In keeping with her training and sympathies, Flanagan appointed other "unBroadway" people to run the regional Theatre offices. The FTP which was divided into five areas: New York City, the East, the South, the Midwest, and the West, engaged in experimental works which exposed many Americans to their first experience with live professional performances. New York City, headed by Elmer Rice (until 1936), was the biggest unit of the FTP, which employed around 5,000 people. .
At its height, the Federal Theatre Project employed around twelve thousand people in all kinds of projects scattered over thirty-one states. The project received its funding from the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, in which it gave the FTP around seven million dollars to spend on wages and other materials. "With this commitment of funding, representatives of the Federal Theatre director throughout the country, set up classification boards, auditioned theatre personnel and started theater groups, in cooperation with local Works Progress Administration offices and with the United States Employment Service" (The Library of Congress 1999). With this amount of funding and support, the FTP was able to establish various new units and departments that would create sub-projects within the system. .
The FTP created 28 sub-projects in all, some of the more important ones included: Living Newspaper, Negro Theatre, Marionettes and Vaudeville Theatre's, Teaching of Theatre Technique,and lastly Classical Theatre.
The Living Newspaper, an innovation of Elmer Rice, was a dramatic form: "a committed documentary that informed the audience of the size, nature, and origin of a social problem, and then called for specific action to solve it. Living newspapers were written on such varied topics as housing, health, cooperatives, natural resources, labor unions, Negroes, the movies, and public utilities" (Zandee). Three important documentaries came from the Living Newspaper: one was the Triple-A Plowed Under, the second was Ethiopia, and the last was One Third of A Nation.
