During the Great Depression, The federally-funded WPA (Works Projects Administration) created the Federal Theater Project, which was run by producer, playwright, and Vassar College theater professor Hallie Flanagan. Flanagan chose Rose McClendon to run the Negro Theater Unit in Harlem; McClendon (who was in failing health) hired John Houseman to co-direct the unit, and they in turn hired 20-year-old Orson Welles to produce Shakespeare’s Macbeth with an all-black cast (Houseman, who had already produced a Gertrude Stein opera with a predominately black cast).
Welles moved the play’s scenery from Scotland to Haiti (earning the production the nickname, “The Voodoo Macbeth”), and the production was controversial from the start. The WPA was criticized for wasting its money (”an exhibition of deluxe boondoggling”); McClendon was criticized for selecting Welles; and Welles was criticized for everything (no one could determine if Welles was ridiculing Shakespeare, his cast, or the public). Welles knew the controversy would bring publicity, for the play, but also for himself.
With a cast of more than 150, the Harlem Negro Theater Unit’s premiere performance on 14 April 1936 defied any and all expectation.
More than 10,000 people (white and black, at a time when almost all performances were segregated) crowded around Harlem’s Lafayette Theater on opening night, and when the performance ended, the crowd erupted into a 15-minute standing ovation.
After a 10-week run at the Lafayette, and another shorter run in Manhattan, the performance was taken to Hartford, Dallas, Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Syracuse, performing to sold-out, integrated crowds across the country.
“By all odds my great success in my life was that play,“ Welles said in 1982.
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