New York Theater: “One of the things we’re talking about internally has been the way in which the scale of this catastrophe — a wholesale shutting down of the field — is only really comparable is the Great Depression. We’re looking at 20 percent or higher unemployment! So what lessons can we find in the Federal Theater Project? Under the New Deal, the government’s super-spending effort that put America back to work in the ’30s, the Federal Theater Project only accounted for 0.5 percent of the Works Progress Administration spending, which, if you applied that to the current bailout, would come to $10 billion.
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A new federal theatre project would be great. I would love to see the federal government supporting the theatre industry financially. But I really see no world under the current government where this will happen which makes me so sad. When theatres shut down and the National Theatre of London started releasing their shows online, I watched almost all of them, and I really did start thinking about why America doesn’t have a national theatre, and what it would take for us to get a federally funded theatre. And I really think one theatre is not what the US needs, I think the federal theatre project is really what we need. We need federal support of theatres across the country right now to help this art and part of our culture not die with the pandemic. I think that it is so saddening and disheartening to see how few people of power value theatre and the arts are actually beneficial to our society and the lives of people. I really like don’t know what we have to do to get people to realize the value of theatre. I feel like there have been so many scholarly papers about it and still, it seems so few people actually acknowledge its value.
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