Broadway and the Blacklist

One of the darker epochs of American history were the years commonly thought of, although misnamed, the McCarthy-Era, where motion picture and television artists, most notably actors and writers were unable to work as they found themselves on “the blacklist.”

There was, however, a place to go and create and keep your name: theatre.We begin at the turn of the 20th Century when theatre consisted primarily of melodramas, pot-boilers, and drawing room comedies save for the occasional Shakespearean play brought across the ocean by an English company looking for new lands to conquer, The reader is introduced to the Theatre Guild which births the Group Theatre. It looks at the short life and death of the Federal Theatre Project, and the investigations of the motion picture and television industries by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The role the three major performing arts unions played is vital to this story, leading into investigating Broadway and the theatre artists who continue to make work in spite of it all.

This book opens the window on an art form that brought light into the darkness, and ends as a simple love letter to theatre and those who create it.