Under the umbrella of FDR’s New Deal, the Federal Theater Project (FTP, 1935-39) was the largest government investment in public arts in U.S. history. In its first two years alone, more than 20 million Americans saw new plays written, directed, and performed by white and Black dramatists during some of the darkest years of the Great Depression. At the same time, 1930s America was undergoing tremendous shifts in the daily rhythms of modern life as urbanization, migration, and energy technologies – from fossil fuel extraction to electrification – reordered U.S. social and labor relations while raising new questions about power, race, and energy that would echo into our century.

However, most of the FTP plays have remained unpublished, have fallen out of print, have been obscured in university archives, or have been forgotten completely. This project examines four plays – two by Black authors, two by white authors – written and produced in the FTP that capture the tensions of energy, work, and race as the U.S. entered the modern period. These plays introduce new generations of readers to the intersecting discourses of race, theater, and energy in our contemporary moment when funding for the arts (especially theater) has been decimated, fascism is on the rise, labor rights are trampled, racial violence and injustice are more visible than ever, and fossil-fuel-driven climate change continues unchecked. These plays speak to current American society with clear and radical messages.

The project also breaks new ground in energy humanities – a field dominated by literary genres like the short story and novel (and to a lesser extent poetry) – by situating drama as a critical meta-narrative space for energy critique and the recovery of Black voices. Further, Every Atom Weeps follows a resurgence of public and scholarly interest in the FTP, including, for example, James Shapiro’s The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War (2024) and Kate Dossett’s Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal (2020). These critical works offer important histories of the FTP and emphasize themes such as housing, medicine, and working conditions, but no scholarship has explored the FTP for its engagement with questions of environmental justice and energy extraction. In this way, the project recuperates forgotten artistic visions of the FTP, draws readers’ attention to the implications of shifting energy paradigms on race and labor relations, and highlights resistance to dominant forms of power (literally and figuratively) through staged performance. These plays, in other words, have much to teach us in our precarious moment.