity of modern life, so the private control of that access was seen as increasingly abusive. The question of urgent moment: Is power a private commodity or a public good? Power strikes theatrical sparks with those issues, telling the story of the Newark blackout and the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, all while giving a dynamic crash course in economic and electrical theory and a charged critique of the balance of power. The play races across the country, from boiler room to boardroom, weaving together 21 practically vaudevillian vignettes with an affable narrator. A topical work of art from a bygone era, the play is a fascinating artifact of America’s theater history. But as we always find at Metropolitan, this piece of the past has a great deal to tell us about our present. The questions that provoked the Living Newspaper Unit seem very current indeed. Spurred by manipulations of commerce and capital, misuse of political clout and economic influence, and disparities in the lives of thosewho have and those who need, the artists who created Power crafted a savvy and pointed indictment of business as usual. Today, we ask if credit markets are properly regulated, if water can be available to all, if health care is a public right or a private privilege, and, ironically, if our systems that supply electricity are founded on technologies that do more harm to the world than the good they provide. There is no missing the political slant and the propagandistic tone of Power (hint: it won’t play on Fox), but seen today, all the more engaging are its cogent perceptions and its spirited style. Metropolitan will bring them to life with 9 actors playing the 100+ roles under the direction of Mark Harborth, whose inspired vision of Eugene O’Neill’s early plays was last season’s Pioneer. As part of our Season of Work, we are proud to restage such inventive and provocative theater, another gem in the treasure of American experience |
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 The
Federal Theater Project and The Living Newspaper
UnitNew Deal art may bring to mind Deco murals depicting urban industry, agricultural bounty, and union organizers. But nearly 13,000 artists, technicians, researchers, and staff in at least 40 cities were employed through the Federal Theater Project. The FTP was established in 1935, and under playwright and producer Hallie Flanagan, the project gave work to such luminaries as Susan Glaspell, Elmer Rice, Orson Welles, John Houseman, Arthur Miller, and Elia Kazan, staging traditional dramas, re-interpreting classics, and creating myriad new works for the Depression Era stage. Most familiar to theater aficionados are Welles’s Voodoo Macbeth, W.E.B. DuBois’s Haiti, the Swing Mikado, and an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here. The fame of more topical productions has faded 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 political. From 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.
 ndictment of the
Supreme Court’s striking down a farm bill, Injunction
Granted, skewering business leaders such as William Randolph Hearst and
H.J. Heinz, One Third of a Nation, exploring poverty in the US, and
Spirochete, about the spread of Syphilis.Ultimately, the Federal Theater Project lost its Congressional funding. It 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 -written by Alex Roe |
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| WPA/Federal
Theatre Project Webpages: The New Deal Stage New Deal Network |
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