Wife Jo Ann Schmidman
Queer Places:
Cornish School of Allied Arts, 710 E Roy St, Seattle, WA 98102
Magic Theatre, 3325 S 16th St, Omaha, NE 68102
Megan
Terry (July 22, 1932 – April 12, 2023) was an Obie Award winner, a founding member of the Open Theater group and a prolific feminist playwright who wrote and directed a rock musical on the New York stage that predated Hair.
Terry met Jo Ann Schmidman,
who was to become her lifetime personal and professional partner, at Boston
University, where she had been asked to write a two-hundredth anniversary
commemorative play (Approaching Simone) for the school. Megan Terry and her
life partner Jo Ann Schmidman operate the Omaha Magic Theater, which Schmidman
founded in 1968 and which Terry has served as a playwright since 1974.
Terry's Viet Rock: A Folk War Movie opened at the Martinique Theater, an Off Broadway house, on Nov. 10, 1966, during the Vietnam War, after earlier performances at the Yale Repertory Company and La MaMa E.T.C., in the East Village.
The rock numbers' lyrics were poignant and pointed: The wars have melted into one/A war was on when I was born. One song advised against optimism: Don't put all your eggs in one basket/Baskets wear out and men die young/ Better to marry trees or elephants/Men die young.
The dialogue played with politics and popular culture. Let's all go gay with L.B.J., one character said, a twist on President Lyndon B. Johnson's campaign slogan All the way with L.B.J. Others declared: I lost my way with L.B.J., March to doomsday with L.B.J. and I lost my green beret on the Road to Mandalay. Viet Rock was believed to be the first American stage work to address the Vietnam War. The piece ended with an image of rebirth, the critic Dan Sullivan wrote in The Los Angeles Times, but the image that stayed with the viewer was a mound of dead soldiers, male and female, muttering ˜Who needs this?'
The New York Times panned the production. Walter Kerr, the newspaper's chief theater critic, dismissed it as essentially thoughtless, from-the-gut-only noise. The Village Voice called it extraordinary.
A year later, one of its cast members, Gerome Ragni, and two partners presented their musical Hair
at the Public Theater, which moved to Broadway in 1968 and found overwhelming
international success.
Terry, in her mid-30s, went on to write Approaching Simone (1970), about Simone Weil, the French activist philosopher. It won the Obie Award for best Off Broadway play.
Jack Kroll wrote in Newsweek magazine that Simone was a rare theatrical event filled with the light, shadow and weight of human life and the exultant agonies of the ceaseless attempt to create one's humanity. Clive Barnes of The Times called it a superb theatrical coup.
Marguerite Duffy was born on July 22, 1932, in Seattle, the daughter of Harold
Duffy and Marguerite Henry. Her father was a businessman. Marguerite became fascinated with theater after seeing a play at age 7, a passion that, by her account, her disapproving father ridiculed, giving her nicknames like Tallulah Blackhead and Sarah Heartburn, as opposed to
Bankhead and
Bernhardt.
In high school, she worked with the Seattle Repertory Playhouse, learning early that politics and theater could be powerful but prickly bedfellows. The playhouse closed in 1951 under pressure from the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Marguerite won a scholarship to the Banff School of Fine Arts in Canada, where she earned a certificate in acting, directing and design. Returning to her home state, she completed her bachelor's degree in education at the University of Washington.
She then took a teaching job at the Cornish School of Allied Arts, today Cornish College of the Arts, in Seattle. Her first plays, including Beach Grass and Go Out and Move the Car, were criticized for their frankness, which led her to take two drastic steps.
She began doing her theater work under a pseudonym. Megan was the Celtic root of her first name, and Terry was a tribute to the 19th-century British actress
Ellen Terry. And she moved to New York City.
Her plays in New York included The Magic Realist (1960), Ex-Miss Copper Queen on a Set of Pills (1963), When My Girlhood Was Still All Flowers (1963), Eat at Joe's (1964) and Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool, Dry Place
(1967).
Broadway Play PubOne of Ms. Terry's most talked-about techniques with the Open Theater, an experimental New York company founded in 1963 by Joseph Chaikin, was known simply as transformation. An actor might begin speaking in one language and suddenly switch to another, having taken on a new character's identity.
In a scene in Viet Rock, one actor mimes being hit by gunfire and the others catch him. Then, abruptly, the sounds change, the body is held high, and the group, rotating weirdly, has become a helicopter, transporting the wounded to Saigon, the critic Michael Feingold wrote in The Times in 1966. Seconds later, he wrote, the actors became the hospital, and shortly afterward turn it, without a qualm, into a Buddhist funeral.
The Open Theater's last production was Nightwalk (1973), written by Terry, Sam Shepard and Jean-Claude van Itallie and performed in repertory with two other works. Mel Gussow of The Times called it enormously enjoyable, with a strong and disquieting impact.
Terry also worked with the Firehouse Theater in Minneapolis. In her 40s, she moved to Nebraska to become the playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theater in Omaha and continued to produce experimental work.
At the end of her career, she had written 70 plays. They include Babes in the Bighouse: A Documentary Fantasy Musical About Life in Prison (1974), Sleazing Toward Athens (1977), 15 Million 15-Year-Olds (1983), Dinner's in the Blender (1987) and Breakfast Serial (1991).
Much of her work was intended, at least partly, for young audiences. The Snow Queen (1991) was a playful adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. Headlights (1990) was an examination of illiteracy.
Terry was a founder, with five others, of the short-lived but influential Women's Theater Council in 1972. She received the Dramatists Guild Award in 1983. Along with her wife, Jo Ann Schmidman, and Sara Kimberlain, she was an editor of Right Brain Vacation Photos (1992), an illustrated book of two decades of Magic Theater productions.
Terry died on April 12 at a hospital in Omaha. She was 90.
Elizabeth Primamore, a writer who is working on a book about Terry and four other women writers, confirmed the death on Monday.
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
