A poster for Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich’s comedy *Up Pops the Devil,* presented by the Federal Theatre at Waterloo Theater in 1937.

In the Wings

After funding was cut for the Federal Theatre Project, hundreds of scripts, props, and costumes went missing. Three decades later, two professors and a government worker saved them

By James S. Shapiro

On the last day of June 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt reluctantly signed into law a congressional bill that ended funding for the Federal Theatre Project. Overnight, its sets, costumes, scripts, and playbills were no longer needed. Since it began, in 1935, the Federal Theatre had staged more than a thousand productions, which meant that a lot of federal property, scattered over 29 states, needed to be disposed of quickly. Some of it found its way into local libraries. Some was sold off. No doubt, many objects were pilfered or taken as mementos. A good deal of official paperwork ended up in the National Archives and the Library of Congress. But with the outbreak of World War II, sorting through and storing the objects became a very low priority that was seemingly abandoned.

Thirty-four years later, two English professors at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia—Lorraine Brown and John O’Connor—went searching for this material. Much of it, including hundreds of invaluable and unpublished playscripts from a crucial moment in American culture, were nowhere to be found. Their hunt for these lost treasures—without which I could never have written my new book, The Playbook—turned out to be one of the most fascinating backstories to the history of this ill-fated federal program.