The Brief Life and Big Impact of the Federal Theatre Project, with James Shapiro

Imagine: a fiercely idealistic, politically progressive artist takes the stand at a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The chair of the committee is a hard-right demagogue with a gift for sound bites and a fixation with Communism.

If you’re picturing Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade in the 1950s… think two decades earlier. This story played during the Great Depression. The congressman was Martin Dies, a Texas Democrat. On the stand was Hallie Flanagan, the director of the Federal Theater Project, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambitious program to rescue live theater in America. The project attempted to create jobs for thousands of out-of-work playwrights, actors, directors, and backstage technicians. It commissioned new plays and staged productions all around the country. And, despite logistical hitches and ideological blowback, the Federal Theater managed to reach millions of Americans, many of whom had never seen a live production ever before.

Columbia University Professor James Shapiro’s new book, The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War, tells the story of that New Deal program and how it changed our cultural and political landscape. He discusses it with host Barbara Bogaev.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or wherever you get your podcasts.

James Shapiro is the Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of several acclaimed books on Shakespeare including A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, Contested Will; Who Wrote Shakespeare?, and The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, and Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published July 16, 2024. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Previous: A Tour of the Newly-Reopened Folger | Part 2: Research at the Folger.  |
Next: Colman Domingo on Sing Sing and the Power of Theater

BARBARA BOGAEV: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Barbara Bogaev.

Imagine this scene: a fiercely idealistic, politically progressive artist takes the stand at a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The chair of the committee is a hard-right demagogue with a gift for sound bites and a fixation with Communism.

Now guess what decade we’re in. No, it’s not Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade in the 1950s. This story played out two decades earlier, during the Great Depression.

The Congressman was Martin Dies, a Democrat from Texas. And on the stand was Hallie Flanagan, the director of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambitious program to rescue live theater in America.

My guest is James Shapiro, who teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. In his latest book, Shapiro tells the story of the Federal Theatre Project, a little-known program within FDR’s New Deal.

The Federal Theatre attempted to create jobs for thousands of out-of-work playwrights, actors, directors, and backstage technicians. It commissioned new plays and staged productions all around the country.

Hallie Flanagan assembled a powerhouse of talent for the Federal Theatre—and ran into trouble almost immediately. But despite logistical hitches and ideological blowback, the Federal Theatre managed to reach millions of Americans, many of whom had never seen a live production ever before.

James Shapiro has appeared twice before on Shakespeare Unlimited… first in 2015 to discuss his book The Year of Lear… and in 2020, we spoke about Shakespeare in a Divided America. His latest is called The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War.

James Shapiro, welcome back!
————————–

JAMES SHAPIRO: Good talking. How are you?

BOGAEV: Great. Oh, it’s really nice to talk with you again. I really enjoyed the book.

SHAPIRO: Oh, thank you so much.

BOGAEV: I was thinking most of us probably think of social security and the Hoover Dam when we think of the WPA. And murals, of course, right? So maybe, could you just remind us how broad the New Deal really was?

SHAPIRO: Sure. The New Deal did an awful lot for Americans, almost all of which has been unwound. We all know, as Americans, we get a social security check. We also know that if there’s a run on our bank, the FDIC is there to protect us.

What most interests me as a humanities scholar is what the federal government did for unemployed artists in the mid- to late 1930s. By that, I mean painters, writers, theater practitioners, musicians. All of whom, like everybody else in the country, were struggling to hold on when employment was at a terrifying level.

One of the things that the WPA did was create something called Federal One, which was a way of employing all these unemployed artists. The centerpiece of that was the Federal Theatre Project.

BOGAEV: I think the other thing we forget is just how big theater was across the country before the rise of Hollywood.

SHAPIRO: Theater was the form of entertainment. The celebrities in the arts world were actors at the time. And it went down the drain very, very, very quickly at the beginning of the 20th century.

A decade or so earlier in the 1890s, even 1900 or so, scores, if not hundreds, of theater companies toured the nation. Two or three theaters in every mid-sized town in America, far more in the big cities. When the movies came along, that ended and put a lot of people out of work even before the Depression hit.

BOGAEV: Oh, great. This is really setting the stage. Let’s get to it. Who championed the idea for a Federal Theatre? How did it start?

SHAPIRO: I think everybody understood at the time in ways that our elected officials do not understand as well now, that you can’t have a strong democracy without a strong theater. You can’t have a strong theater without a thriving democracy.

And one of the things that FDR and his government recognized was they had to put money into the arts, and they did. The Federal Theatre was able to, in a very short time—its history lasted from 1935 to 1939, and it took some months before it was up and running.

But in that brief period, it reached 29 states. It reached one out of every four Americans; 30 million Americans got to see a play for free or a pittance. Two thirds of whom had never seen a play, a live play before. And it’s just extraordinary, almost shocking to recite those numbers.

BOGAEV: Yeah, it really is. And why don’t you set up our players, our characters, Harry Hopkins and Hallie Flanagan?

SHAPIRO: Sure, Midwesterners both. Harry Hopkins was Roosevelt’s right-hand man. A brilliant, brilliant, social worker, whose training—helping large numbers of people make it through tough times—put him in very good stead to work for the federal government during the depression and oversee programs. It helped that he was charismatic and tireless.

And he had gone to college in Iowa, Grinnell College, with Hallie Flanagan. And Hallie Flanagan was a remarkable woman. She is little known today and should be better known.

She was widowed with two young children, had to support herself, went back to teaching at Grinnell and was interested in theater. Wrote a not-very-good play, but was asked to attend the best graduate program for a year at Harvard in theater. And on the back of that was one of the first women to win a Guggenheim to study theater in Europe. And established at Vassar College—where she was soon tenured—one of the best experimental theater programs in the United States.

And had Harry Hopkins not reached out to his classmate to run the Federal Theatre Program and oversee 12,000 theater artists, she probably would have spent the rest of her life directing Vassar students in productions and frustrated that life didn’t offer her more opportunities than that.

BOGAEV: So Harry Hopkins got the ball rolling and Hallie Flanagan, he hired her to administer to run this program. What kind of plays did they plan to stage? What was the mission of this thing called the Federal Theatre?

SHAPIRO: Harry Hopkins was progressive. The New Deal was a progressive enterprise. The general thought was that these plays would address the problems facing Americans.

And by that I mean everything from labor issues, unionization, syphilis and socialized medicine. Nothing was off the table. And everything that they were interested in were things that neither Hollywood nor the commercial stage on Broadway were particularly keen on staging.

BOGAEV: Yeah, and it got off to a bit of a rough start, right?

SHAPIRO: It got off to a really rough start because it is not easy putting 12,000 people in a theater to work. Anybody who’s ever worked in the theater knows how hard it is to develop one season at one playhouse.

They had to find spaces across the United States. They had to find directors across the country, and only 29 states really had enough of a critical mass to stage plays. They had to then get scripts and find ways of putting lots of actors to work overnight.

And by that, I mean a four hander would not do it. You need to have plays that could employ a hundred or a hundred and fifty actors in one go.

BOGAEV: Yeah, it’s like putting on a middle school production. Everybody has to get on stage.

SHAPIRO: It’s like putting on a thousand middle school productions overnight. It’s everyone’s worst nightmare in the theater.

And Hallie Flanagan was unflappable. Surrounded herself with a lot of young, talented people, and there was a lot of talent out there. Orson Welles is 20 years old, hungry to be asked to produce something, and direct something.

BOGAEV: Yes.

SHAPIRO: I mean, there was talent.

BOGAEV: Yes. Let’s talk about Orson Welles because they tried out a couple of plays and then they arrived at something that Orson Welles called “Voodoo Macbeth.” So what was the genesis of that production with Rose McClendon and the “Negro Unit” of the Federal Theatre, as it was called? And why Macbeth?

SHAPIRO: That’s a great set of questions. I’m uncomfortable with that term, “Voodoo Macbeth.” Ordinarily, Macbeth productions are known by the pair of stars who play the lead roles. Orson Welles was much keener on making this about him than about the actors who performed this play. I think of it as the Lafayette Theatre Macbeth because that’s where it debuted in early 1936 and was the first mega hit of the Federal Theatre Program. It starred 150 Black actors, including an African American dance and drumming troupe. For that reason and for the reason that it was set in 19^th-century Haiti, it was called “Voodoo Macbeth.”

BOGAEV: Which was Orson Welles’ wife, Virginia Nicholson’s, idea, right?

SHAPIRO: I actually no longer believe anything that Orson Welles said.

BOGAEV: [LAUGHING] Ever said.

SHAPIRO: That tends to self-promotion. I’ll tell you why. You know, afterwards he and John Houseman, who together oversaw this production—two white guys, really, as interlopers in a theater, the Negro Unit Theater, at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem, which should have been overseen by Rose McClendon, one of the great stars on Broadway and in the Black community at the time. She was ill, probably cancer, and died a few months later. [She] was supposed to play Lady M and did not.

And, at any rate, John Housman assumed her leadership role. Housman decided to divide up the Lafayette into two groups: one to do plays about Black life, and the other to do classical theater, and the first play that they did in the classical theater was Macbeth.

John Houseman asked his young friend and collaborator at the time, Orson Welles, to direct the play.

BOGAEV: And, it should be said, they dined out on stories about this Macbeth for decades.

SHAPIRO: Yeah, and they dined out on stories that don’t really sound so good today, such as trivializing the contribution of the Black actors, who [were] far better known than they were at that time. It’s a lot easier when you become Orson Welles and John Houseman in the 50s and 60s and 70s. But they were just struggling and unemployed like everybody else at the time and made it about themselves.

That having been said. To me, what was so extraordinary about this production was that it confronted Jim Crow directly. In other words, after its success first in Harlem and then on Broadway, it went on the road. They had a special train that took them up to Connecticut and then across the country as far as Dallas, Texas.

Dallas, Texas is not the kind of place which was celebrated for Black Shakespeare productions. And they played in a festival, an outdoor festival there. The idea of Black actors having a hit with Shakespeare on a national level was extraordinary.

And some places they couldn’t play at, other places they struggled to find beds for the actors and hotels for the actors to sleep in. But it broke through a color barrier in this country. Or, at least, it exposed that color barrier in ways that theater, more than most art forms, gets to do.

So to me, that was incredibly exciting, and for Hallie Flanagan, a huge relief.

BOGAEV: It’s an amazing story. Since we are a Shakespeare podcast, how did Welles handle the text itself of Macbeth? What did he edit? It sounds like he made it into very much of a melodrama. You write that he took out everything that had anything to do with redemption or reflection.

SHAPIRO: Anybody who teaches Macbeth to ninth graders or has been involved in their production of the play know that there are some big questions you have to answer. Is the source of evil something that’s within Macbeth and or Lady Macbeth, or does it come from the witches? That’s the tension of the play.

Orson Welles was not interested in the tension of the play. All the evil, all the malevolent forces, would come from the outside. He elevated the role of Hecate and he played with the text and cut it.

I have to say, to his credit, there wasn’t a 20-year-old in the country or in the world who knew Shakespeare better than Orson Welles, and he had enough confidence in his judgment, even if he was a tyrant in the rehearsal room, to bring this thing to fruition and make it a stunning, stunning production. And it was.

BOGAEV: You’ve already addressed the legacy of this production of Macbeth. That it challenged Jim Crow and was such a success nationwide. How about for the performers? What did it do for these Black actors?

SHAPIRO: Well, it was great for Orson Welles and John Houseman, who soon split off and would go on to fame in their own commercial productions, beginning with the Mercury Theater and the brilliant, brilliant Julius Caesar that Orson Welles staged there.

Not so good news for the 150 Black actors who were involved, including the leads, who all continued to struggle to find valuable theater roles once the Federal Theatre Project closed and opportunities for Black actors returned to the stereotypic roles that they had been before the creation of the Federal Theatre Project.

BOGAEV: Yeah, and we’re going to talk about this some more. That’s not the only time that happened. But another landmark in this story of the Federal Theatre involves Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. Which was a what-if story about a fascist takeover of the US. Why don’t you just remind us what form the fascism takes and what happens in the book?

SHAPIRO: Sure, Sinclair Lewis is not widely read today, but in his own day, he sold hundreds of thousands of copies of every novel he wrote, and his novels were quickly turned into blockbuster movies.

What happened was, the Federal Theatre thought, “Hey, why don’t we do to movies what they’ve done to us? Why don’t we do a version of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here.” Which in, you know, the mid 1930s, exposing the danger of fascism reaching the United States was not so farfetched.

You had voices emerging in this country that were proto-fascist, then as now. This was a play that the Federal Theatre, with Sinclair Lewis’s blessing and his participation in the drafting of the play script, set out to stage in 18 cities across the country, in multiple languages, opening the same night. Which was a thrilling idea.

BOGAEV: Like a movie. That’s where they’re getting back at Hollywood.

SHAPIRO: Exactly. Exactly.

BOGAEV: So, they have this audacious plan, but then it sounds like they immediately started self-censoring.

SHAPIRO: It was really a volatile moment. The mayor of Chicago felt he had the right to shut down any play in his town he didn’t like. And they were worried that that would happen. They were worried that word would get out that this was leaning too heavily one way or the other.

And in fact, there were some people who thought it was meant to—since it opened a week or two before the federal elections, they thought it was meant to either hurt Roosevelt or help Roosevelt: anti-fascist, pro-fascist. They wanted to keep as low a profile as possible.

So, when some independent designer for the Detroit Productions poster had a soldier who looked like Adolf Hitler, they panicked back in Washington and New York. And said, “Please destroy every copy of that poster.” They didn’t destroy every copy, and I include an image from it in my book, but it tells you a couple of things:

One, theater mattered. Theater can make a difference, and people were scared of the impact of theater. And, also, theater practitioners, as in Shakespeare’s day, always have flirted with censorship, tried to self-censor to stay on the right side of the line. But that’s part of the complicated story I try to convey in the book.

BOGAEV: Yeah, and real resonance for us today, but we’ll talk about that in a minute. So, they kneecap themselves in terms of the publicity, it sounds like, and also editing more inflammatory things out of the play itself. But then they did pull off this opening in, I think, 21 productions across the country on the same night, as you say, in September, 1936. Was it a success? How did audiences react?

SHAPIRO: It was a tremendous success. Maybe less for the New York and Chicago critics than for the hundreds of thousands of people who were exposed in a way they were not exposed, in the mainstream media and in the films of the day, to what it means for a small town in Vermont when fascists take over the United States and start—and I’m describing a scenario which will seem shockingly unfamiliar—Promising to round up immigrants, to punish Jews and Blacks, to punish anybody who doesn’t represent their vision of America. This is what fascists do, and this is what the Federal Theatre staged.

And, they gave each—unlike the movies—they gave each regional theater the option to play with the ending and play with the staging in subtle and not so subtle ways. So that there are regional variations on how patriotic and how dark the ending of their production was. This was vivid, exciting. One of the high points of the Federal Theatre Project.

BOGAEV: Okay, I want to talk about one more project before we talk about the ramifications of the—or the legacy of the Federal Theatre. That is this goal to stage what they called a “living newspaper.” So first, what did they mean by a living newspaper?

SHAPIRO: Yeah, that’s a great question. If you asked Hallie Flanagan and her staff, they would give a really bland answer, and they would not say that it was agitprop theater, derived from Russian and German models in Europe that she had studied in the ‘20s and brought back with her, that was used to propagandize large social issues.

But a living newspaper was, in a way, exactly that. You would turn the news into theater.

BOGAEV: So, rip from the headlines?

SHAPIRO: Right from the headlines. There were a lot of unemployed journalists who were brought in to fact check every bit of these plays.

The challenge was some of the directors involved were pretty left, and they were trying to push as hard as they could against the status quo in America’s courts, in America’s treatment of labor and industry.

BOGAEV: They also wanted to dramatize racial discrimination with a living newspaper. The program eventually landed on a living newspaper called Liberty Deferred. What was the plot?

SHAPIRO: This is the most heartbreaking chapter in my book. A couple of young Black playwrights decided to collaborate on a play that took us from 1619 to the present, in the ‘30s, and exposed in a really darkly comic way systemic racism in America. It was so good. It was so powerful.

BOGAEV: It sounds amazing, especially the scene you described called—or the setting, Lynchotopia.

SHAPIRO: Lynchotopia is the central scene in Liberty Deferred, where all the Black guys who were lynched the previous year get together and have a contest. They all arrive wearing a noose around their neck, and they kind of vie to win best lynching of the year. The stories are horrific. You know, somebody mentions that he was burned with a blowtorch, and somebody else is joking, “Oh, they’re going modern now.” I can’t describe how shocking, powerful, and brilliant this play was.

So, much so that at this point, the Federal Theatre, fearing blowback from white supremacists in Congress who wanted to shut it down, slow walked this production, demanded revision after revision after revision, and it stretched on for two years. Liberty Deferred remained unstaged then and unstaged until this day.

BOGAEV: It sounds so modern. I mean, can you… could it be resurrected today? Has anyone ever though about resurrecting it?

SHAPIRO: Sure, and Ron DeSantis would censor it immediately in the great state of Florida. Because it would fall a foul of laws governing the teaching of race or critical race theory. That’s what this play, Liberty Deferred, was about.

This is threatening theater, and you have to understand going back to Sophocles, Euripides, playwrights have always challenges the status quo. This was a moment in the United States when playwrights and actors had a chance to challenge things that were profoundly wrong in this country.

BOGAEV: Now, it sounds like the takeaway of Liberty Deferred for you is pretty much the thesis of how the playbook was forged during this Federal Theatre debacle.

SHAPIRO: My book is about two things. One, what the Federal Theatre accomplished in its self-censoring and stumbling in brilliant ways.

But on the other hand, the forces that were aligned against it then and have a legacy today. This had to do with the creation in May, 1938, of what was called the “House Un-American Activities Committee.” Although in its own day it was called the Dies Committee after its first chairman, Martin Dies.

BOGAEV: Right. Most of us think of the House Un-American Activities Committee as being started by McCarthy, that he headed that up and started it. But no. No, as you tell.

SHAPIRO: McCarthy’s hearings in the Senate are famous for their communist hunting in the early 1950s. McCarthy himself said Martin Dies was the greatest communist hunter in America. Martin Dies was a charismatic, charming, cigar-chomping good old boy from the second congressional district of Texas, where his father had been a congressman before him.

When he arrived at age 30 or so in Congress, was seen as a kind of bumbling fool. He first really ran on an anti-immigrant platform. “Let’s kick out five million immigrants and give their jobs to good Americans.”

If he seems familiar to contemporary political figures, there’s a reason why. Because all of them owe an incredible debt to Martin Dies, who did not disguise his racism, did not disguise his hatred of immigrants, was so charming with the media that they never really looked into his charges and accusations.

He understood, in a way no politician before him in America had, what the weak guardrails of the legislative system were and how to exploit them. Martin Dies knew he had only a few months to bring the newspapers behind him to persuade the country they needed to keep his committee going. And he reached for the lowest hanging fruit possible.

His superiors in Congress gave him a measly 25,000 dollar budget, not enough to investigate anything. He was not interested in investigating fascism, given his own fascist tendencies. He landed on communism, which was really an amorphous thing at the time. There weren’t a lot of American communists. It wasn’t illegal to be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.

The Federal Theatre Project was not allowed to ask its employees where their political associations were. But Martin Dies quickly figured out that to be communist was to be un-American, and this Federal Theatre was un-American.

He decided to go after the Federal Theatre. And the Federal Theatre ended in ‘39, and we were saddled as a country with the House Un-American Affairs Committee until 1975.

BOGAEV: Okay, so hearings were held, and witnesses called to testify. And Hallie Flanagan did her best, but the forces were against her. But why were they so successful in getting the Federal Theatre shut down?

Here, we’re back to your playbook thesis. That the Dies playbook is the one that conservatives have been following in culture wars ever since, because it works. So, what works about it and what is the playbook?

SHAPIRO: Congress at the time was a Democratic majority. But this was a moment in the country where people were tired of federal relief, were divided more than anything else of questions of race.

You couldn’t, if you were a Southern Democrat, attack the enormously popular Roosevelt. But, you could hit and hit repeatedly at his most vulnerable programs, such as the WPA. The most visible aspect of the WPA was the Federal Theatre. So they went after this with a vengeance.

BOGAEV: So, they were a victim of their own success.

SHAPIRO: They were a victim of this success. When Hallie Flanagan squared off against Martin Dies in the only Congressional hearing I know where the place of theater in American democracy was heatedly debated.

She proudly said, “25 million Americans at this point had already seen our plays.” For her, that was a great thing. For Martin Dies, that was terrifying because this was a theater that promoted Blacks, that promoted interracial casting, and that had to be stopped with its progressive agenda.

BOGAEV: And that playbook involves the media.

SHAPIRO: You had congressmen standing up and reciting long lists of plays in salacious ways, anything that had the slightest bit of innuendo associated with it. You know, A Woman in A Room, or The Beaux’ Stratagem, whatever it was, they would just read aloud titles of classical plays and modern plays to make it sound like what the Federal Theatre does was obscene. Martin Dies himself would read from, in the hearings, read from a play in which a Black man who is falsely convicted of rape cries out and curses against those who would accuse him. And Dies says, “It’s just disgusting. This language is unacceptable.”

Theater is easy to cherry pick. Theater is always dialogic, you know? It poses points of view. And Hallie Flanagan really struggled to make this point because the congressman would pull out a line or a statement by somebody in a play, and they would assume that spoke for the play.

These congressmen were not theater folk. One of them challenged Hallie Flanagan, a guy named Joe Starnes, saying, “You mentioned this Marlowe figure. What, was Marlowe a communist?” You know, everybody in the room burst into laughter.

BOGAEV: That’s the name of one of the chapters of your book.

SHAPIRO: She just says, you know, “He was kind of a playwright along with Shakespeare,” and they—Starnes still didn’t get it. You know, “Well, tell us, tell us more about him. We want to investigate these communists.” And then he went after Euripides as well.

BOGAEV: Yeah, he’s a little shaky on his history.

SHAPIRO: He’s shaky in his history, but he’s not wrong in thinking that playwrights like Marlowe and Euripides were not afraid to challenge the status quo. That’s what scared the Dies Committee, and that’s what scares a lot of people today.

BOGAEV: We think of today’s polarization and these culture wars as being worse than any that came before, but is that a misconception when you look at this period that you’ve been studying for so long?

SHAPIRO: You know, as the scholar Sean Willens, who was very gracious—the Princeton historian who helped me think through the question of the culture wars a lot better—He reminded me that culture wars have always been with us, and they go back to revolutionary times where some people were quite happy with the British, others wanted to overthrow their rule.

We’ve seen a succession of cultural wars in this country. What makes the cultural wars of the thirties so relevant to today is that playbook. That is to say, the ways in which attacks on culture have become so popular and so effective that the playbook Dies assembled in the late 1930s is being used willy-nilly by school board members, by members of Congress, and by other previous and current elected officials in really dangerous ways.

One of the things that I’m trying to do with this book is remind everyone how necessary a thriving theater is in a democracy. Remember, this was a moment where Americans sat cheek by jowl across racial, across social divides in theaters and watched plays that were meaningful to them. We have to ask ourselves, who now is threatened by that?

BOGAEV: You know, in the wake of the devastation of theater from COVID, some have called for a modern resurrection of national theater. But this is such a cautionary tale. What are your thoughts about that, that movement?

SHAPIRO: Well, now you have a situation, exacerbated by COVID, where the public theater and every other major theater in this country is hemorrhaging money, hemorrhaging subscription, having to lay off people, having to close doors. Theater has never been as vulnerable in this country as it is today. For some reason, this does not rise to the level of front page or even page 10 news. Soon enough, we will be a country with an impoverished theater. We are heading in this country, I fear, in a direction—And it’s not simply Biden versus Trump. It’s a larger question of what our values are. It’s a larger question of whether we think, as Roosevelt once thought, that theater, like industry and agriculture, was deserving of federal support. Most Americans don’t think that now, at their peril.

BOGAEV: Oh, it’s always so bracing to talk with you, even if it’s a little, really, disheartening. What are you working on now?

SHAPIRO: Skip Gates and David Blight of Harvard and Yale have created a Black Lives series out of Yale University Press, and they’ve asked me to write a biography of Othello, a fictional character. I told them that I’d be happy to do that and would focus on Othello’s American life. And I hope to be back on this program as soon as that book is done.

BOGAEV: I can’t wait. Thank you so much for this.

SHAPIRO: My pleasure. Always really good speaking.

————————–

BOGAEV: James Shapiro’s new book, The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War, is out now from Penguin Press.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer, with help from Leonor Fernandez. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

If you’re a fan of Shakespeare Unlimited, please do leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice, to help others find the show.

Shakespeare Unlimited comes to you from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Home to the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger is dedicated to advancing knowledge and the arts.

The Folger is now open to the public after four years of renovations. Come check out our brand-new gardens and exhibition halls—or take in a performance in our Tudor theater. You can find more information and plan your visit at our website, folger.edu.

Thanks again for listening.