by Simon Callow
Enter Orson Welles. With his first professional production he created, at a stroke, and for better or for worse, the ‘concept production’. It was Houseman who offered him the job, but the framework for it was something much bigger than both of them; one of the most extraordinary events in theatre history, in fact: the creation of the Federal Theatre Project. Orson Welles’s achievements in the theatre of the thirties can only be understood in the light of it.
CHAPTER NINE
FTP/Macbeth
THE FEDERAL Theatre Project was an offshoot of Roosevelt’s second New Deal programme. The first New Deal programme (1933–5) had initiated various relief schemes, one of which included a scheme for unemployed theatre workers; but the second programme (1935–9), including the creation of Harry Hopkins’s Works Progress Administration, sought to implement a much wider-ranging policy of productive redeployment. ‘For the first time the skills of the worker and his self-respect became the cornerstone of a relief programme,’ write O’Connor and Brown in their history of the project, Free, Adult and Uncensored. There was a Federal Music Project, a Federal Art Project, and a Federal Writers’ Project in addition to the Theatre Project; together they employed 40,000 people. As head of the Theatre Project, Hopkins appointed, in the face of considerable opposition, a forty-five-year-old theatre academic, Hallie Flanagan, head of the Experimental Theatre at Vassar Women’s College, and author of a survey of the European theatrical revolution, Shifting Scenes. Hopkins’s instinct was sound, not to say inspired. She brought to the job a sinewy strength, undentable enthusiasm and a very clear brain; but the quality above all that she contributed was vision, and it is that which transformed the Project from a practical and a useful undertaking into a crusade whose generosity of spirit and breadth of purpose still has the power to move.
From the start she insisted that, though ‘the arts projects were being set up to deal with physical hunger, was there not another form of hunger with which we could rightly be concerned, the hunger of millions of Americans for music, plays, pictures, books?’1 The Theatre Project would bring jobs to as many out-of-work artists as possible, but the opportunity would be seized to create a national network of easily accessible theatres in places where there had been none before, for people who had never dreamed of attending one. At a time like the present, when the notion of state support for the performing arts is being quietly dropped even in those countries where it has from time immemorial been an unspoken assumption, her vision is especially moving. ‘Belief in the theory that the work of the artists was a part of the national wealth America could not afford to lose, belief in the new pattern of life this work could create for many people – these were the passionate affirmations underlying the alternate despair and laughter of those gargantuan days.’ The size of the task never seemed to trouble her. What she was proposing was the establishment of a national health service of the theatre arts – to benefit audience and performers in equal measure.
The range of work that she sponsored is astonishing: in some cases she sought to revitalise an ailing branch of the performance arts (the circus, for example), in others to create something entirely new, like the theatre of the blind in Omaha. There were, across the country, vaudeville projects, and variety projects; there was a special division for marionettes. Educational projects were part of every production; old and young artists were brought together in apprentice-master relationship. ‘Perhaps,’ as O’Connor and Brown say, ‘the real measure of the Federal Theatre should not be the now-famous names, but rather the thousands of unknown people in rural towns, CCC camps, and city parks who saw live theatre for the first time, and the hundreds of people who had given their lives to the theatre, who were able to end or continue their careers with pride, doing what they were trained to do and did well.’
At the time, there was immense scepticism on all sides. The Project was seen as a) utopian and naive, a further waste of taxpayers’ money (boon-doggling, in the expressive phrase of the period); b) liable to draw people away from the legitimate, unsubsidised theatre, since prices were pegged at 75c or less; c) in danger of fostering tenth-rate work, since only the unemployed were being used, and good actors were never unemployed for long, were they? Above all, the Project was perceived, like the New Deal itself, as another form of ‘creeping socialism’. If the theatre couldn’t survive without government aid, then too bad; let it go to the wall. This perception was reinforced by the nature of much of what was produced: Hallie Flanagan didn’t bother to conceal her conviction that ‘the theatre must become conscious of the implications of the changing social order, or the changing social order will ignore, and rightly, the implications of the theatre’.2 Every FTP show had something to contribute to the national debate; it was a truly public theatre. Plays by the people, of the people, for the people; being an actor, a writer or a director did not stop you from being a citizen.
For Hallie Flanagan, the Federal Theatre was a part of ‘the tremendous rethinking, redreaming and rebuilding of America. Our people are one, not only with the musicians playing symphonies in Federal orchestra; with writers recreating the American scene; with artists compiling from the rich and almost forgotten past “The Index of American Design”; but they are one also with thousands of men building roads and bridges and sewers; one with doctors and nurses giving clinical aid to a million destitute men, women and children; one with workers carrying travelling libraries into desolate areas; one with scientists studying mosquito control and reforestation and swamp drainage and soil erosion. What has all this to do with the theatre?’ she asked, and then ringingly answered herself: ‘It has everything to do with the Federal Theatre. For these activities represent a new frontier in America, a frontier against disease, dirt, illiteracy, unemployment, despair, and at the same time against selfishness, special privilege and social apathy.’
There were plays about syphilis, and about housing, about the conditions of the agricultural industry, the history of labour unions, and public ownership of utilities. There was a marionette play about careless driving (Death Takes the Wheel); even the children’s plays were socially conscious. Of Revolt of the Beavers, Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times: ‘Mother Goose is no longer a rhymed escapist; she has been studying Marx.’3 Flanagan was very firm about the political neutrality of the Project, but there was no mistaking the progressive – as Gassner would say, the leftist – bias of the great majority of the work. For precisely this reason, it would not be tolerated for long. The rumblings started very early; when the time was ripe, the Project had made enough enemies on the right for it to disappear virtually overnight.
But in 1935, heaven was still there for the storming. Not that it was easy. The alliance of the arts with public services was an uncomfortable one. ‘Imagine an organisation producing in a season nearly as many plays as all the commercial theatres on Broadway,’4 wrote the former head of production services for the FTP. ‘On top of that, imagine that organisation being required constantly to adapt itself to the same rules and regulations set down primarily for engineering projects. Then imagine those rules and regulations enforced by people completely without a knowledge of the theatre and theatre practice – and you have precisely the position of the FTP.’ Flanagan herself gave an example of the failure of the organisation to grasp the nature of its tasks: a theatre which had spent the entire rehearsal period trying to secure a loaf of bread for each performance of a projected run of thirty, received, on the first night, thirty loaves.
In view of the scale of the operation, and the suddenness of its development, she and her lieutenants were none the less miraculously successful in achieving their goals. The New York Project presented problems of its own; inevitably. It became ‘the best and the worst of Federal Theatre. It presented the widest range of productions, talents, taste, attitudes, races, religious and political faiths. It was everything in excess. In short, it reflected its city …’ New York had six Project theatres, and a number of first-time ventures: a bureau of researc
h and publication; a Federal Theatre Magazine; the Living Newspaper, in a way the most famous and characteristic of all the Project’s enterprises; and the Negro Theatre Unit.
John Houseman was appointed to run this; and he, naturally, approached Orson Welles to direct a play for him. Houseman’s appointment was not without controversy: within the black acting community there were distinct factions, some of whom (notably the former members of the now defunct Lafayette Players) believed that the director of the unit should be black, while others (the intellectuals, teachers, social workers and so on) believed that, realistically speaking, ‘a white man was needed to guide the project through a white man’s world’.5 Among the latter was the great black actress, Rose McLendon, star of Porgy and Langston Hughes’s Mulatto. If the leader of the Negro Theatre project were to be black, she was the natural choice; and she, having admired Houseman’s skills as co-ordinator on Four Saints in Three Acts, in which she had appeared, nominated him as the person she felt most likely to make a go of things – at which point, she died of the cancer with which she had struggled for years, and Houseman was appointed, unopposed; endorsed, in fact, from beyond the grave. He ran the Negro Theatre project, in the not unadmiring words of a black colleague, ‘like a colonial governor’.6
He surrounded himself with talent. His black team consisted of the writers Countee Cullen, Zora Hurston Neale; the dancer Clarence Yates; the designer Perry Hopkins; Eubie Blake, Joe Jordan, Leonard de Paur, musicians. All of them were already distinguished in their respective spheres, and as a result of the Federal Theatre Project, became part of the mainstream of the theatre. White colleagues included Houseman’s friend and now house-mate Virgil Thomson, Abe Feder, the lighting designer of Panic, and a new colleague, the designer Nat Karson who had created sensational extravaganzas at Radio City Music Hall. All were paid exactly what Houseman himself was paid: $23.86 per week. As assistants, he chose Carlton Moss – ‘bitter, but brilliantly clear about “the negro mind”’7 – Edward Perry, his stage manager from Four Saints in Three Acts, and, as his secretary, the ‘plump, pink-cheeked, bouncing Jewish virgin’ Augusta Weissberger. For the rest – for the personnel of the unit, actors, stage-hands, set-builders – he held open recruitment sessions. The result was pandemonium. Just as with any other division of the Project, the Negro Unit was inundated with applications from people who, desperate to work, were often only vestigially connected with the theatre – if at all. Since so many black performers were driven to pursue their careers in a sort of twilight zone out of the professional mainstream, it was especially difficult to determine whose application was legitimate, and whose was not. Carlton Moss, with his bitter brilliant clarity, was particularly ruthless in weeding out the pretenders.
The arrival of the Negro Unit in Harlem was greeted with controversy. On the one hand, any activity, any sign of hopeful life, any possibility of employment and confidence, was to be welcomed in that desperate quarter, so recently the scene of riots. With a population 80 per cent of whom were out of work, endemic prostitution, gambling and bootlegging, and with rents, as Houseman observes, ‘double those for the equivalent white dwelling’, it was a very different place from the Renaissance Harlem of even ten years before, where there had existed for the first time in America a black community of artists, intellectuals and entrepreneurs – businessmen, property owners, responsible politicians – a life unforgettably recorded by the camera of the great black photographer James Van Der Zee. This black Montmartre and Champs Elysées rolled into one had disappeared pretty well as suddenly as it had arisen, a casualty of the depression; and no amount of ‘momentary tranquillisation by the New Deal Relief’ could compensate for the loss of dignity and self-respect. There remained, of course, the clubs and the dives, frequented by down-there-on-a-visit whites; Harlem was not yet a no-go area. But the place was seething with anger and despair.
What was the purpose of this Negro Unit, Harlemites wanted to know. Was the Unit, provocatively taking up residence in the Lafayette, scene of the most successful attempt to create a permanent black company (where a wide range of plays had been attempted, from Othello to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde taking in on the way The Count of Monte Cristo and sentimental Yiddish comedy) intended to cater to a white audience or a black one? Would it preserve an image of black people as ‘handkerchief-headed’ savages, whether noble or mentally sub-normal, violent or comic, or would the slow slow process of legitimisation of the black profession be advanced? Here and there, hopeful signs were visible: since Charles Gilpin, a veteran of the Lafayette, had created the title role in The Emperor Jones, it had begun to be possible for the occasional black actor to be taken seriously. Robeson had continued along Gilpin’s path, as had others in the small outcrop of (mostly white-authored) black dramas, of which Dubose Heyward’s Porgy was the outstanding example.
As well as the perennial revues, such as the Blackbirds series, there were all-black versions of recent Broadway hits – Nicholson’s and Robinson’s Sailor Beware! and Hecht’s and MacArthur’s The Front Page, and the curious genre of the adapted folk-play, most famously Marc Connelly’s In Abraham’s Bosom (in which God’s first entrance is preceded by a cry of ‘here come de Lawd!’) and, more enterprisingly, Paul Green’s Roll, Sweet Chariot, ‘a symphonic play of the Negro people’. Another striking Broadway drama of the late twenties had been Harlem, by a black author, Wallace Thurman, featuring a cast of sixty black actors and a lone white one. An ‘Episode of Life in New York’s Black Belt’ it was described in an admiring notice by George Jean Nathan as affording ‘a dozen and one vivid hints of niggerdom at its realest’,8 a phrase which fairly neatly sums up the situation of the black drama in the third decade of the century. Did black life exist, as far as the theatre was concerned, simply to be held up for examination by well-heeled white audiences, for amusement or gratifying shock? Was it better not to work in the theatre at all, rather than be subject to the squealing scrutiny so well parodied by Ben Hecht in the late twenties: ‘My set has discovered something too marvellous for words. Negroes! Oodles and oodles of them! Big ones and little ones! Harlem, way this side of the zoo.’9
Virgil Thomson helped to clear Houseman’s mind. When they had cast Four Saints in Three Acts with an entirely black cast, he reminded him, the only consideration in doing so had been aesthetic: voices, movement, diction. There was no political statement involved; nor had they adapted the text in any way to make sense of the performers’ negritude. They found black performers more beautiful and more expressive. No more, no less. With this highly radical principle in mind, Houseman decided to divide the work of the Unit into two categories: ‘1. Plays by blacks, for blacks, with blacks. 2. Classical plays, performed by black artists “without concession or reference to colour”.’ The former category he handed over to his black colleagues. They would open the theatre with an example of new black writing; the classical play, whatever it might be, would take more time to prepare. Without hesitation (though as far as he knew he had only ever previously directed school productions) Houseman invited Orson Welles to direct it. Without hesitation, Welles accepted the invitation.
The fact that most of his actors would have no experience whatever of blank verse, and that indeed many of them would have very little experience of acting, tout court, was only a further recommendation to him. His abhorrence of the polite approach to Shakespeare was absolute; rather complete ignorance than that. Professionalism per se had no appeal for him; he realised – as Houseman must have done – that there was no question of turning the Negro Unit into the Old Vic and that what was required were not tutorials in the iambic pentameter but leadership of a galvanising, inspirational kind. The only question was which play was best suited to the actors at his disposal. Houseman reports being roused at 2 a.m. by a telephone call from Welles passionately eager to convey the inspiration that Virginia – as a result of conversations with Francis Carpenter – had had: they must do Macbeth, and set it at the court of the early nineteenth-century Haitian Empe
ror Henri Christophe. Houseman was delighted, and Welles and Nat Karson set to work with passion, researching the period and the curious figure of the gigantic Grenadian slave who had become an emperor. Leader of the Haitian forces of insurrection, he was first elected President, then, after a furious civil war, Napoleonically crowned himself. As Henri I, his vigorous rule was marred by avarice and cruelty; eventually his people revolted, and, cornered, he shot himself. The subject of Aimé Césaire’s great poem ‘La Tragédie du Roi Christophe’, he is an extraordinary figure, not least in the mannered extravagance of his court, anticipating the excesses of the Emperor Bokassa in the Central African Republic; the parallels with Shakespeare’s hero are clear enough. For Welles the element in the transposition that really attracted him was that Haiti’s voodoo culture enabled him to make the supernatural scenes a credible centre of the play.
It is to be questioned whether this approach quite fulfilled Houseman’s and Thomson’s criterion of using black performers without reference to the colour of their skins, or ‘any other cultural factor’. It may be questioned, in fact, whether it constituted an interpretation of the play. What it is, essentially, is a concept: a way of doing the play which makes you think about it afresh. Concepts, almost by definition, only apply to existing work, generally with a long performing tradition. They are by their nature corrective. What Welles wanted to do – what he always wanted to do in the earlier part of his career in the theatre – was to break the mould. He may, in his heart, have longed to see Elizabethan productions of Elizabethan plays (that was certainly the message of Everybody’s Shakespeare, only two years before); but in practice, he felt he needed to shake off the performing stereotypes of recent tradition. Admiring above all the magnificently timeless performances of an Anew McMaster, and being strangely old-fashioned himself, in practice Welles felt compelled to use shock tactics to restore the immediacy of the texts. For the most part that meant taking an explicit and monothematic line on a play, and that meant cutting and reshaping it to give it surface vividness at the expense of digging into its meaning and discovering its organic structure. It is this that made Mary McCarthy, most ruthless of his critics, say, in the late thirties, ‘Mr Welles has the idea that an Elizabethan play is a liability which only by the most strenuous showmanship, by cutting, doctoring, and modernising, can be converted into an asset. Mr Welles’ method is to find a modern formula into which a classic can somehow be squeezed.’10 The fact that generally speaking he realised his concept with electrifying brilliance deflected attention from the superficiality of the approach, and with concept, as opposed to interpretation, the execution is all. That said, electrifying brilliance is not such a common commodity that it can be lightly dismissed; it cost him a great deal of effort and inspiration, and never more so than on this Macbeth.
