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WPA Federal Theatre Project production, Seattle, ca. 1937
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| Title | WPA Federal Theatre Project production, Seattle, ca. 1937 |
| Photographer | Unknown |
| Date | ca. 1937 |
| Caption | The Federal Theatre Project was a program of the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal. It employed actors and other theater professionals and often explored progressive ideas and new types of theater. This made it suspect in the eyes of some, leading to the program's shutdown in 1939 after accusations of Communist sympathies.
"... Federal Theatre was organized out of WPA efforts to create, nationally, jobs for the professional actors who were out of work as a result of the Depression. It was quite a struggle to get the Seattle Negro Repertory Theater started. Florence and Burton James were the organizers. A family friend heard about this Theater and he called to tell me about auditions being held at the YMCA which at that time was on 21st and Madison, so I went over and I sang, and I read for "Momma Noah." I had three weeks to learn the part, and I did. We presented that play and some others at the Playhouse on University Way. I was able to get on WPA with permanent status after about three months. The pay was a BIG eighty dollars a month. And believe It or not eighty dollars a month WAS a very good salary; you could rent a house and still have money left over to take care of other things. We did "Stevedore, " "Swing, Gates, Swing, " "Waiting for Lefty, " "It Can't Happen Here, " and many more plays, and Joe Staton and Herman Moore correlated all poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar Into an "Evening With Dunbar." They had a party scene, the "Ante-Bellum Sermon, " and set one of the poems to music. There was a choir, and Syvilla Fort taught dance movements. After some years, we moved to a small theater on Atlantic Street. It was an old movie house and we stayed there to the bitter end... when it was decided that there should be no more theater. We did Children's Theater there and the kids really enjoyed it. But we ran into things we hadn't encountered before. There had been no caricatures made of Negroes before that, but we ran into this business of the publicity man making caricatures to put on the front of the theater for "Androcles and the Lion" and we all protested very DEFINITELY, and they had to remove them, 'cause we weren't going to even do the show. All through the Negro Theater the head people were white, and we were reviewed by white papers, they seemed to enjoy it, perhaps because it was a unique thing happening In Seattle, but we didn't get the caricatures there. We did some vaudeville and we traveled and performed in various places in western Washington. You'd study the meaning of the play, the character... what every movement meant. It's the same thing that they do in Black Arts West now. It tickles me I say, 'Well they haven't changed.' But this is drama."
From an interview with Sara Jackson - by Esther Mumford |
| Notes | Pictured here is Seattle's Negro Repertory Company. The production is probably "Black Empire, " a play about the post-revolutionary Haitian government. Actors and dancers included Joe Staton, Perry Gilliam, Doris Booker, Howard Briggs, Mary Goodman, Mary Bigman, Alice Powell, Charlise Monroe, Sarai Green. They were paid $85 a month. |
| Subjects | Theatrical productions--Washington (State)--Seattle
Actors--Washington (State)--Seattle
Costumes--Washington (State)--Seattle
Federal Theatre Project (U.S.)
Public service employment--Washington (State)--Seattle
African Americans--Washington (State)--Seattle
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| Location | United States--Washington (State)--Seattle |
| Digital Collection | Black Heritage Society Collection |
| Image Number | 2002.05.2.01D |
| Ordering Information | To order a reproduction or inquire about permissions, contact: TheBoard@blackheritagewa.org. Please cite the Image Number. |
| Repository | The Black Heritage Society of Washington State, Inc. |
| Physical Description | 1 photographic print: b&w; 3 1/4 x 4 1/2 in. |
| Type | Image |
| Digital Reproduction Information | Scanned as a 3000 pixel TIFF image in 8-bit grayscale, resized to 640 pixels in the longest dimension and compressed into JPEG format using Photoshop 6.0 and its JPEG quality measurement 3. |
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