A Democratic Legacy: Hallie Flanagan and the Vassar Experimental Theatre

Abstract

Hallie Flanagan is best known as national director of the Federal Theatre Project (1935–1939). However, Flanagan’s influence on American theatre extends far beyond these four years. Flanagan was the first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, which she used to study contemporaneous European theatre. Upon her return, she established the Vassar Experimental Theatre (VET, 1927), a theatre, she imagined, that would convert energy into power—the power to transform society. Flanagan brought her first-hand experiences with Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Gordon Craig, and Lady Gregory to Vassar stages and classrooms. The young women in VET performed, produced, designed, built, lit, directed, wrote, and, as one graduate explained, learned to create within a “true democratic way of life, individualistic desires subordinated” to the creative needs of the collective.