The Theatre of the First Amendment, George Mason University’s professional theater company, will re-create the look, sound and feel of the classic radio days of the 1930s this weekend. The show, “Live Wire,” is based on authentic shows drawn from Mason’s extensive Federal Theatre Project archives. The Federal Theatre Project was a division of the Works Progress Administration, which was part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, intended to provide employment for artists, writers and performers during the Great Depression.
“Lorraine Brown was a longtime professor of English here at the university,” explained Rick Davis, director of “Live Wire.” “She was the nation’s leading scholar on the Federal Theatre. She came to have that role because she and a couple of colleagues rescued the entire Federal Theatre archive from a bunch of moldy boxes in an aircraft hangar near Baltimore.
| Onstage |
| ‘Live Wire’ |
| Where: Hylton Performing Arts Center’s Merchant Hall in Manassas |
| When: 8 p.m. Friday |
| Where: George Mason’s Center for the Arts in Fairfax |
| When: 4 p.m. Sunday |
| Info: 888-945-2468 |
“She talked the George Mason Library into becoming the repository for the collection. She did all the archiving and research to get them in shape. In the mid-1990s, the Library of Congress repossessed and digitized the collection. Then, because we had had the collection for 20-some years, it attracted other donations and acquisitions.”
The collection of Federal Theater Project primary source materials includes oral histories, personal papers, visual materials and administrative records. Sources of donated materials include persons formerly employed in the FTP, such as actors, writers and designers as well as theater historians. Over half of the collection consists of scripts, photographs and posters that are duplicates of materials held by the National Archives and Records Administration and the Library of Congress. The entire collection consists of approximately 366 linear feet of materials.
The Theater of the First Amendment is dedicating the production to the memory of professor Brown, who died in 2010.
