As a tiny part of the New Deal, Hallie Flanagan helped create the Federal Theatre Project in 1935, where the US government funded unemployed actors to make free plays available to all. A big part of those were Living Newspapers: researchers became playwrights and wrote about current events lifted from the headlines to inform people.
The very first Living Newspaper was a hilarious tragedy. "Ethiopia" by Arthur Arent was all about how being invaded during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War was ravaging the country. Hilariously, it got exactly one dress rehearsal (the press was invited, it got good reviews), and then the US State Department cancelled it before its first showing, arguing that it was bad to show other world leaders, specifically this guy named Mussolini, in a bad light. And they only found out because someone in the production team tried to make the play more realistic by requesting a recording of one of President Roosevelt's speeches, tipping off Washington...
Thankfully, other Living Newspapers about domestic issues became huge successes. Eventually the Federal Theatre Project fell into a fate that seems eerily similar to today: wealthy people got mad that it gave money to those who were seen as not deserving it despite being a tiny fraction of the budget, it was accused of being too communist after things such as plays which revolved around housing inequality and farmers, and the program was cancelled in one of the first victims of McCarthyism :(
(Source: https://doi.org/10.2307/3204873 , but I only found out about this from seeing the book "Furious improvisation : how the WPA and a cast of thousands made high art out of desperate times" by Susan Quinn in a library search)
