IN Series, a company committed to making “theater from music,” devoted its just-concluded season to the staging of works that were once banned. The season, with productions mounted in both Washington and Baltimore, began with a new version of Orson Welles’s “The Cradle Will Rock,” censored by the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and ended with Arthur Arent’s “Ethiopia,” which suffered the same fate.
…a compelling work…deserves to be heard…
Both works were initially developed and financed by the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal program to fund live artistic performances and put theatre artists back to work, and their bans showed how the seemingly benign hand of government funding can put artists on a leash. In a sadly ironic turn, IN Series is dealing with the same, losing its National Endowment for the Humanities grant during the development of “Ethiopia.”
This sad news only adds to the urgency of “Ethiopia,” a compelling work that highlights the rise of authoritarianism and the costs of appeasement. Following on the tradition of news readers who would travel from town to town in the nation’s frontier days reading newspapers aloud to illiterate settlers, the Federal Theatre Project envisioned a series of “living newspapers” where actors would present complex current events through short plays.
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