Way back in the 1930s, theater arts in the U.S. were suffering to near extinction as stage actors got pushed to the sidelines by the burgeoning motion picture industry. That's when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration stepped up with a rescue plan that soon put actors all over the country back to work. Between 1935 and 1939, 30 million Americans had the chance to see a play thanks to the Federal Theater Project. Two-thirds of these theater-goers had never seen a play. The project, however, was later shut down by Congress' Un-American Activities Committee not long after a...