All Play and No Work: American Work Ideals and the Comic Plays of the Federal Theatre Project [Hardcover]

Many of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) plays Paul Gagliardi analyzes inAll Play and No Workfeature complex portrayals of labor and work relief at a time when access to work was difficult. Gagliardi asks, what does it mean that many plays produced by the FTP celebrated forms of labor like speculation and swindling?     

All Play and No Workdirectly contradicts the promoted ideals of work found in American society, culture, and within the broader New Deal itself. Gagliardi shows how comedies of the Great Depression engaged questions of labor, labor history, and labor ethics. He considers the breadth of the FTP’s production history, staging plays includingAh, Wilderness!,Help Yourself, andMississippi Rainbow.

Gagliardi examines backstage comedies, middle-class comedies, comedies of chance, and con-artist comedies that employed diverse casts and crew and contained radical economic and labor ideas. He contextualizes these plays within the ideologically complicated New Deal, showing how programs like the Social Security Act straddled progressive ideals and conservative, capitalist norms. Addressing topics including the politicization of theatrical labor and the real dangers of unchecked economic con artists, the comic plays of the FTP reveal acts of political resistance and inequality that reflected the concerns of their audiences."In his highly readable examination of comic plays produced by the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), Gagliardi takes his readers into a unique corner of the FTP and its essential impact on the American theater of the 1930s and beyond.... Gagliardi's particular emphasis on the labor movement and the economic challenges faced by the poor and middle classes freshly illuminates the culture and history of the era. His study emerges as an essential book for students of the early-20th-century American theater.... Summing Up: Highly recommended."&mdasl£w