Photo by Michael Schaffer
Hallie, a Library Premiere
Hallie Flanagan. Chances are you’ve never heard of her, but she - or rather the Depression-era Federal Theatre Project she created as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Works Progress Administration - reached millions across the country.
A feisty redhead, full of energy, wry humor, and passion, she was part firebrand, part playwright, and part social worker. She was dedicated to her art and to improving the lives of the less fortunate. And like many who reach the top, she made decisions she would later come to question. Success came at great personal cost to the girl born Hallie Ferguson in South Dakota, 1890.
Hallie’s story is the subject of a new two-act play by Daniel Jacobs and Susan Quinn who came down to Princeton from their home in Brookline, Mass., for a staged reading by The Poquelin Players on Sunday, March 27, at the Princeton Public Library.
The play is a first for biographer Quinn and her psychiatrist husband Jacobs, a collaboration that came about when Quinn began working on a biography of Flanagan that expanded into a history of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times [Walker Publishing, 2008].
Quinn’s book is a riveting read, packed with information about a progressive project that began in 1935 and gave jobs to countless theater people: performers, stagehands, carpenters, seamstresses, painters, operas singers, jazz musicians, and aging vaudevillians. It entertained and, through “Living Newspapers” written from news clippings on hot button issues of the day, informed millions in cities and rural communities across the nation until it fell afoul of ‑ and was ultimately scuppered by ‑ the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1939.
“She was an amazing woman,” says Quinn, who is no stranger to amazing women, having written a biography of pioneering psychoanalyst Karen Horney (Perseus, 1987), and Marie Curie, A Life, (Perseus, 1995) about the famed Nobel scientist.
Chances are you’ll hear more about Hallie and her success in bringing theater to a majority of the American public who had never experienced it. The play received an enthusiastic standing ovation from the Princeton audience who stayed on for a Q&A session with the performers and the playwrights.
Sunday’s presentation opened with an effective projection of images evoking the “Grapes of Wrath” backdrop to the Federal Theatre Project: images of dust; overall-clad out-of-work men riding the rails; dirt-smeared hungry children; gaunt, impassive parents. A shot of F.D.R., accompanied by rousing music, signaled change: putting people to work in logging camps and “Yes We Can” programs. Posters flitted across the screen interspersed with clips from several FTP productions: Orson Welles and Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 musical, “The Cradle Will Rock,” and the Welles-directed 1935 first all-black production of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” for the FTP’s “Negro Theatre Unit.” Known as the “voodoo Macbeth” ‑ the three witches were voodoo priestesses (check it out on YouTube) ‑ it is set in 19th century Haiti.
Here’s Paul Robeson surrounded by working men and singing his heart out. Here too is Welles, barely in his twenties, angry and electrifying. It’s an anger that would later be turned upon Hallie when she had to make tough decisions and cut back on programs. “You’ve become an apologist for government naysayers,” he accused her.
Sunday’s event was free, but Michael Schaffer’s short documentary alone would have been worth the price of a theater ticket. Schaffer hails from Boston where he is a prize-winning film and video producer. This is his first collaboration with the playwrights and with The Poquelin Players. His work gives context to Derry Light’s opening monologue as Hallie – a one-sided conversation with an off-stage doctor in the Austen Riggs Psychiatric Clinic where Flanagan is suffering from early onset Parkinson’s Disease and depression at age 58.
Images take us to Austen Riggs in Stockbridge, Mass. It is August 1948 and the questions put to Hallie by her doctor echo those of a decade earlier. This time, however, as Hallie wryly observes, the question is: “Are you now or have you ever been neurotic?” She may be depressed but she is still as quick-witted as when she responded to her HUAC interrogator: “My name is Hallie Flanagan, I am director of the Federal Theatre Project and I am concerned with combating American inactivity.”
Memories circle in Hallie’s mind like “a carousel of painted horses” as she recalls the people of her past, dead husbands, dead friends, her dead child, and stories from her childhood such as the time her father strung individual apples on a bare tree and she awoke to find it bearing fruit out of season. Schaffer has apples magically appearing on the tree outside Hallie’s window, like a scene from the Wizard of Oz (appropriately enough). Her father told her: “If reality appears grim, change it.”
“Hallie is searching for answers,” says Ms. Quinn. “Why did so many people abandon her? She had an important career with tremendous power and influence and now she is losing it.”
Though focused on the Great Depression and dealing with a poignant subject, as Hallie puts it: “Who hasn’t had a hard life; mine’s been no picnic,” the play is leavened with much humor, as when Southern Congressman Joseph Starnes “accuses” Hallie of spreading sexual and racial equality. Starnes queries the communist leanings of “this Marlowe feller.” The playwright in question is of course Shakespeare contemporary Christopher Marlowe. The press had a field day, describing Senator Starnes as “the only man who could detect a communist at three centuries!”
Derry Light subtly portrays the beginnings of Hallie’s Parkinson’s with a tremor of the hand, and the play shifts deftly between Hallie’s present, including visits from her son (who also has conversations with the off-stage doctor), and hermemories.
Using the autobiography Hallie wrote at the encouragement of her Austen Riggs doctor, Quinn and Jacobs have chosen this period for Hallie to reflect upon her life. It’s a dramatic tale. In her twenties, she lost her young husband to tuberculosis ‑ her second husband, younger than she, would later die of a heart attack. Her seven-year-old son, Jack, died of spinal meningitis. Leaving her younger son in the care of her parents, she took up opportunities to study playwriting at Harvard and to travel abroad as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1926. She met T.S. Eliot in England, Pirandello in Italy and Stanislavsky in Russia. “I was in love with it all, she says, “It was writing about Russian theater that got me into trouble, but I don’t believe it’s un-American to admire good theater wherever it occurs.”
Through all her misfortunes and the son whose alcoholism plagues her later years, one thing remains: the theater never let her down. “Without the theater, I would have died,” she says. As Hallie questions and remembers, she is tormented by her son as he deals with his own issues of abandonment. The Christmases she recalls fondly are remembered as anything but, by the adult Fred who would later commit suicide just six months before his mother died in 1969.
At the end of the performance on Sunday, the authors sought and received valuable feedback about their work, which they say will be used to refine the play for anticipated future full-scale production. No knowing when or where that will be, but my guess is that it won’t be long before we hear more of Hallie.
There was some expression of the view that perhaps a little too much time was given to Fred and his criticisms of his mother. And it did seem a tad harsh to witness family linen being laundered in public when Hallie had already suffered such personal losses besides the indignities of HUAC. But the authors persuasively argued their case for choosing Fred as witness to the price Hallie paid for success. One wonders, however, whether less of Fred and more of her relationship with Orson Welles might better serve the play.
The Poquelin Players, founded and directed by Dick Swain, are seasoned performers who have been together, with some cast changes, for 15 years. Each of The Poquelin Players (incidentally, the name refers to Moliere) plays multiple roles. Swain is well known in Princeton where he’s been active in the arts for over 30 years. A professor of art history at Rider University, he’s also a musician and cabaret performer. In Hallie, he played Harry Hopkins, the man who tapped Hallie to lead the FTP, as well as Congressman Joseph Starnes, Senator Martin Dies, and others. Princeton’s own Derry Light, often seen at McCarter Theatre, is a core member of the group. Princeton High School alumnus Patrick Arnheim played Fred. Hopewell resident Bill Bunting performed as Hallie’s first and second husbands, Murray Flanagan and Phil Davis, as well as the flamboyant Welles. Ewing resident Jamie Micallef, who teaches French in West Windsor-Plainsboro, played the role of Ms. Flanagan’s secretary with gusto.
This collaboration came about when Swain met Quinn and the two discovered they’d been in shows together at Oberlin College back in the day. After reading Quinn’s book, Swain told Quinn: “You know, I have an acting troupe in Princeton,” to which Quinn replied, “Well, as it happens, I have just written a play.” And good things came to pass.
Clearly a match meant to be. A fully-fledged production would surely be something to look forward to. Chances are you’ll be hearing more of Hallie!
About the Author
Linda Arntzenius has been a freelance writer for over two decades. In Princeton, her byline appears in such publications as The Princeton Packet, Town Topics, and Princeton Magazine. She is a member of the Princeton Research Forum and author of Images of America: Institute for Advanced Study, a pictorial history of the intellectual home of Einstein, Oppenheimer, von Neumann et al.
