US Government Initiates Federal Theatre Project

Aims to support live theatre across the country.

Tuesday, December 8th

Performance from 6:00 - 7:00 pm

Doors open at 5:30 pm
Cost is free. Donations are gratefully accepted.

Teatro Paraguas (Second Space) 3205 Calle Marie Santa Fe

These were the headlines in August, 1935. Under the WPA, the Works Progress Administration, the Feds committed $27 million to employ thousands of theater professionals during the Depression. This was one of biggest and most successful relief programs of the time. Within a year, the FTP employed 15,000 people. At the time, WPA head, Harry Hopkins, famously noted, “I don’t know why I still hang on to the idea that unemployed actors get just as hungry as anybody else.” The pay was $23.86 a week. What happened next is the lore of the playwright and the stuff of a presentation by Santa Fe’s resident theater historian, Robert ‘Beny’ Benedetti. Benedetti writes, “The Federal Theater Project was part of the WPA and had at its height 3000 theaters throughout the country. It was the most massive subsidy of any art in American’s history and its story is an object lesson for what is happening to the arts under Trump.

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