SAN FRANCISCO, April 9, 2010—San Francisco State University graduate drama students use puppets, film and music to revive a “lost” play about the Works Progress Administration in Money: A Comedy with Music. SF State Theatre Arts Professor Joel Schechter began the project after finding the play, which was originally planned for completion in 1937 by associates of the Federal Theatre Project.
SF State drama students write Money, a revived 1937 musical about financial crises
The new play moves from Brazil to New York, with scenes of wealth and bankruptcy, accompanied by cabaret songs, chicanery and financial chaos. Money incorporates puppetry, film clips, news headlines, music, circus and more as production elements to explore ideas about capitalism, supply and demand, and the burning question of happiness.
“The San Francisco State graduate drama students who wrote this new 1930s play learned from the past that artists in our country were socially constructive, resourceful and supported by the public in a difficult economic period,” Schechter says. “I think they wanted to commemorate that WPA’s spirit of creativity and collaboration, and to revive it with comedy, song and some historical essays that keep the Federal Theatre’s practices alive.”
The play was developed this year, but its origins are in the Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project from the 1930s. The cast of characters includes such infamous and historic figures as Stalin and Hitler, Huey Long and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, along with a 17th-century Elizabethan and a W.C. Fields-like banker.
Inspired by an abandoned Living Newspaper play outline, Money is now being developed fully and discussed in a series of essays written by advanced graduate students in Drama. James DeMaiolo and Ashley Telleen are now coordinating and editing script revisions, and Rebecca Potter is assisting on songs.
The Federal Theatre Project first presented the Living Newspaper form to American audiences in the 1930s, under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which began April 8, 1935. As a government unemployment relief agency, the WPA created 8.5 million new jobs for Americans in the Great Depression, including new work for newspaper reporters who wrote the first Federal Theatre’s Living Newspapers.
Through its comic scenes and songs, Money addresses some of the financial crises that the United States faced 75 years ago, and which deserve recognition in this period of economic uncertainty. The play provides an occasion to commemorate past achievements of the WPA and the Federal Theatre in solving national crises, and invites discussion about comparable social and artistic programs in the 21st century.
San Francisco State’s graduate students will introduce their new work at free public readings early next fall on campus and at other locations.
For more information, contact Professor Schechter at (415) 338-1331 or jschech@sfsu.edu.
Julia Halprin Jackson, an M.F.A. candidate in Creative Writing at SF State, and Professor Joel Schechter compiled this press release.
Contact: Matt Itelson, (415) 338-1442, matti@sfsu.edu, College of Creative Arts, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave., San Francisco, Calif. 94132