Good Morning POU! Today let’s learn about the creative director of The Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project.
Rose McClendon (August 27, 1884 – July 12, 1936) was a leading African-American Broadway actress of the 1920s. A founder of the Negro People’s Theatre, she guided the creation of the Federal Theatre Project‘s African American theatre units nationwide and briefly co-directed the New York Negro Theater Unit.
Rose McClendon was born as Rosalie Virginia Scott in Greenville, South Carolina, and as a child relocated to New York City. She started acting in church plays in her youth. She became a professional actress in her thirties, after winning a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Art.
At age 20 she was married to Dr. Henry Pruden McClendon, a chiropractor.
Her first notable role came in Deep River, a “native opera with jazz”, in 1926. In addition to acting, she also directed several plays at the Harlem Experimental Theatre. She appeared in the 1927 Pulitzer Prize-winning play In Abraham’s Bosom by Paul Green. In 1931, she was in another Paul Green play on Broadway, The House of Connelly, which was the first production by the Group Theatre, directed by Lee Strasberg.
McClendon was a contemporary of Paul Robeson, Ethel Barrymore, Lynn Fontanne and Langston Hughes, who created a character for her in his 1935 play, Mulatto.
As a showcase for McClendon, Countee Cullen adapted Euripides’ tragedy Medea, working with producer John Houseman, composer Virgil Thomson and production designer Chick Austin. Although the sets and costumes had been ready for months, by the end of 1934 McClendon had fallen ill and the project was never realized.
Her talent extended to directing as well as acting. In 1935 she co-founded, with Dick Campbell, the Negro People’s Theatre in Harlem. More than 4,000 people attended its first production, an adaptation of Clifford Odets‘ Waiting for Lefty, and the group was organized in permanent form in June.
The Negro People’s Theatre directly inspired the Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project, which was created in 1935 under McClendon’s supervision. Under her guidance units were created in Seattle, Hartford, Philadelphia, Newark, Los Angeles, Boston, Raleigh, Birmingham, San Francisco and Chicago as well as New York. She served as liaison to numerous organizations and individuals who became involved in the Federal Theatre Project, including Harry Edward, Carlton Moss and Edna Thomas. McClendon advised national director Hallie Flanagan that the project should begin under experienced direction and selected John Houseman to co-direct the unit.
In December 1935, McClendon was forced to leave the cast of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto after she became critically ill with pleurisy. McClendon was to have portrayed Lady Macbeth in Orson Welles‘s Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth (1936), but due to her continuing illness Edna Thomas played the role. Her condition later developed into pneumonia, and McClendon died at her home on July 12, 1936.
The “Negro Units” of the Federal Theatre Project were headed by Rose McClendon and it was her decision to bring on John Houseman, a theatre producer who was able to get actor/director Orson Welles to work with the unit. (10 percent of the Federal Theatre Project budget could be used to pay non-relief workers). There were Negro units in many cities, but the most notorious was New York’s: it produced a Swing Mikado, a swing version of the Gilbert and Sullivan show, Negro spokesman and author W. E. B. DuBois’s Haiti, and, perhaps the most famous, the Voodoo Macbeth, for which Welles brought in actual “witch doctors” from the Caribbean.
The Negro Repertory Company was the most active unit of Seattle’s Federal Theatre Project and produced some of the most innovative and controversial theater. Historian Rena Fraden states that Seattle’s Negro unit mounted “some of the most experimental of productions of any Negro unit,” and was considered by many to be the most interesting part of Seattle’s Federal Theatre Project. The NRC’s first production was Noah, a whimsical gospel chorus musical which opened on April 28, 1936. This was followed by Stevedore, a Marxist-themed piece of social realism concerning a black union organizer unjustly accused of raping a white woman. The cast was interracial. Audiences responded strongly, even spontaneously rising up and surging onstage to join the cast for the climactic finale at one of the performances.
Big White Fog is a play by American playwright Theodore Ward and his first major work. The play follows the fictional Mason family across three generations between 1922 and 1933. Half of the family supports a return to Africa and Garveyism, while the other half of the family seeks the American Dream. Completed in 1937, it was first produced by the Negro Unit of the Chicago Federal Theatre Project in 1938 at the Great Northern Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.
The End of the FTP
In May 1938, Martin Dies Jr., director of The House Committee on Un-American Activities specifically targeted the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project. Assailing Flanagan’s professional character and political affiliations, the committee heard testimony from former Federal Theatre Project members who were unhappy with their tenure with the project. Flanagan testified that the FTP was pro-American insofar as the work celebrated the constitutional freedoms of speech and expression to address the relevant and pressing concerns of its citizens.
Citing the Federal Theatre’s call for racial equality, impending war, and further perpetuating the rumor that the FTP was a front for radical and communist activities, Congress ended federal funding as of June 30, 1939, immediately putting 8,000 people out of work across the country. Although the overall financial cost of the FTP was minuscule in the grand scheme of the WPA’s budget, Congress determined that the average American did not consider theater a viable recipient of their tax dollars. Following the decision, Flanagan’s stepdaughter, Joanne Bentley quoted an unnamed Congressmen saying “Culture! What the Hell—Let ’em have a pick and shovel!”