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TRANSCRIPT of INTERVIEW with EMMET LAVERY by Mae Mallory

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TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW with EMMET LAVERY by Mae Mallory Krulak and John O' Connor for the RESEARCH CENTER FOR THE FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia 22030 January 5, 1976 Encino, California Revised and Corrected by interviewee Transcribed by Madge Nickelhoff December, 1977 EL: ... Literally went through the cart and put down every play. I don't think I could do it. But, he was a real researcher, and he just went through the whole thing, project by project, page by page, and that's how we reconstructed the production “record from the scrapbooks." JO: That's an impressive book. MK: I have my copy of Arena right with me today. When I went to see Mrs. Lawson, she said, ''Won't you leave this with me? I can't find my copy of Arena." And I said, "No, it's my Bible, I don't . " (Laugh) EL: I know. MK: "don't know what's going on, unless I check. .” EL: I have one copy, and I don't loan it out to anybody. You know, what's insurance, if it got lost? (pause) Well, my. Is this for me, or is. JO: No, we have to have it. (Laugh) We do have duplicate photographs of the productions, and I must have left them back there, but I'll send those to you, if you'd like. There are some of these photos in here that ... EL: I don 't know whether I ever mentioned what a beautiful production. Most imaginative that the Federal Theatre did of Monsignor' s Hour on the New Orleans project. Monsignor's Hour, which was very successful in Europe, isn't done very often here. It's the story of an Irish Monsignor, the extension, really, of the character in The First Legion, who, on a visit to the Vatican galleries, meets and to the Pope, and gets talking to him and tells him mat he, the Monsignor, would do about world peace, if he were Pope. So, he would play out this masquerade. Well, the project in New Orleans had the fascinating concept of putting an extra frame in the proscenium so that we, the audience, were the painting that the Pope and the Monsignor were looking at. And it gave a lovely reverse spin in physical dimension to the play, but that was... JO: That's a good idea. EL: That was really most imaginative. (pause) Well, I don't know that I have the answers to your questions, but . JO: Well -- eh -- you've already answered so much just by the manuscript and also the answers to the other letters. What I guess I 'd like to go over, first of all, is a number of things, I think but one of them is, if you can explain again, probably just in more detail, the relationship between the National Service Bureau and the regional offices the National Service Bureau would send out play lists and the regional bureaus would ask for the scripts...? EL: Yes, but it was a two-way relationship, and I think toward the end of the project, between, let's see, '37 and '39, when I came in, due to the fine groundwork laid by the people who were there before me, the whole relationship was really smoothed out so that National Service Bureau didn't tell them what they should do. Oh, except in rare instances -- for instance, when it still was a common decision, when Hallie thought it would be a great thing to open those simultaneous productions of It Can't Happen Here. That's what you might call, perhaps, what -- a national directive or a national hope, and the regions responded like a man. The regions were free to nominate a play of their choice, but by the time I joined the project, it had well been established that before they attempted -- well, no contracts could be made in the Service - but they could dig up many plays that National Service Bureau had not necessarily found on its own initiative. And then when it was sent in to the National Service Bureau, we checked, Mrs. Flanagan and I ---. I think in our time the Service Bureau had taken over the functions of what was previously called National Policy Board, which was broadly represented in the regions. Generally speaking, the regions indicated what they'd like to do, and we found out. Was it contractually available? And did it match the prevailing standards of Federal Theatre? And actually, it seemed to me in my time there, our relationships with the regions were very good. It balanced out nicely. It didn't have as many administrative difficulties as you might think. JO: Spirochete would be a case in point of a play that came from a region and was approved by the National -- EL: Yes. And, -- oh, I'm sure that so many wonderful things on the Project didn't originate ~ se in National Service Bureau. I always thought that one of the delightful ones was the Swing Mikado from Chicago. I'm sure that must have been Harry Minturn's inventive use of the Negro company -- and a most graceful use. I 'd seen other Negro versions, not Project productions, of Mikado. They didn't compare with the Swing Mikado. The Swing Mikado had elegance and grace. It wasn't just a stunt. It was done with real class. And, of course, the New York project, particularly in the days of Orson and John Houseman, oh, originated all kinds of ideas. However, I think National Service Bureau represents an interesting illustration of how any kind of national enterprise has to work. It seemed to me that as time evolved, it was the research facilities at National Service Bureau -- even the legal research facilities -- the playreading, the library, the exchange of actors on loan, which was managed through the Bureau -. It's true. We had our experimental contacts with many of the projects, and sometimes had a friendly hand in the development of than, but I'm sure that nobody in National Service Bureau ever told Halsted Welles that he had to produce Murder in the Cathedral. That was a dividend that came to the project because Hallie knew Eliot so well. And apparently somewhere along the line she had done quite some of Eliot's productions at Vassar, and he had said, “You can have one of my next plays," and so when Murder in the Cathedral came along, she said, "All right. Let's have this one. " But I think a lot of the good things in the project happened that way. For instance. I didn't know anything about Monsignor's Hour down in New Orleans, until after I joined the project. There I was, just a playwright whose play they liked, and whose play they did. And there was a lot of this in the regions. However, as I have indicated somewhere -- I think in this last memo on "1697 Broadway" the whole project was not as imaginative as Hallie herself. Well, how could it be? Basically, this was a work relief project, and that was its great justification. The development of the Living Newspaper obviously was related to the fact that it was a simple way to employ large numbers of people, and when Hallie first took over the project, at the suggestion of Harry Hopkins, of course, who was her old classmate at Grinnell, she said to me the problem was how to employ enough actors quickly enough. You know, from the WPA point of view, these were people who deserved to be employed and who weren't. But, unlike carpenters and bricklayers, how do you find plays to employ thousands of actors? In the era of the well-made play or the intimate musical, a few actors---but WPA was saying, "We're in business to employ actors and writers at some kind of survival wage,” and the Living Newspaper with casts of hundreds- You know, no Broadway producer could afford a Living Newspaper even today. But Federal Theatre was rich in manpower, and I think that accounted for the success of Orson and John's productions, like the Negro Macbeth. You could set them up with a flair, because you had the people. But - what I was going to say was the regions were not always as inventive as Hallie. After all, who were these people who were unemployed and who deserved another chance at their chosen profession? They were people who had done a lot of the old plays in the old-fashioned ways and taking the line of least resistance, they would go for what you and I would call stock productions. The ones that they had done before. And I said somewhere before that we used to wonder, on the project, what would have happened, if there had been a work rule from the beginning that said, "You have to do either all new plays or at least 80 per cent of the productions have to be new plays" It would have been an interesting concept. It could have been a different theatre. I think that under all the circumstances, and I don't mean this as a justification for the project per se, it came out rather well, unexpectedly, remembering that basically it was a work enterprise, and there was only a ten per cent variation for supervisory personnel. And, really, whether it was playreading or play production, the resulting program could only be as good as the supervisor. If the supervisor was no good, nothing was going to come out of the rest of it.
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