| I'm reading Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the American Theatre by Joanne Bentley (I can't get the book thing to work).
Anyway, what a great book! I want to try to find everything that Hallie wrote and read it. This book is a biography written by her stepdaughter. Hallie Flanagan was a pioneer of experimental theatre in the 20s and 30s. She was trained by George Pierce Baker at Harvard, who was the first to teach theatre at the university level. She started teaching and experimenting at Grinnel College then moved on to Vassar in Poughkeepsie, NY. One of the most facinating things that she did while she was at Vassar, besides directing and producing some of the most experimental theatre to ever be produced at a university, she received a grant to travel to Europe to study theatre with some of the leading theatre artists of the 20th century. Because of her proximity to NYC, she became widely known and also had worked with quite a few people that admired and respected her work. This lead to her being appointed director of the Federal Theatre Project, a division of the Works Project Administration that Roosevelt formed to bring relief to workers all across the US. At one point there were 9000 people on the payroll of the Federal Theatre Project. WOW! And when Federal Theatre ended in 1939 all those people no longer had jobs. Its very political and I'm not into politics, so it seems like it would be so frustrating that I would just quit. She presses on and perseveres and produces some of the best theatre the world had seen at the time. Federal Theatre ended because of ignorance on the part of the government. Now I am a fan of the government, so I am not trying to smack anyone down, but I think back at that time, people could get away with things that wouldn't fly today.
I love reading books like this for the history also. For some reason I have a difficult time reading nonfiction books, like text books that are supposed to teach me something. It never sticks, but if I read a creative nonfiction book like a biography or someone's memoir (like the last blog I wrote on Confederates in the Attic about the Civil War), the information sticks. So I learned a lot about this time period that I had always jumbled together, not realizing they were separate events. ah me.
If you are at all interested in theatre or the arts, a great movie to watch about Federal Theatre is Cradle Will Rock. Its a Tim Robbins directed and written movie--fabulous!
I know Amber recently picked up this book, so I am interested to hear what you have to say Amber!! |
