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Theater Patricia C. Willis In keeping with Yale's attention to theater, as well as its location in New Haven, formerly the tryout capital for Broadway, archives important for their theater connections have been greatly enhanced in this century. The papers of Eugene O'Neill, 1926 Hon., recall his study in George Pierce Baker's famous "47 Workshop" for playwrights at Harvard, the founding of the Provincetown Players in 1915, O'Neill's Broadway successes mounted by the Theatre Guild, and the troubled family of Long Day's Journey into Night. Manuscripts in the author's miniscule script are joined by typescripts made by Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, set designs, production photographs, and Carlotta's journals documenting their life together until O'Neill's death. Papers of Agnes Boulton O'Neill, Eugene's second wife, cover the 1920s, while the papers of Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood elaborate on the Provincetown Players. Another student in Baker's workshop, Philip Barry, 1918, succeeded on Broadway with such works as Hotel Universe and The Philadelphia Story, both produced by the Theatre Guild. Graduating from Yale two years after Barry, Thornton Wilder took Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction (The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1927) and drama (Our Town, 1938). His archive documents not only his career in theater but also his literary friendships, such as that with Gertrude Stein, whom he persuaded to give her archive to his alma mater. The archive of the Theatre Guild and of its founder, Lawrence Langner, is one of the largest in the collection. From the 1920s through recent years, the Guild produced many of Broadway's prominent hits, including O'Neill's Ah! Wilderness, Shaw's Pygmalion, Lynn Riggs's Green Grow the Lilacs (which became Oklahoma!, also a Theatre Guild production), DuBose Heyward and George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, and William Inge's Come Back Little Sheba. The archive contains scripts which include light plots, blocking notes, and property plots, readers' reports, casting books, road company information, financial papers, cast and production photographs, playbills, reviews, and correspondence with Langner and Theresa Helburn. The anatomy of every Broadway season for nearly a half century can be gleaned from these papers. The papers of the Phoenix Theatre, which flourished in New York beginning in the 1950s, attest to the work of T. Edward Hambleton, 1934, 1937 Dra., John Housman, and Harold Prince in producing such classics as Jean Cocteau's The Infernal Machine, T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion, Chekhov's The Seagull, and O'Neill's Great God Brown. Among the papers are box office reports, production notes, publicity, stage managers' reports, and tour contracts.  Comments:Ellen R.
Cordes, ellen.cordes@yale.edu |