The issue of archival has always been contentious within the theater community. Not only does there persist the question of how one goes about archiving theater (especially when centuries of iconic productions have already been lost to the ages), there are individuals who believe that theater isn’t meant to be preserved. The script is written down, they argue, and to leave future directors and actors any more traces of previous productions interferes in the creation of new art. To which a counterpoint is presented of, how else can the evolution of theatrical practices be examined? With this context, it isn’t a wonder why the Federal Theater Project became such a large target for controversy.
What these arguments come to a head on more than anything else is public accessibility. Theater is haunted by an air of elitism that doesn’t hang as heavy over art forms like music or film. The FTP wasn’t immune, even as certain projects sought to bridge this gap, thanks to internal conflicts of interest among the people running the show. Some wanted everything to remain within the professional circuit, while others insisted that rural American theater needed to experience its own revival. Archiving is much the same. There are those who believe the general public won’t appreciate the effort that went into both the productions themselves and the act of preserving them, classist issues of locking archived materials behind paywalls, and discourse over what “deserves” to be archived in the first place. All this dictates the way that future generations interact with what winds up preserved.
Interestingly, FTP productions like “the voodoo Macbeth” that won over the public were the ones which polarized critics and controversy. Efforts to revive community theater were similarly mixed – the infamous beaver communism play, for example, was being put on in schools. These were preserved, arguably to the best technological abilities of the late 1930s, through photographs, books, and other primary sources. But was all that able, or positioned, to survive the jump to digital archives? The cost-benefit of preserving authenticity or extending longevity isn’t a clear-cut issue. You can type a transcript of a news article, but that’s not the same experience as seeing the original newspaper, even if said newspaper is in very real danger of falling apart should it ever leave its climate-controlled glass box.
The FTP wasn’t the only project to dissent over what was “worth” preserving, and even what outlasts its creators doesn’t always fall into the hands of archivists eager to share. The controversies which surrounded the FTP are just as important a part of its legacy as the works that came from it, though. History is its own archive, and the FTP was a product as much as it was a producer. If all we tried to preserve of it were the “good” parts, would we really be doing it justice?
