(L to R): CARRIE McCROSSEN, KEN GLICKFELD, CHRISTOPHER HURT, DEREK JAMISON, and CATHERINE PORTER

The Peculiar Works Project, producers of Can You Hear Their Voices? must have thought they had found a prize when they unearthed this gawky 1931 agit-prop play by noted Hallie Flanagan and Margaret Ellen Clifford, one of her students, based on a story by the notorious Whittaker Chambers. Famous names! Well, once. Sic transit. Famous stories to feature about the once famed creators. Well, one of them. Startlingly pertinent: Depression, millions jobless, evil exploiters, desperation. Plus ca change. There were distinct possibilities for a meaningful theatrical coup. Perhaps in other hands. But the PWP is on the road to Hell, which, as we all know, is paved with good intentions. They, themselves are ripe for satirizing, for parody; they don’t know what they don’t know. Theorize, research, Study? Fine. But required also and foremost are taste, judgment, talent. Consider their production:

Firstly, the play demands focus. It’s about real problems, ultimately the realest, hunger, staying alive, and drastic solutions attempted by people at the end of their rope. Drought has killed the crops, killed the cattle, killed the farms. There’s no food for the farmers even though there’s food in town in the stores. To buy. And, of course, the farmers have no money and the banks will lend no more. Foreclosures? These folks are beyond foreclosures, families are starving. Some of them are desperate enough to take food at gun point; many still believe the government will help them. But help does not come and children die. The farmers gather, gun in hand, to feed their families. They’ve been rallied by a farmer who reads too much, believes in the communist credo that a man has a right to work and to eat and to think for himself.

In her script, Flanagan has the father tell his boys who are sent to walk the road away from this starvation to go to the Communists in the next town; they’ll help you. That line is excised from the current production. In fact, most sense is excised from this production; emphasis is on moving set pieces, changing clothes, trying to cover thirty characters (Flanagan was a fledgling playwright) with eleven actors, several of them apparently amateurs in dire need of clear direction which was clearly not forthcoming. In spite of the play’s inherent awkwardness its intense earnestness is compelling. Flanagan may have reduced Communism to a combination of sheer desperation and elevated thinking but the directors’ take seems to have veered entirely to dressing up an old, hapless agit-prop piece with a parade of period clothing, (anachronisms abounding), electronic projections on unforgiving walls and nice live music inches away from the actors. Seeking reflected glory? An irony. Even though the play’s concrete points are all very familiar, they are concrete. You need to invest them with strong, directorial concept instead of a dither of illustration and dressings. Composer Seth Bedford providing a score? Played live? Why? Matthew Tennie’s projections (bad ones, badly projected)? Why? Five hundred costume changes? Why? And cross dressing casting? Whatever for? The clumsiest set pieces in the world? None of it, none enhances the play. And basic basic: get your actors on and off, for crying out loud. Some of them are good.


L to R: MICK HILGERS, DEREK JAMISON, SARAH ELIZONDO, TONYA CANADA, REBECCA SERVON (with back to camera), and CARRIE McCROSSEN
Photos by Jim Baldassare

Hallie Flanagan Davis – that’s how I knew her, as a friend of my favorite college professor – was the first to travel on a Guggenheim. As a theater human being she was my ideal; she created the great Federal Theater Project, kept thousands of theater people working, even me, instead of starving, until a craven Congress killed the program as the Red Menace strangled their minds, their spirit and their decency. They painted Hallie Flanagan with their fear and made her life a hell, as well as the lives of many, many other innocent theater people. Obviously, this play reaches me, so to see it fall so far short of what it can be is particularly dismaying. Well, at least it’s out in the air again. Go, out of curiosity. There are ghosts.

Can You Hear Their Voices? At a Pop-Up Space at 2 Great Jones Street near Broadway. Tickeets: $18 ($15,students, seniors) cash at door. Online,$15 ($12 students, seniors) theatermania.com/new-york/shows/can-you-hear-their-voices 168197/ or 212-352-3101. TDF okay.