Episode 115: All Play and No Work in the Depression w/ Dr. Paul Gagliardi

Introduction to Podcast

0:00Hi, and welcome to the Theatre History Podcast. I'm Mike Liger. There wasn't a lot that was funny about the Great Depression. With millions out of work and geopolitical turmoil threatening overseas, it might seem like the 1930s were a grim time. But there was still quite a lot of comedy, including in the plays put on by the Federal Theatre Project, which brought

0:32theatre to audiences across America in the late 1930s, while also providing work for artists affected by the economic crisis. Dr. Paul Gagliardi has written about these comedies in his book All Play and No Work, American Work Ideals and the Comic Plays of the Federal Theatre Project. Paul is an associate professor of English at Marquette University, and listeners may also remember him from episode 23 of this show, when he talked to us about the Federal Theatre Project's stage adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's anti-fascist novel, It Can't Happen Here. Paul, welcome back.

1:09It's great to be back. This is exciting. I gotta say, I was reviewing our episode from, gosh, almost a decade ago at this point, and you mentioned, oh, I'm working on this thing about comedies in the Federal Theatre Project, and hey, look at you now. A whole book about it. That was a teaser that just took me 10 years to get it flushed out, so it works. Well, as that may indicate, we've talked about the Federal Theatre Project a few times on this show already, but could you maybe talk about how it fit into the

Federal Theatre Project Overview

1:41larger framework of the New Deal, and maybe what that word work meant to Americans at the time? Sure. The Federal Theatre Project, the FTP, was part of what we generally call the Second New Deal, sort of a mismatch of programs past, post-1935, 1936. It was part of the Works Progress Administration, and that was a, or the WPA. And its primary charge was giving people work that, or providing work,

2:16and providing jobs for people underemployed, unemployed during the Great Depression. And the Federal Theatre Project was part of a subgroup of the WPA called Federal One, which were, which was a group of programs dedicated to professional work, artistic work. So you have the Federal Arts Project, you have the Federal Writers Project, you have, you have historians going around and collecting slave narratives in the Deep South, and you have the Federal Theatre Project,

2:49among others. And it was a kind of conscious effort by the Roosevelt administration, and specifically Harry Hopkins, who headed the WPA, to provide work that just wasn't necessarily menial, that had some sort of social connection and social significance to people, and to the workers themselves. You know, one of the hardest hit industries, even before the Great Depression really hit in 19, really 1930,

3:201931, was theatre, right? Because theatre had been struggling throughout the 19, 1910s and 1920s, because it's losing a huge amount of its marketplace to cinema. And, and you had certain, you know, theatre actor, film actors saying it was kind of a useless thing like ballet and, you know, opera. So, Chalamet just has me so annoyed. But kind of broadly, it was a part of a larger

3:51concerted effort by the Roosevelt administration to attach a kind of moral connection to, to labor. You know, longer view, we, we often talk about the Protestant ethic in American, American society, American labor. And, you know, for people like Max Weber, right, the, the idea of the Puritan ethic was something wonderful and benevolent, but under the condition that it, at its root, it was. By the time

4:23that capitalism has really kind of cemented itself in Western societies in the 19th and Western, like 19th century capitalism, work is devoid of any kind of moral, moral component. It's something we're obligated to do. And so I think there, there's a shift with the New Deal to try to give work that has some sort of moral, moral component to it. Something that is not just providing money, but also giving something to the soul of, soul of workers. And that's kind of like the broader context

4:57where the FTP fits in. Yeah. And sort of this idea of, of work that means something. I think one

Backstage Comedies

5:05particular example that understandably theatre people would be really interested in is the actual work of putting on a show. Your book is divided into these, you know, kind of four main areas of focus, these different kinds of comedies that you perceive in the work offered by the FTP in the 1930s. And the first of these is what's called a backstage comedy. What were those? And what did they say about the business of working in the theatre? So the backstage comedies, I took that term kind of

5:37loosely from Jane Frewer's, you know, work on the self-referential comedies in, in film studies. And, but like applied that to this group of plays that I started to see that were performed by the FTP that kind of functioned like those self-referential musicals of the forties and fifties, right? That things like Bandwagon, right? That are advocating for the, the musical as, as an art form. And backstage comedies go back to really like the turn of the last century on Broadway. When you have the,

6:14when you have that kind of odd transition from the sort of musical that doesn't have like a narrative thread through it and the easiest way to concoct a narrative and then have those set pieces is to stage everything backstage, so to speak. And then the musical number becomes part of the show and you don't have to have like as tight a narrative overlap or explanation as to why people are singing and dancing because they're performing for the show. And also backstage comedies that kind of developed at the same time in

6:48musicals and comedies. People are more interested in, in theatre workers and celebrity. And so it becomes a kind of a scintillating, uh, expose, uh, of theatre life. Um, and that of course gets transferred to film too, right? You have gold diggers of 33 and, and other films that carry on that backstage musical tradition. I think in the context of the FTP, it, the FTP wasn't always produced. I'm going to talk about this a little bit later, but they weren't, weren't always producing plays of the moment. They would often

7:23stage plays that were a bit older, uh, and maybe out of fashion, out of fashion, the sense they weren't always doing these avant-garde, uh, political polemics. We often think of with the FTP, like revolt of the beavers or it can't happen here. Um, these living newspaper plays. So I think they staged it in part because they knew they were sort of popular, but I think in the context of the FTP, you know, it's, it's a controversial program. Um, even

7:53though it's, and we're seeing that now today with all these cuts to, uh, the federal government in the last couple years, uh, things like USAID, you know, USAID and among other things that are a micro, micro, micro, micro, micro, micro element of the budget and FTP is the same, but so I think the backstage comedies kind of function like those self-referential musicals where they're advocating for theater itself. You'll see in a lot

8:25of these plays, uh, actors really struggling, uh, to, uh, find work. Uh, they're struggling with the nature of what it means to put on a play. There's a play that I'm very fond of, uh, by Richard Maybaum called a moral entertainment, uh, Maybaum later becomes really famous. He he's one of the big producers of the James Bond films in the sixties and seventies. And it's about the, it's, it's not a great play, but I find it very charming. Um, it's about these, these, uh, theater actors in

8:58like colonial Massachusetts that run into this Puritan magistrate who puts them all in, arrest them for staging Romeo and Juliet. And he gives spoiler alert. He gives, he gives, um, the actors this choice of either work in the town or we're going to like chop off your hands. And most of the actors like, yeah, I'd rather, I'd rather eat than put on a play ever again. So I think they're ultimately advocating for, we need something to protect the labor of, of actors and to protect theater.

9:31Because again, like the depression is horrible to the theater industry. And, you know, like we're also seeing witch hunts right later in the decade with, uh, the rise of HUAC, uh, and investigations of the FTP for being just this embedded by communists. And so I think they're just sort of operating as we need to protect theater at all costs.

Countering Criticism with Middle-Class Plays

9:58You were just talking there about how the federal theater project often draws criticism for being too politically radical or at least being perceived as such. This is something we also talked about when we talked about, uh, it can't happen here. And there seemed like some programming choices that were hopefully, you know, aimed at counteracting that perception. Although two of the, uh, examples that you mention are by, uh, Eugene O'Neill and the socialism curious George S. Kaufman, which kind of

10:28seem like odd choices to counteract the criticism, but could you explain why they fit that choice to offer productions that were more focused on middle-class life? Yeah. I mean, Eugene O'Neill is one of like, he and, uh, Bernard Shaw, George Bernard Shaw, basically give their entire catalogs to the FTP. I think it like a hugely discounted rate or, or for free. Um, and they're probably the two most prominent, uh, dramatists in, uh, North America

11:00and Europe at that time, give or take, you know, however you're, you're ranking them. And it's interesting, like the most popular Eugene O'Neill play produced by the FTP is one that I think is the least produced. And the one that people don't think of as a Eugene O'Neill play is, uh, wilderness is his, his, his sort of comedy. I say sort of comedy. I don't find it that funny. Um, just I, I'm, I'm crapping on Timothy Chalamet and Eugene O'Neill in the same, the same podcast. So it is, uh, objectively one of the like low key saddest, uh, most depressed, uh, comedies you'll

11:37ever see. And that's maybe even before you realize it's by O'Neill. So that's very true. So I think broader context, like one of the things that makes the depression so bad, um, is it's one of the economic downturns that really affects the middle class and sort of contemporary society. And I guess you say panic of 1893 does too, but that's neither here nor there. So longer view, like the middle class, one of the things that makes the depression really hard is the middle class is hit very badly by the depression. Um, so it's not just blue collar

12:10workers facing unemployment and economic deprivation. It's the middle class. So I think there's a concerted effort by the FTP to stage plays that reflect that kind of middle-class life, that middle class position. And as you said, like as a comedy, it's, it's a very depressing comedy. Um, it is very sad in terms of his portrayal of, you know, sex work. It's this, these sort of alienated figures that live in this upper middle class, or I should, uh, yeah, upper middle class, you know, family in,

12:42in Connecticut. Um, the uncle is, uh, a man who is very much like struggling with employment and struggling with alcohol. And it's all kind of wrapped up in a nice, neat bow. And I think in that case, I think those productions of some, uh, from the work of a playwright who is kind of has a complicated under complicated politics that vacillates between leftism and centrism and reactionary politics later in life. And, but I think here's a play that like is really kind of

13:16questioning what is work, like what can work accomplish the most of the middle class through the 1920s have been kind of force fed this idea by doctors and, uh, cultural advocates that the solution to what ails you is more work. Work should be something that is joyful, um, that you should take pleasure in work. And yeah, you can have leisure, but ultimately you can combine the two, right? There's a kind of hedonistic work that should, uh, lift you up. And here, I think O'Neill is saying,

13:52like work has some limitations. There's only so much that work can do. It can't solve social issues. It can't solve, uh, personal issues. And with Kaufman, right. Again, I like that phrase, like socially, uh, socialist curious, whatever your great phrase was. Um, another guy whose politics are kind of hard to, to hit upon. He's certainly, you know, he's, I think by this point, he's in Hollywood working for the Hollywood studios. He's also producing plays that are kind of, uh, you know,

14:27that, that kind of comedy that's just like very middle of the road, um, to kind of not offend anybody, but also offend everybody. But I think in this case, like the plays, the play I write about as to the ladies, um, which is more forgotten, like 1920s plays. And again, it's, it's one that I think focuses, I know focuses quite a bit on this, this idea of who is being employed and what are the benefits to, uh, middle-class life and how it's impacting a family. That play features a husband,

15:02uh, who is incredibly irresponsible with money and his young wife, uh, who is the one that kind of is the breadwinner in essence. She's the one that solves like all his work conundrums and work problems. And again, for like broader, broader view, like, I think there's always this misnomer about the new deal among certainly students. And I think the general public is this super left-facing, uh, quasi communist, uh, series of programs. It's not, I'm certainly one of the people who's like,

15:35you know, it was pretty conservative overall, right? Most of the jobs given to, or most of the work provided or opportunity work opportunities provided work or for married men, right? Uh, middle-class or lower-class white men. And the FTP is one of the few, relatively few agencies that gives work to women. That's not like these kind of like stereotypical domestic projects. So here you have a play written by a guy whose politics are also a little bit hard to navigate, but in the

16:07course of FTP performance, it's the wife comes in and saves the day, right? Which I think is a kind of signal about the limitations of the new deal on the whole. So we've been talking about, uh, some of these plays and some of the things going on in the 1930s have, uh, you know, interesting, um, sort of parallels maybe to what's going on today. If you want to get a few more shots in it, Timothy Chalamet,

Comedies of Chance

16:29I totally support that by the way. Um, I got, I got a laundry list. Uh, there's, you know, a few other things that maybe, uh, resonate with, with stuff that's going on now in the 21st century, for example, um, you know, uh, legalized sports betting and a cryptocurrency speculation, things like that have maybe been in the news just a tiny bit in the last couple of years. You talk about how there's this kind of whole sub genre of plays that are all about forms of chance as a way of, uh, as a kind of work or a kind of labor. Uh, could you talk about those?

17:03Yeah. One of the interesting things I found in my research were, we'll talk about one of the other, you know, sub genres too, or genres, I guess, but these, these plays about chance and, and all the variations of chance, speculation, luck, whatever it may be. Luck and chance are these, these concepts that really become, I think, start to really show up in, in 19th century literature and all these discussions of, you should, you know, again, that the conflict, right. The tension between we want

17:39to, as a society advocate for putting your nose to the grindstone and working hard and, you know, finding material success through your hard labor. Um, we don't want to encourage, uh, speculation. We don't encourage, uh, putting all your money into like nebulous investments. And, uh, and there's also kind of a hatred of that, right. In American society. But then ironically, like how a lot of people have made money historically is like in these, these occurrences of speculation. So it's fine for

18:10some people to do it and not so fine for other people to do it is generally how American society has, has thought of it. And I think with a lot of plays of, of chance, it is in, it is, they're both like criticizing people who engage purely in speculation, right. But upper class speculation, those are the bad guys. If people from a disadvantaged group, right. Can find success with speculation, that's great. And that's wonderful. Like we want to see that it's sort of,

18:41you know, the, the, the pauper winning over the prince kind of, uh, kind of story. And these are issues that don't go away. Right. Um, and as you said, like we're now in a, in a, a space where, uh, yeah, uh, you can't watch. I love, I love watching hockey. Uh, I can't watch a game without like the updates on like, you know, what are the odds that this team is going to win the face off? Right. Or, and that's like being browbeaten into the, the broadcasts, um, and of course,

19:13cryptocurrency. Um, and, uh, do we have the, the guardrails in place to protect people? Uh, if those things fall asunder, you know, I do a lot of, um, teaching observations with, with my job. And sometimes I'll sit in the back of the class and look at what the students are doing. And every now that I'll just see like students just like with their, uh, FanDuel accounts open on their laptops. And I just, I worry about like this, I sound like a 19th century moralist in some ways, but,

19:47but I think in this case, like we've gone too far into the embrace of speculation in society. And here these plays are saying speculation is fine in certain, certain circumstances, but I think now we've gone too far in the other direction. Yeah. It's interesting just to that point you're making it. Uh, you talk about plays like George Kelly's the show off where maybe I'm, let me see if I understand this correctly. It almost seems as if there's a sort of, um, uh, an undertone or a, an implicit message that, Hey, look, the high level financier stuff, that's kind of how we got into

20:19this whole great depression mess in the first place. But if that's how it works, then, Hey, why not, uh, take advantage of that. If you're just a normal middle-class guy or even somebody more marginalized. Absolutely. And, and that's the tension, especially at George Kelly's, the, uh, the show off, which again is an older 1920s play that was really popular. And I think in the context of the depression, the main character, Aubrey Piper in the 1920s, he's sort of a braggart and,

20:50oh, he falls into success and he's kind of like a fun comedic figure. I think in the depression, I think that play, those performances are kind of pushing it toward, he's more of a dangerous figure. Right. I write in my book and I find, found this moment very fascinating that like one of the, the subplots of that play is Aubrey Piper's mother-in-law, uh, her husband dies and I'm blanking on her name all of a sudden. Um, and she gets a severance check from the insurance

21:23company. Uh, and there's a conversation between, uh, the insurance agent and herself about the need for security, right. The need to buttress yourself against chance and risk. And to me, always, I always thought of it as like a little bit of acknowledgement of the need for like social security and, you know, so many new deal programs that are like trying to prevent the worker against the inherent risk in, in the work, the workplace and in society. But by the same token, then you have the other character, Aubrey Piper in that play, um, is just reckless. He's gets into car collisions. He doesn't

21:59have insurance. He happens upon this big investment that saves the family. And I think in that case, depending on who's producing it, that character becomes an object of derision or someone that, okay, if you know how to game the system, it's fine to do it, but you need some level of security. You can't always count on the deus ex machina kind of moment of, Hey, you know, I, I found, I put a thousand dollars on team USA baseball to lose. Right. And now I have all the money in the

22:37world and this is great, but you're right. Like in the context of other productions that changes the meaning of Aubrey Piper's character. Yeah. I especially am interested. You, you go into some

Racial Dynamics in Comedies

22:52detail about a production of this play, the show off that, uh, one is done by a Yiddish theater unit of the FTP. And another one is done by one of the so-called Negro theater units of the FTP. And that also gets tied in with another play where the racial dynamics are particularly pronounced in some interesting and probably very uncomfortable ways. Uh, a play called Mississippi rainbow, uh, between those sort of unique, uh, productions of show off and Mississippi rainbow, what happens when

23:22these comedies of chance get filtered through a particular identity, especially in the case of the show off gets produced in Harlem with that Negro, the so-called Negro unit there. I think in that case, like there's the audience receives the play differently, right? It seems, um, and how the, how that character is produced changes, right. In the case of the Harlem unit, right. He, you know, Aubrey Piper is, he, like, it doesn't matter that he falls into this kind of success. Uh, they,

23:58there, there's some changes to that play done by that, by that unit that it's more centric on, it's more centered on like the black experience in the New York city area, in the Harlem area. Um, and so I think for audiences there, it, yeah, it's like that ability to gain agency over the white economic system, right. Uh, and the realization that sure, like he's a braggart and, but we kind of like him and he's able to game the system, right. By emulating white labor techniques

24:34and the case of Mississippi rainbow, right. Which is, as you said, like is kind of uncomfortable in a lot of, a lot of ways. It's written by a white playwright. It often, it often features heavily accented. We could say racist dialogue. It's often produced by a lot of the black theaters and the FTP, especially in Chicago, which is where I focus most of my, my research on. And that's really fascinating. Like I, one of the great discoveries brief aside that I found in my archival research

25:06was, uh, John Bernal who wrote Mississippi rainbow basically kept every Western union telegram, uh, that he sent in the 1930s, trying to get his plays produced, um, by the FTP, um, and gets in some like very vicious, um, arguments with all kinds of people. And is very just, it's a treasure trove of a window into someone's, someone's like racial understanding of the world. But I think in those cases, Mississippi rainbow, like the main character, um, just decides not to work and rather

25:43engages in like his long plan against spoiler alert is, um, he, he makes claim of land that a riverboat company is going to use. Uh, the riverboat company has to pay him a huge amount of money to get the land. But again, like engaging in white speculation, right? Land speculation. And for black audiences, it very much, again, I, what I found in terms of audience research with that play, different groups found that different people found that play problematic, or they found that humorous,

26:16or some people didn't like it. So it's not across the board, but it was fairly popular. But it does seem to be in certain productions, people see it as, again, like if we take those approaches, right, if we can take white speculative labor, white approaches to labor, we can gain a level of agency. It might be temporary because it hasn't removed any of the existing racist superstructures that we encounter as, you know, as, as black people in 1930s. But at least at that

26:49moment, it's a victory, uh, even if it's temporary. So they're very interesting in that, in that regard. And one other kind of sub genre that you talk about that seems very closely related to comedies

Con Artist Figures in Comedies

27:02of chance are comedies that feature some sort of con artist figure. And, and some of those seem to have been really popular with federal theater project audiences. What was going on there? Americans have a very interesting relationship with, with the con artist going back to like some of the canonical texts of American literature, uh, from Twain and Melville through so many of the comedies of the 1930s, even to today, right? Like if you can work the hustle, if you can work the con, depending on what

27:39that is, right? You can be, uh, something of a hero. I mean, like it's not a coincidence in my head that this is the era when pro wrestling starts to become very, very popular. And even in the 1930s, there are all these exposés of, I don't think this is real. And everyone's like, yeah, we know, we understand this isn't real. We don't care. So in that vein, I think there is like something embedded in the depression audience of looking for someone to pull, to pull one over, right?

28:14Again, like, kind of like you said, well, the comedy is a chance. Like if we can find victory using this language and using this, this approach to, you know, outwitting somebody else, that's great. So in a play like the Milky Way, uh, which later is a turned into, um, I think I, and I had the, the timeline wrong. There's a, there's a film version with Harold Lloyd that comes out right around the time that the FTP productions of the play come out, but yeah, a milkman accidentally knocks out the middleweight champ. Um, and then his boxing manager sends him on these staged fights

28:50across the country, right. To, to appear to be legitimate. And like, that's a harmless con in some ways. Yeah. People might be losing money betting on the fight and that becomes a key component later in the play. Um, but it's performative, right. And there's like a kind of mythology attached to that. Like everyone's like pro wrestling, everyone seems in on the joke. And every now and then there's somebody who's like, you realize this is fake, right? And again, the response is, we don't care. We like the story. My favorite play that I studied and the one I get the most questions about is

29:23another con play Connor's play called help yourself, which, um, is based on Austrian play has a really interesting sort of history and various translations. But in essence, that play is about a guy who just one day walks into a bank and says, I work here and is able to pull out of his ass, right. A kind of, you know, makes up a business proposal that gets accepted and he becomes, you know, the vice president of the bank. And, and the one hand, right. It's, it's cool. And again,

29:58if there's any industry people don't like in the 1930s, it's the banking industry for all number of reasons. And so you can say, of course, I like that. I like this story of the bankers being dumb and being duped and this guy fumbling his way, but not necessarily fumbling his way. It's like, he's able to succeed in business with understanding the language of business, taking his way through conversations. So there's a great line in the play

30:30where one of the characters is like, I don't remember you. He's like, Oh no, I was in the corner. I used to eat the sandwiches. And the other character is like, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And playing up that, like that, that falsity of performance we often all engage in on a day-to-day basis. So I think in that vein, it's great. And I think audiences will respond to that, but there's also in the back of it, like the flip side of that. We have things about the con that we love and we admire at the same token, the con is also dangerous. The con very easily can go from something

31:08that people are finding engaging and fun to something nefarious and dangerous. And I think audiences too understood the danger of this play is this seems very familiar. If this seems feasible, if someone could in theory do this, how, how safe is that institution? And we see that a lot in contemporary life. You know, it's funny, like when we first had, you know, going back to, it can't happen here. The danger of the con in politics, you know, there are any number of things written

31:44about how certain president, you know, certain political candidates borrow a lot of language from pro wrestling, a con via con and the real world ramifications of that, right. In, in health, in politics and everything. So it's kind of a prescient engagement, right. With things that haven't gone away, right. We love the con, but we're leery of the con. Yeah. You, you've been talking about these comedies and, and sort of just bringing it there to sort of the political resonances.

32:17It's interesting because as, as you know, the premise of your book is that we don't really think so much about the comedies produced by the federal theater project. We tend to think, I think often of the more sort of politically engaged, serious minded ones that were contemporary, maybe written as living newspapers or whatever, but here by contrast, not only is the genre somewhat different, but as you pointed out a few times, a lot of the plays that are being produced are from a decade or even earlier. How does this all kind of complicate our understanding of the federal theater project of

32:50the role that it played in American culture during the 1930s? That's a really good question. And I, I think the best response I can give is I think when I, when I talk about this or, you know, or, you know, when I talk to people about the depression or, or the new deal, I think there's a sort of a fallacy that this is something that was, you know, almost a hundred years ago that it's, it's a matter of fact. It's, it's something that was passed and there was no pushback to it. And again, like it's,

33:27historically inaccurate as, as a cultural historian, I like the nuance, you know, it's not as though Roosevelt had a complete, it wasn't like it was a grand plan, but also not like it was a bunch of things that did not work and were contradictory in various programs. These programs were often very controversial, right? There was a huge amount of blowback, right? And pushback from democratic and conservative and leftists and fascists in the, in the United States at this time. And so I think a lot

34:04of these plays are dealing with like these larger anxieties that I don't know that get carried over in the most quote unquote serious plays in the same, the same vein. Comedy ultimately, I think sometimes at its root can hide a lot of anxiety. Um, sometimes the anxiety is very upfront. Uh, my wife and I went to go see a movie, uh, the other day and one of the trailers was for the new, uh, scary movie, uh,

34:34that's coming out at some point this summer. And the trailer, it bothered me a lot because a lot of the jokes being promoted and a lot of the discourse around that film is, oh, this is a chance to be actually funny again, or to not to, you know, there's no woke in this comedy. And I think at times comedy can be like too conservative and too confrontational. And I think those, like this kind of larger anxieties are, are full on display. I think in a lot of these plays, the, the comedy or

35:06the, the anxiety and the tension about what the new deal is doing, what the great, what the response of government should be, what is my response in terms of my connection to labor? I mean, it's more subtle in some, in some regards, right? It's more complicated. Um, just as on the one hand, you can have a character, uh, pull off this kind of elaborate con in the bank, as you can see that as a kind of very clear condemnation of the banking industry and a moment of uplift for, for the worker, I think also

35:41there's a moment of, has anything changed? If this is feasible, you have into the ladies, you have a character who is inept at his, at his job and succeeds in spite of any kind of recognition of the woman, the woman who's really doing it. And then another place, like there's a kind of questioning of the effectiveness, right. Of again, look to the ladies, like how effective is, are these programs of only male work is getting privileged? What else needs to be accomplished? And so I think there are

36:12in many ways, like very subtle kind of interrogations of life in the new deal and life in the depression. And I think maybe also a concern of, again, like the programs in the new deal, I think for a long time, we have presumed that they are stable, that they are untouchable. And what we're starting to see in the United States is very quickly and very slowly, a lot of this programs or like that general approach

36:44of government providing some security to people is being eroded. And I think now for us, as we look back at these plays, we need to have this sort of conversation, that realization that what was presumed or what has been worked through in the depression is, might be temporary. And if that's the case, do we need to have a kind of inversion of help yourself, right? Do we need to have a new realization that there needs to

37:14be a new barrier to the institution or a new change to the institution? What does that look like? But I think they complicate like our understanding of the new deal. I think they show us that these things were not, were not taken at, were not presumed to be correct. And I think ultimately they show us that we may have to go back to like reworking those programs or having new, new approaches, because I think we're in a kind of an inversion of the depression right now.

37:45We'll post additional information about the plays Paul talks about in this episode, as well as more info about his book, All Play and No Work, American Work Ideals and the Comic Plays of the Federal Theater Project. Paul, thanks for expanding our sense of the Federal Theater Project and all the plays that it produced. Thanks for having me back, Michael. This is, this was great. If you'd like to continue today's conversation, please visit theaterhistorypodcast.net

38:19and follow at theaterhistorypodcast on social media. Please note that that's theater spelled T-H-E-A-T-R-E. Our theme music is The Black Crook Gallop, which comes to us courtesy of the New York Public Library Libretto Project and Adam Roberts. Thanks as well to Tip Kress, who designed our logo. And finally, thank you for listening.