Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Tony, Tony, Tony!

Nominees for this year's Tony Awards were announced today, making this an ideal time to highlight some great books about the theater!

One could easily argue that the entire English-speaking world traces some of its lineage back to the London stage. Of course most theaters now have a myriad of influences, but London's pull is strong, and no place in the western tradition has a longer history of such a wide array of aspects of the dramatic craft: performance, playwriting, dramatic instruction, theater management or, on the other hand, of the drama's influence on society. But if you're curious about London's theater history, it's hard to know what to put at the top of your reading list. Search no longer, friends, I have the book for you! It's London Theatre: From the Globe to the National, in which James Roose-Evans hits the highlights of London stage history: Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, the suppression of the theater during the Commonwealth period, the Old Price Riots of 1809, the patent theaters that had monopolies on performing “serious” plays, and many other fascinating subjects.

The Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project was intended partly to employ actors, playwrights, and other theater professionals during the Great Depression, but it also aimed to bring the diversion and inspiration of the theater to regular people across America. As Susan Quinn explains in her history Furious Improvisation, the FTP brought dozens of new and experimental plays to diverse audiences all over the country, tackled social and political issues of the day, and presented pioneering reinventions of classics like Macbeth with all-Black casts. But this vital project in the development of the American theater ended when the House Un-American Activities Committee shut the Federal Theatre Project down in 1939.

However, the 1930s wasn't the last period of innovation on the American stage. In the late 1950s, the New York City neighborhood of Greenwich Village was host to a new development in theater when Café Cino, a small coffeehouse, opened and began featuring poetry readings and actors performing scenes. This fertile ground for experimental dramatic work eventually led to a movement of edgy new theater that came to be known as Off-Off-Broadway. David A. Crespy's Off-Off-Broadway Explosion explains how this revolution took off, and introduces the visionary young playwrights (Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka, and many others) who were the creative force behind the movement. And, in a concluding chapter, Crespy gives advice to aspiring playwrights, actors, and others who want to create their own space for experimental theater work – hopefully facilitating new artistic revolutions in our near future!

Hard Times

One thing the economic downturn has done is inspire people to be creative about saving money. Cooking at home, trading or bartering goods and services, and learning new practical skills are all on our minds right now. I don't want to draw too sharp of a comparison between our current predicament and the Great Depression of the 1930s, but the library has been getting some new books that give us a window into daily life during that period, and, well, I gotta share some of them with you!

If you want a feel for what life was like in some other place and time, a book of documentary photographs is a darned good place to start. Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field brings together a collection of photographs from Lange's 1939 trips to photograph regular people who were hard hit by the Depression in California, the Pacific Northwest, and North Carolina. The photographs, which are published here for the first time, include portraits, landscapes, and scenes of communities, and many are truly stunning.  Author Anne Whiston Spirn's history of Lange's work as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration is also fascinating.

The Great Depression was great in many senses – one was that it affected people all over the globe. Australians were seriously hard hit, and as unemployment rose and consumer spending dropped, many people faced eviction and homelessness. Iain MacIntyre's brief, beautifully made zine Lock out the Landlords chronicles the history of the Australian eviction resistance movement, illustrated with historic photographs and brief excerpts from contemporary newspaper reports on housing-related grassroots activism.

Back here in Oregon, Elaine Dahl Rohse's Depression-era childhood was spent on a cattle ranch near Monument, in Grant County. Her memoir Poverty Wasn't Painful recalls those years with humor and good grace about the difficulties of the era. Rohse started her writing career as a newspaper journalist, and her short, breezy chapters read like a newspaper column – interesting, opinionated, and friendly – and she discusses a wide-ranging array of topics: playing high school basketball; huckleberry picking; the daily chore of washing dishes; her mom's careful husbanding of bacon fat; and many, many more.

Great Depression Film Festival

People are really talking about our current economic downturn. We're talking about it amongst our friends and family and coworkers, people discuss it on the bus, and it's an agenda item in meetings of community organizations and businesses alike. And it's in the news – so much so, in fact, that many news websites have special sections devoted to the economic crisis, including the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times.  Like a lot of people, I've been drawing some parallels between what's happening now and the Great Depression my grandparents lived through 75 years ago. What was life like then, for regular average Americans? What happened when the bottom fell out of a town's main industry, when young people couldn't find any work at all, or when economic pressures caused families to disintegrate? Maybe the best place to find out is at the movies!

There are some films about the Great Depression, like Bonnie and Clyde, The Color Purple, The Grapes of Wrath, and Cradle Will Rock, which are perennially popular, and if you want to get them from the library, you'll have to wait in line. But there are others, great films that can give you a little perspective on what the great depression of the 1930s was like without having to get on a long waiting list. Here are a few that I like – all of them have loftier themes than mere economic woes, but each film has a setting that's richly evocative of the social challenges of the Great Depression: the prevalence of crime; the extreme shortage of honest, steady work; the temptations of drink and drugs; and many other details of daily life are important elements of all three stories.

The first little gem I'd like to share is the rather scandalous 1931 film Night Nurse. The film begins as Lora Hart (Barbara Stanwyck) manipulates the rules to get a position as a student in a nursing program at a local hospital. The story follows her through her training and to her first job, caring for two sick children whose mother is a drunken, partying socialite. Lora herself is no beacon of moral upstandingness, but her commitment to her profession is sincere and she finds it tested when she begins to realize that she is the only person in her employers wild, boozy household who has any genuine concern for the two children's welfare. (The library's copy of Night Nurse is part of the Forbidden Hollywood Collection, and comes packaged with several other racy early 1930s films.)

For those of you who like a film that exposes the seamy underbelly of life, without being too desperate or tragic, Paper Moon is just the ticket. Con man Moses Pray (Ryan O'Neal) has agreed to deliver recently-orphaned Addie Loggins (Tatum O'Neal) to her aunt's care, but their interest in their destination wanes after Addie becomes a partner in Moses's confidence schemes. Eventually they tangle with a bootlegger who turns out to have powerful connections, and Moses has to figure out how to run from the law without compromising Addie's safety.

But if you crave adventure, daring deeds, and excitement, I'd recommend O Brother, Where Art Thou? Three escaped convicts set out after $1.2 million dollars that one of them, Everett (George Clooney), claims to have stolen and set by before he went to prison – but they're in a hurry because the treasure will be buried under a lake that's about to be created when a new hydroelectric project is brought on line. At the same time, Everett is trying to get back to his wife and family. Along the way they record a hit country song, help rob a bank, and stumble on a meeting of the local Ku Klux Klan, and, well I can't even begin to enumerate all the trouble they get in!