Creative Person; 19; Hallie Flanagan

The creative person has a special gift. His private vision of the world, the artist through words, images, music, ideas, touches our view of the 20th century. The world of the creative teacher is a private inspiration. A unique giving, a rare ability to touch deeply, that which lies in weight in any receptive person.

This is the gift of the great teacher. What your one is Halle Flanagan. Her object was a larger human being, her means, the theatre. As students of the theatre, you are not entering an ivory tower. You are concerned with the sweep of history, with the languages and ideas of foreign countries, with the spirit of scientific inquiry, with developments in all other art fields, with the psychology of individuals and groups, and with social, economic and political America.

Theatre is a part of life, not a part from life. The distinguished American poet, Muriel Rokaiser, a student of Halle Flanagan. There are these few rare people who can bring together and heal and make whole, all the things that have been separated and artificially kept apart, fields, subjects, specializations. For me they are the great people, they are the meeting place people. Halle is a meeting place person. This Florence was lucky, a former student, now assistant to the president, Vassar College. Halle was probably interested in the theatre and in working in a college, in order to achieve perhaps two different aims. One of them, the purpose of working with young people and bringing about in them changes,

the changes that good teaching and good theatre can bring, doing something creative for them as individuals. The other interest, and I'm sure this was an equally potent and strong one, was to create a theatre that in itself could have its effect on modifying things in society. Norris Houghton, co-founder of the Phoenix Theatre, current director of the experimental theatre, Vassar College. Halle was a paradoxical creature. She was a small, lively, if you hadn't known, she was a Scottsville, but you would have thought she was Irish, for she had red hair and a quick tongue and a bright sense of cure, and she had that gift which people have, I think, who effectively worked with other people and making you feel that you're the one person that she really was most interested

in in all the world. And at Lavery, playwright and screenwriter, friend, neighbor and colleague. Whenever I think of Halle Flanagan, I usually think of a line from Fought and Wilder. The theatre is always now, it certainly was for Halle, certainly still is for Halle. It was 1927, when I first met Halle Flanagan, and yet for one moment today, it isn't 1927. It's now. I'm a newspaper editor in a small town, McKipsey, the place where I was born. I practice a little on the side, I have a Vassar wife, and I have a brand new baby boy, but I'm curious about the theatre, I want to know how to write plays, so I go out to Vassar College, I go over to Kendrick House, a ring bell, and I ask for Halle Flanagan, and there she is, a trim, dynamic, extraordinary woman. I have a simple question, can I audit her classes in the experiment theatre?

And she said, yes, of course, I've always thought how typical Halle. She was the kind of woman who always said, let's, rather than, let's not. Perhaps the reason that Halle and I hit it off so well, was that we were both small town people. She was born in a small town south Dakota, and had gone to Gridel College, where she established her own experimental theatre. Of course, when I first caught up with Halle, in 1927, she was just back from Europe. She'd been over there on a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, first one ever given to a woman, and she'd been studying production, playwriting, in a dozen countries. It was an exciting time to be in a theatre with Halle Flanagan. She brought a lot of new ideas, a lot of new techniques to the theatre. I can remember the degree to which everybody studied everything when they worked with Halle. The theatre was not an isolated experience, all departments at the college were involved in it, and it was a memorable experience for all of us.

I used to think to myself, how fortunate I was, that I didn't have to leave home and go to Harvard and study with George Pierce Baker. I had the next best thing right on my own, go a step. George Pierce Baker remembered Halle very well. She had been as assistant at Harvard when she was working for her master's at Radcliffe. It was also Baker who had recommended her to the Guggenheim Foundation for the year of study in Europe. Of course, when Halle came home from Europe, she brought back much more than a book. She brought back the wealth of theatrical experience when she was quick to share with the students in the experimental theatre at Besser. It was an exciting time to be alive, because Halle had exciting ideas. She was a pragmatist in the theatre, what worked worked. This was particularly apparent in her search for form. With Halle, the form was never one thing to the exclusion of anything else. It could be all kinds of things, and there had to be a form that was just right for the

particular play. I saw this work out in a very special way, in the production that first brought her national attention, the three manners of the marriage proposal by Chekhov, realist, expressionist, constructivist. We decided to define by doing, to take the same block of dramatic material, produce it three times in the same evening, each in a different tradition. Would anyone want to see the same play produce three times in succession? We didn't know. New York Times magazine, 1928. Chekhov's play, done in three manners, has made an impression on the great world of the theatre. I think that Halle, when she went to Europe in the 20s and brought back the concept gained there of a unified theatrical experience, was probably in a kind of way, planting the seeds, which we are seeing flower today.

She was, whether she was aware of it or not, in a kind of way, organizing a theatre, which subsequently now, 20, 30 years later, the present generation has seen come to flower. It's seeing it in terms of ensembles of artists working together in various places, almost in the way that Halle was working in the 20s and 30s here with her group of student play rights and student actors and directors and designers at all. The Vassar Experimental Theatre emerged in its present form out of well-ordered quiet. There was a basement in this building used as a storeroom. The windows were boarded up and the members of our first class used to look through the cracks at this paradise of possibilities. And we have the basement. We'll clean it out, the girls can paint it themselves, can't they? They could and did.

Everything smelled of turpentine and enamel. The bedroom, prop rooms, classrooms, storage space, shops emerged. It became a theatre. The best way to give an impression of Halle's work in the experiment theatre is probably to let Halle speak for herself in her own words. The best way to do that, I think, is through dynamol. One of Perendello was asked whether Halle could do his plays. He answered, we need to find balance between the scene world and that other world which many of us know exists, only a hair breadth from the actual. In each and his own way, a play which I very much want done in America, the people on

the stage should be unreal. Puppets pulled about by the strings of their own passions or vacuities. Theatre Arts Monthly, 1931. When you hear their voices, is a good play of important native material. If Halle Flanagan and her students are types of the new woman coming into the theatre, one need not fear a softening of fiber by their presence. Of the production of fear, a play originally banned by the Soviets as counter-revolutionary, the New York Times said, there was nothing lacking in tonight's presentation. Many expressed wonderment that Broadway had not proceeded vassar in recognizing the merits of the piece. New York Herald Tribune, 1931. A politician was performed in the original Greek. The chorus was superb. In groupings barred from painting and sculpture craftsmen long forgotten, they mirrored the tragedy laden verse.

Halle also did Sweeney Agonisties by T.S. Alia. And when she wrote him to ask for permission, he replied, dear Halle Flanagan, I have no objection to your doing Sweeney, what there is of it, though I cannot imagine what anyone can do without me there to direct it. Alia attended the performance and later wrote, dear Mrs. Flanagan, the whole experience was very memorable for me, and if I ever do succeed in producing a complete play, I shall attribute its completion to the stimulus which I received at vassar. Naturally, the finished product will be offered to vassar, so long as you are experimenting there, you are very gratefully T.S. Alia, May 21, 1933. I see her as she is in the past, in the theater, a small woman, flashing with authority, fire and pepper running up the aisle.

They're calling on the discipline of the arts, of the freedom of the arts, calling in the words of the quotation that she uses. Art demands first, last and always, the control of the medium. A former student of Halle Flanagan's, Mrs. Mimi Obler, now a housewife. I always felt that the kind of production she did each year was not based on Halle's mood or whim, but it was based on the choice of students. She took the material she had, and she would create with this beyond what anyone would expect. If she had dancers, if she had some particular talent, if you were a harpist or something, she would find a way of using you in that area that was so right that you would figure she must have been planning for years if I ever get a hold of a harpist, this is what I'm going to do. This was a capacity she had of using her imagination and using the abilities of the people around her, and using the whole college.

This is why I think the experimental theater was so successful, really. It wasn't just theater. You didn't go there to learn how to act. You didn't go there to express yourself. You went because you were taught, really, to appreciate theater as a life force. That's the phrase of Halle's. I care very much about these threshold figures, if you like, but more. The image of a woman drawing things together, what I think of as a meeting place person, the great people in our age, the beginning of the next age, in which the fragmentation that we suffer from, in which the breaking of things into fields, into subjects, into schools, into fragments everywhere, can be bound together, healed and made whole by people who see theater and education as one thing, very often, poetry and document in my own terms, as one thing.

Halle is one of these people. She has enormous value for our time, whether we know her name or not, and she never cared in that way that her name be known, although now it is going out in a way perhaps that it has from time to time and now is going out more than ever. When Halle Flanagan traveled on sabbaticals, the need for continuity with her students emerged in her letters. In 1934, she went again to Europe and shared with them the sights, sounds, people and theater she was experiencing. Before sailing, February 8th, 1934, dear theater, much of me stays with you and the theater and the masks and the long room filled with an assortment of people of whom, as you may have guessed, I am inordinately proud and fond, Berkeley Square. I am now going to tea with T.S. Eliot.

The class will please rise, while the orchestra plays, God save the king. Paris, say what we will about the modern theater building. There is nothing in the world so like a theater, so much a theater as the comedy firm says. So red and gold, so crystal gleaming, so floridly aristocratic, I would come here and sit just to regain a sense of the splendor of one age of the theater no matter what was playing. Tripoli Africa, never since my first visit to Moscow have I felt so strongly the impact of a different civilization. This is not the picturesqueness arranged for tourists. These are people independent and rather incidentally scornful of the chance observer. Athens, Greece, writing to you has become my favorite vice.

I shall be thinking of you on commencement day and will wish I could dance or sing or in some way express my deep emotion, my devoted affection, Halle, Flanagan, 1934. August 27, 1935, date line, Washington, D.C. Professor Halle, Flanagan, was today sworn in as director of the Federal Theater Project. The Works Progress Administration had been created to combat the great depression of the thirties. The Federal Theater Project was one of the agencies designed to meet the needs of the unemployed thousands in the theater. Halle, Flanagan's path had been but a preparation for this vast new cultural enterprise. The creative teacher was called upon to be the creative administrator. A former student, Mrs. Patsy Walsh, was one of her secretaries.

I couldn't believe that she could cope with all the problems that came up. The administrative problems, Washington wanted 13 copies of everything. The personal problems, she was dealing with the high of WPA authorities and a bunch of primadanas here and still keep this concept of the theater in her mind at all times. The idea of the theater is an explosive dynamic force which could change life. And so, from 1935 to 1939, under the auspices of the government of the United States, we had the biggest theatrical enterprise the world has ever known. Statistics hardly tell the whole story, but perhaps one should mention a few, an appropriation of $46 million over a period of four years kept alive 10,000 unemployed craftsmen produced approximately 1,200 plays in 31 states and gave to the American theater such variety

and had never seen before. There was children's theater, there was ballet, there was niggle drama, there was religious theater, there was reputory, there was foreign language drama, there was everything that one could look for in the theater and all under the auspices of a governmental enterprise directed by Halley, whose office nominally was in Washington and occasionally in New York, but whose office was really everywhere in the United States. She covered the projects in all the cities, in all the states and it was because of her familiarity and her love for the diversity of American life and the regional quality of American life that the project had this unique character. It wasn't the project of anyone's city or anyone's state. It was a project which was as American and as diversified as the country in which it was a part.

Four of Halley Flanagan's colleagues recall her work in the Federal Theater Project, Scenic Designer Howard Bay, playwright author Aaron, choreographer Helen Tamiris, lighting consultant and designer Abe Fader. She had thousands of people in the Federal Project or Cameron for attention, hundreds of units and there were all these political mind of people about her, the politicians. And she was constantly being pulled in one way or the other. And remember when we used to have pickets on the project when the word came down from Washington that the various projects had to be cut, there was Halley in the middle. She didn't want to cut the projects and yet she knew that in order for them to continue to exist, she had to follow the word as it came down from on high, on high being Capitol

Hill. Halley's main spine I always felt was as a catalyst to bring out the creative best in people. And her quality of appeasing the politicians, keeping the creative people on their keel and solidifying the project as a real cultural force, as Helen said, that could be recognized internationally, is Halley's personality. And I think that her personality can only be expressed in the end products of theatre. When you talk about Halley in relation to the theatre, to me it's a wide open landscape of theatre, but then when I began to break it down for myself and my own field, I did

then and of course in retrospect, even more so, recognize what she did for the dance. When I talk about the dance, I talk about the modern dance because this was a new art. And in the late 20s there were the first rumblings and the critics on the papers and the audience began to recognize that a new movement in dance was taking place. Halley recognized this and she said this is valuable not only as dance works, this belongs in the theatre. And I never forget an experience in San Francisco. I was there for another reason during the world's fair there and I was coming out of my room in a lobby on the fifth floor and Halley was down the hall and I was going somewhere and before I knew it I'd spent two and a half hours with Halley and she was pouring out

problems that she was confronted with almost overwhelmingly so. Halley, your empathy, your relationship to the time, to the moment and you gave full it, then you wouldn't see Halley for months. Halley was coping with this living, breathing, yelling, screaming, kind of thing which was federal theatre. On June 30th 1939 the Congress of the United States abolished the federal theatre project. Several years unique and American theatre history came to an end and Halley Flanagan returned to Vassar. Halley was distressed when she came back to Vassar because her federal theatre people were going to be thrown out of work. She thought of this in terms of families, homes, self-confidence and above all a group of dedicated, professional, now highly trained people whose livelihood was at stake. I think she felt particularly better because she felt that the members of the Congressional

Committee who had started this did not understand the federal theatre or the way the theatre function, she was particularly upset at one question that was asked during the Congressional hearings. A member of the committee asked her if she was producing a play by Christopher Marlow and she said yes and he turned to her and said, oh, he is the Communist, isn't he? The President of the United States and writing me of his regret at the closing of the federal theatre referred to it as a pioneering job. As it was, gusty, lusty, bad and good, sad and funny, superbly worth more wit, wisdom and imagination than we could give it, its significance lies in its pointing to the future. The ten thousand anonymous men and women, the et cetera's and the so-forths who did

the work, the no bodies who were everybody, the somebody's who believed it, their dreams and deeds were not the end. They were the beginning of a people's theatre in a country whose greatest plays are still to come. And when it was over, except that a thing like this is never really over, Halley came home to the Kipsey and once more we were working together on a common project. This time it was arena, the history of federal theatre. In 1942, she went to Smith's dean and I went back home to California where I've been ever since. And Halley was finished with teaching, she retired and went home to the Kipsey. And I began to think, well, it's almost the way it was in 1927, except it isn't really past. The theatre is always now. We live a mere continent away, it's almost as if we were still around the corner. There are the letters and every time I have a new script, I send it to it.

And always there is the same receptive, intuitive comment, or how he is that rare thing in the modern theatre. A person with dramatic imagination. I see Halley at many times from the back of the vassar theatre when I first was there. The small, red-headed woman flashing with authority, fire and pepper running up the aisle, holding that great empty theatre in the concentration of the moment of the actors. I see her in the heat and green of Iowa midsummer as the neighbor came with a basket of ripeness. With all of her anxiety about the evening's opening suspended, I see her in her anger as another group of actors when she felt had used the period of rehearsal as a vacation

and who could never get the control and discipline that she needed in everything and first of all in herself. Dear theatre, how is it possible in the theatre to give a sense of the past, or a sense of the livingness of the past, for if the emphasis is primarily on the way they dressed, moved, spoke, it will be description. And description is not theatre. The emphasis must always be on life, on the reality of the life of people, people on the stage, communicating a sense of life to living people in the audience. And I devoted affection, Halley Flanagan.

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