2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
THE DRAMA OF REGION
COURTESY OF PLAYMAKERS REPERTORY COMPANY, DEPARTMENT OF DRAMATIC ART, UNC CHAPEL HILL
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a review by Gina Caison Cecilia Moore. The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017.
GINA CAISON is an Assistant Professor of English at Georgia State University where she teaches courses in Southern literature, Native American literatures, and documentary practices. She is the author of Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies (University of Georgia Press, 2018) and co-editor of Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), and she hosts the weekly podcast, About South. Read her interview with Eddie Swimmer on his revival of the outdoor drama Unto These Hlils in NCLR 2010. CECILIA MOORE is a North Carolina historian, as well as a member of the Chancellor’s task force at UNC Chapel Hill. As a long-time resident of North Carolina, Moore holds a BA in Theatre from Barry University (in Miami, FL), an MA in Public History from NC State University, and a PhD in History from UNC Chapel Hill. She is also the co-author of the upcoming book, UNC A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press).
ABOVE Members of the Carolina Playmakers, 1941
Cecelia Moore’s The Federal Theatre Project in the American South covers the period of the late 1930s when the Works Progress Administration attempted to merge artistic economic relief efforts with cultural revitalization in the country’s southern and rural areas. Centered largely around the theater activity of Chapel Hill, NC, and Frederich Koch’s Carolina Playmakers, the book outlines the impetus, evolution, and limitations of the large-scale cultural studies experiment of the era. Moore’s book focuses on important Southern playwrights such as Paul Green and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as a careful history of more locally-known figures such as Joseph Christmas, an African American community theater leader in Raleigh, NC, and Martha Mathis, an actress and director from the eastern part of the state, all of which demonstrate that there is yet more to be understood about Southern drama, Southern literature in the 1930s, and the relationship between the nation and the region. Studies of Southern literature have long been dominated by the Depression era and the 1930s. Many of these studies tend to feature figures such as William
Faulkner or the ideological school of the Agrarians, who published their manifesto I’ll Take My Stand in 1930. Additionally, Southern literary studies has long suffered from a neglect of the region’s dramatic literature. Despite having luminaries such as the aforementioned Green and Hurston (whose own dramatic output often takes second-stage to her fiction) as well as Lillian Hellman and Tennessee Williams, rarely do scholars pay much attention to the relationship between theater and the US South. Williams, arguably the most famous Southern playwright, is often considered an American writer, as if “regional” is an adjective one should happily rise above. This surrounding critical context makes Moore’s work all the more refreshing and important. Imagine: a book on the 1930s US South without one mention of the Agrarians or William Faulkner. Instead, Moore elucidates in direct prose a complex story about efforts to transform the region through theater and the paid employment of artistic talent, not in merely fantastical terms of some Southern accent-laden “mute inglorious Milton,” but rather through the minutia of what it