Megan Terry

American playwright

• Born: July 22, 1932
• Place of Birth: Seattle, Washington
• Died: April 12, 2023
• Place of Death: Omaha, Nebraska

A founding member of the Open Theatre and longtime playwright-in-residence at the Omaha Magic Theatre, Megan Terry established herself as a major pioneer in the development of transformational drama and feminist theater. While best known for her avant-garde 1960s works, including the innovative rock musical Viet Rock (1966), she wrote more than sixty successful plays throughout her career.

Early Life

Megan Terry was born Marguerite Josephine Duffy in Seattle, Washington, to Harold Joseph Duffy Jr. and Marguerite Cecelia Henry Duffy in 1932. She later recalled that she first became interested in a film career when she was four years old, but a few years later a visit to the Seattle Repertory Playhouse inspired her to look to theater instead. She participated in theatrical activities such as grade school plays and homemade shows, but her childhood was uneventful until 1942, when her father left to fight in World War II. During the war, young Terry played at defending the Duffy home with toy guns and bullets. In the seventh grade, she wrote, directed, and acted in her first musical and became convinced that she was destined for the theater.

Terry's parents divorced after the war, and when Terry was fourteen, she and her sister left Seattle to live with their father. Harold Duffy did not encourage his daughter’s theatrical aspirations, but he did instill in her a love of the outdoors and taught her carpentry and bricklaying. Returning to Seattle to live with her grandparents during her last year in high school, Terry rediscovered the Seattle Repertory Playhouse and came under the tutelage of Florence James, a Konstantin Stanislavsky–trained director, and her husband, actor Burton James.

Terry later described her time at Seattle Repertory as her upbringing. At the theater she learned design, studied the work of Gordon Craig and Adolph Appia, and discovered the links between theater and politics from Florence James, who combined her work in theater with running for public office as a Progressive Party candidate. During those years, Terry also discovered classical drama. She spent the summer of 1950 as a scholarship student at the Banff School of Fine Arts, where she took the stage name of Maggie Duffy and played Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. From 1950 to 1951, she studied at the University of Washington in Seattle, and when Seattle Repertory was closed in 1951 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, she moved to Canada to study at the University of Alberta.

Terry’s two years in Canada widened her theatrical experience by exposing her to the work of Antonin Artaud and giving her the extensive backstage work that led her to decide to become a playwright instead of an actor. Her grandfather’s illness forced her back to Seattle, and she re-enrolled at the University of Washington. From 1954 to 1956, she taught at the Cornish School of Allied Arts, where she reorganized the Cornish Players, a theater group composed of students from the school as well as any others who wanted to act. She also wrote four children’s plays that were performed under her direction in the Seattle area. After her graduation in 1956, she returned to the Banff School of Fine Arts, where she earned certificates in directing, acting, and design.

At some point during the early 1950s, Marguerite Josephine Duffy—briefly Maggie Duffy—became Megan Terry, a name she chose in honor of her Welsh heritage. The name Megan came from the Celtic version of “Marguerite,” and Terry was a reference both to the actress Ellen Terry and to “terra,” or the earth.

Life’s Work

In 1956, Terry left the Pacific Northwest and moved to New York City. The move to New York unleashed Terry’s playwriting talent, and for the next eighteen years she was a major figure in the New York experimental theater scene. Her plays were produced by some of the major Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theaters, the Open Theatre, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Genesis Theatre, Cherry Lane Theatre, and the Manhattan Theatre Club, among others, as well as by the Firehouse Theatre in Minneapolis and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

During her New York years, Terry became a founding member of the New York Open Theatre, the brainchild of Joseph Chaikin, who brought together a group of young writers and actors, including Jean-Claud van Itallie, Sam Shepard, Richard Gilman, Roberta Sklar, and others, in addition to Terry. The Open Theatre, which was to become a major influence on both experimental and traditional theater, focused on improvisation as the first step to developing a script and, ultimately, a performance piece. The emphasis was on the ensemble and on acting that combined the ideas of Stanislavsky with Chaikin’s own “psycho-physical” technique.

Terry was playwright-in-residence for the Open Theatre from 1963 to 1968, during which she created or revised for production eight plays. An important play from the Open Theatre years is Calm Down Mother (1965), which is often cited in discussions of transformational drama as an excellent example of the genre. Transformational drama is what critic Robert Pasolli describes as “a theatre of abstraction and illusion,” in which actors “[delineate], consecutively and concurrently, concrete objects, stereotyped individuals, human relationships, impartial observers and abstract actions.” Calm Down Mother involves three actors who play several roles, transforming themselves into different characters and acting out new relationships from scene to scene. The most significant of Terry’s Open Theatre plays is Viet Rock: A Folk War Movie (1966). The play grew out of her Open Theatre workshop, in which the actors improvised scenes from newspaper stories and television coverage of the war. It opened at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club on May 21, 1966, in New York, and later it was produced at Yale and at other theaters around the United States.

Viet Rock was the Open Theatre’s first full-length production, and, like Calm Down Mother, it is a transformational piece with shifting characterization, episodic structure, and the subsuming of individual identity into the collective creativity of the ensemble. The play, a series of variations on war and the experiences of soldiers, was intended as an antiwar piece and a commentary on American involvement in Vietnam. Theatrical experimentation aside, Viet Rock is historically significant in a number of ways: It was the first full theatrical treatment of the Vietnam War, the first commercial production of a transformational play, the first American rock musical, and the first American play in which barriers between stage and house were broken down when the actors left the stage to make physical contact with the audience.

Viet Rock was Terry’s only collaborative creation with the Open Theatre, although that group produced seven of her other plays. Her formal connection with the Open Theatre lasted until 1968, after which she went on to help found the New York Theatre Strategy and the Women’s Theatre Council, both in 1971. Meanwhile, Terry continued to experiment with the role-shaping transformations that had become an integral part of her work, and her plays were given productions both on the stage and on television.

Arguably the most important work of Terry’s late New York period is Approaching Simone (1970), which would remain one of her best-known plays. Throughout her career, Terry stressed repeatedly the need for strong role models for women. Approaching Simone is a dramatized biography of French philosopher, theologian, and mystic Simone Weil. Terry portrays the gradual development of Weil’s political and theological beliefs from Judaism through socialism and communism and finally to Catholicism by creating a series of evolving supporting roles against which the character of Weil remains fundamentally a woman seeking ways to continue being a strong and responsible citizen of the world. Approaching Simone premiered in Boston before moving to New York. For Terry, the production of the play set in motion the next phase of her career. Playing the role of Simone was a young actress named Jo Ann Schmidman, who had already founded the Omaha Magic Theatre in Nebraska in 1968, before she came east to study at Boston University. Schmidman’s performance in Approaching Simone earned her a place with the Open Theatre, with which Terry was still loosely connected, and the two future collaborators briefly became Open Theatre colleagues.

In 1974, Terry moved to Omaha, Nebraska. Several circumstances impelled her to leave New York: the Open Theatre had disbanded in 1973; she was being blacklisted by Actors’ Equity for withdrawing Hothouse (1974) from a showcase production; she wished to avoid New York careerism and engage directly with a community; and, most important, she wanted to work with Schmidman and the Omaha Magic Theatre. As playwright-in-residence, literary manager, performer, musician, and photographer at the Magic Theatre, Terry was productive and innovative, continuing her work with transformational drama and moving into new thematic territory.

One of Terry’s most popular Magic Theatre plays was Babes in the Bighouse (1974). It uses a combination of documentary with musical theater and cross-gender casting to explore the lives of women in prisons and reformatories. Many of her other plays treat equally difficult subjects, such as sexism in language, domestic violence, and teenage alcoholism, among others. Terry also continued to create plays that address society’s need for appropriate female role models. Mollie Bailey’s Traveling Family Circus: Featuring Scenes from the Life of Mother Jones (1981) received critical acclaim for its juxtaposition of the imaginary Mollie Bailey, a nineteenth century housewife and the center of a traveling “family” circus, and the historical Mother Jones, a political activist from the same century.

The plays of Terry’s late career continued to blend multimedia effects, a keen eye for design, and shifting characterization. Sea of Forms (1986), for example, includes soft sculptures by Bill Farmer. Sound Fields: Are We Hear (1992) uses sound recordings to reflect the manifold sounds that surround people every day. In Belches on Couches (1992) a series of contrasting images taken from television programs violent and comic are projected on a screen while a screeching sound plays that mimics the static on televisions; videotape lies in a thick layer on the stage and props. Two groups of characters, Belchers who hum and recite and Drones who perform tasks, interact in a series of self-contained scenes that reveal their mutual dependence. Critics have interpreted the play as a metaphor for media-driven contemporary society.

Terry’s Star Path Moon Stop (1995), is again an audiovisual kaleidoscope. It scrutinizes the technology and mobility of life in the Information Age in ways that concern average people, the thrills and anxieties of getting by in an increasingly complex, global society. It does so by inviting the audience to consider what people mean by “home” in an era when they are constantly on the move literally and searching spiritually.

Terry also wrote several radio and television scripts, including Dirt Boat (1955, KING-TV, Seattle), Home, or Future Soap (1968, Public Broadcasting Service), Sanibel and Captiva (1968, WGHB, Boston), One More Little Drinkie (1969, PBS), American Wedding Ritual: Monitored/Transmitted by the Planet Jupiter (1972, National Public Radio), Special Material (1974, PBS), and Fireworks (1980, NPR). In 1992 she published a book that highlights her photography as well as her plays, Right Brain Vacation Photos: New Plays and Production Photos, 1972–1992, edited by Schmidman and Sora Kimberlain. It records how plays are staged by depicting the stage designs and costuming in plays.

As well as working at the Magic Theatre, Terry was the Bingham Professor of Humanities at the University of Louisville in 1981; Hill Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, in 1983; and visiting artist at the University of Iowa in 1992, Emory University and Bucknell University in 1996, and Texas Tech University in 1997.

Terry’s plays have won a number of awards, including a 1970 Obie for Approaching Simone and the Stanley Drama Award for Hothouse. Other fellowships and grants include two awards from the Office of Advanced Drama Research at the University of Minnesota (1965 and 1969), an ABC-Yale University Fellowship (1966), Rockefeller grants (1968, 1974, and 1987), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1978), a Creative Artists Public Service Fellowship (1973), and a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship (1972) and playwright Fellowship (1989). She received an award as Nebraska Artist of the Year in 1992, the Earplay Radio Award (1972 and 1980), an award for contributions to theater from the Dramatists Guild Committee for Women (1983), a Silver Medal from Amoco Oil for distinguished contributions to American theater (1977), a lifetime membership in the College of Fellows of the American Theater (1994), and the Robert Chesley Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award (2005).

Terry died at the age of ninety in Omaha, Nebraska, on April 12, 2023.

Significance

Terry’s dramatic achievement was unique in the American theater. In her career as a playwright, she produced a body of work that can be read as a history of American drama in the second half of the twentieth century. Her plays ranged from the realism of her Seattle period to the avant-garde experimentation of her New York plays; she created ensemble pieces, naturalistic drama, performance art, musical theater, and transformational drama. Although she developed her transformational techniques out of the need to discover a theater that was relevant to the concerns of a 1960s audience, her experiments in theatrical image making and the use of language proved valid even for audiences in the closing years of the twentieth century.

Terry remarked that she designed her plays to provoke laughter. Her commitment to social change through the agency of a strong people’s theater was responsible for two forms of drama into which she put a great deal of creative energy: role model plays and public service community dramas. Critic Helen Keyssar called Megan Terry the mother of feminist drama, a label that was particularly apt for the woman whose pioneering work in transformational drama served as a major step toward breaking down gender stereotyping and freeing actors to play more varied roles. In her plays that highlighted the activities and achievements of strong women characters, Terry not only provided American theater with excellent female roles, but also gave audiences strong women with whom to identify. In her work with the Omaha Magic Theatre and its outreach programs, Terry sparked dialogue about such community concerns and political issues as homelessness, overpopulation, teenage alcoholism, women in prisons, the influence of television, and stereotyping.

Bibliography

Aronson, Arnold. American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Betsko, Kathleen, and Rachel Koenig, eds. Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights. New York: Beech Tree, 1987.

Brewer, Mary F. "Battling the Legions of the Ungodly: Alternative American Drama and the Vietnam War." Comparative American Studies 9.1 (2011): 35–54. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

Bryer, Jackson R., and Mary C. Harftig. Facts On File Companion to American Drama. New York: Facts On File, 2004.

Fenn, Jeffery W. Levitating the Pentagon: Evolutions in the American Theatre of the Vietnam War Era. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1992.

Gates, Anita. "Megan Terry, Feminist Playwright and Rock Musical Innovator, Dies at 90." The New York Times, 24 Apr. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/04/24/theater/megan-terry-dead.html. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Hart, Lynda, ed. Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1989.

Rapti, Vassiliki. "Ludics in Megan Terry's 'Theatre of Transformations.'" Ludics in Surrealist Theatre and Beyond. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. 145–174. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

Savran, David. In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. 1988. New York: Theatre Communications, 2012.

Schlueter, June. “Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place: Megan Terry’s Transformational Drama and the Possibilities of Self.” Studies in American Drama, 1945–Present 2 (1987): 59–69.