Art Attack

Looking for a good laugh? Marc Acito’s latest book, Attack of the Theater People, has been out for a few months, but it’s the perfect summer read for drama lovers with some time to spend on the beach. And while it’s worth buying for the cover art alone, those who peek inside will be transported to one of the most dreaded eras of Broadway: the 1980s.

The novel follows Edward Zanni, a “too Jazz hands for Julliard” Jersey boy, as he makes his way in New York City after being “freed” from drama school by Julliard Grande Dame Marian Seldes. What follows is a mad farcical comedy that takes Edward from Ramen to ruin, then briefly to Broadway via the Starlight Express, and back again over the course of a year in the big city.

Not everything in the book works. Excessive quips like “Mama said there’d be gays like this” and “Edward Standard Time” prove tedious; but when Acito is funny, he is truly hilarious. A high point of the book recounts a rehearsal for The Music Man?, a Brechtian adaptation of the Meredith Willson musical with heavy inspiration from Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. The whole ordeal is led by Marcus, the book’s self-appointed misunderstood genius, who will seem far too familiar to many readers. But don’t let him stop you from attacking this book!

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While Americans are in the midst of economic woes, the well-timed arrival of Susan Quinn’s Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times recalls even harder times that miraculously, although briefly, brought about America’s only National Theatre: The Federal Theatre Project, the branch of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) dedicated to providing work for unemployed actors, directors, designers, and technicians — and which contributed some of the most important innovations and voices to the American stage since its inception.

Quinn recounts the Federal Theatre’s four short years with a dramatic flair worthy of her subjects. Characters like Federal Theatre’s Director, Hallie Flanagan, Representative Martin Dies of Texas, and the great actor-director Orson Welles move seamlessly in and out of Quinn’s narrative spotlight. Heroes and villains clearly emerge, with Flanagan and her fledgling Federal Theatre pitted against the philistine anti-New Deal Congressmen in Washington.

Like in any well-written play, Furious Improvisation exposes us to our heroes’ weaknesses. Along with being a hard-working genius, Welles is portrayed as arrogant and self-aggrandizing. The themes of the Federal Theatre’s plays are often blatantly leftist: Quinn illuminates this fact in several passages, including one concerning a children’s play called The Revolt of the Beavers, in which a group of worker beavers lead an armed revolt against their cruel beaver overlord. Indeed, it is easy to see how the Federal Theatre became an easy target for Congressional commie-hunters.

Yet, out of the ashes of that tragedy emerged some of the most colorful artists in our nation’s history, including Marc Blitzstein, John Houseman, and Arthur Miller. However, those looking for detailed descriptions of lost Federal Theatre productions will be disappointed as Quinn chooses to highlight only a few of the most famous productions, including Ethiopia, It Can’t Happen Here, and the fabled The Cradle will Rock.

Nonetheless, Quinn should be lauded especially for two points. First, she establishes, with great detail, the context in which the Federal Theatre Project worked. Plenty of attention is paid to the national mood and events in Washington and how those events directly affected how Flanagan chose which plays to produce. Second, ample space is given to projects outside New York City, giving credit where credit is due — and rarely done — to America’s heartland.

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Theater lovers seeking to add to their library have a number of recent releases to choose from: Thomas Hischak’s Oxford Companion to the American Musical, which weighs in at three pounds and 960 pages, is the kind of comprehensive reference every bookshelf should have; Wallace Shawn just published a pairing of two of his early one-act plays, A Thought in Three Parts and the never-before-published Our Late Night; Will Eno also has a new collection, The Flu Season and Other Plays, which includes Tragedy: A Tragedy and Intermission along with the titular work; Sarah Ruhl’s latest play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, is now in print, as is the complete libretto to Rent, just in time for the closing of the original Broadway production on September 7.