Helburn, Theresa (1887–1959)

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Helburn, Theresa (1887–1959)

American theatrical producer, director, and playwright, who served as co-director of the Theatre Guild in New York. Name variations: Terry Helburn. Born on January 12, 1887, in New York City; died on August 18, 1959, in Weston, Connecticut; younger child and only daughter of Julius Helburn (a businessman) and Hannah (Peyser) Helburn; graduated from the Winsor School, Boston, Massachusetts, 1903; Bryn Mawr College, B.A., 1908; attended the Sorbonne, Paris, France, 1913; married John Baker Opdycke (a high school English teacher and author), in 1919 (died 1956); no children.

Under the co-direction of Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner, the Theatre Guild was one of the most successful ventures of America's little theater movement, which flourished during the second decade of the 20th century. During her 30-year association with the Guild, Helburn was a leading force in the development of the American theater, helping to bring to attention numerous playwrights, actors, and designers.

Helburn was born in New York City in 1887 on West 46th Street, which later became the heart of the theater district. As a child, she was educated at home, where her mother Hannah Peyser Helburn ran an experimental primary school. Theresa, known as Terry, attended her first play, at age nine, and was captivated. "I entered a world that was unlike anything I have ever imagined, but that I recognized at once as my own," she later recalled. "The theater was not a dream, or a goal—it was home."

When the family moved to Boston in 1900, Helburn entered the exclusive Winsor School, graduating in 1903. At Bryn Mawr College, which offered no drama courses at the time, she wrote her sophomore thesis on the plays of Arthur Wing Pinero, obtaining her source material from the Philadelphia Library. She also produced, directed, and acted in all of the college plays, often driving herself to the point of exhaustion. After graduating with numerous honors, she enrolled in George Pierce Baker's playwriting class (English 47) at Radcliffe.

Following a modest social debut in 1910, she moved to New York and immersed herself in writing, achieving some success publishing her verses and short stories. She was active in the Poetry Society of America and also joined a weekly play-reading group, where she met Lawrence Langner, a Welsh patent attorney with a passion for theater. The group, which included Lee Simonson, a theater designer, and Philip Moeller, a director, later established the Washington Square Players, an amateur group dedicated to producing plays of artistic worth. In 1913, fresh from a year in Paris, Helburn was invited to act in the Players' first production, a play by Langner entitled Licensed. Two weeks into rehearsal, however, Helburn's family, who disapproved of her acting, discovered the play was about birth control and yanked her from the cast. (Ironically, Helburn appeared on stage many years later in another Langner play, Suzanna and the Elders, which dealt with the subject of free love and multiple marriages.)

Having no intention of giving up the theater, Helburn took up her playwriting in earnest, finishing her first drama, Enter the Hero, in 1916. Accepted by the Washington Square Players for production, it went into rehearsal with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in a major role. Unfortunately, Millay was not much of an actress, and the play was ultimately abandoned. Several of Helburn's subsequent plays, including Prince Prigio, Crops and Croppers, and Denbigh, were produced without much success, although down through the years they have resurfaced as community theater productions.

Helburn rounded out her theater apprenticeship by serving as a drama critic for The Nation during 1918, the same year that Langner reorganized the Washington Square Players as a subscription-based repertory company called the Theatre Guild. (The name harkened back to the medieval trade guilds, known for their cooperative organization and pride in craft.) The Guild included original members of the Washington Square Players, Moeller, and Simonson, as well as newcomers actress Helen Westley , banker Maurice Wertheim, and artist Rollo Peters. Helburn was recruited as a playreader for the fledgling group, but during a managerial crisis in 1919, she stepped in as executive secretary. That year, she also married John Baker Opdycke, an English teacher, who went on to author some 20 books on prose style and advertising technique.

The Theatre Guild's early mission was to produce plays of substance and quality, and it also served as a protest against the commercially minded producers that dominated the Broadway scene. During the first season, the group presented two plays, the first of which, Bonds of Interest

by Jacinto Benavente, was produced on a shoestring and lasted only a few weeks. Opening night was disastrous. Due to budgetary constraints, the leading lady's dress had been fashioned out of oil cloth which was painted gold to simulate a more luxurious fabric. "The actress stood up to make an exit," said Helburn, "and her chair came up with her. When Dudley Digges, who was playing opposite her, gently plucked the chair away from the dress—it left a great white patch." The Guild's second production, John Ferguson by St. John Ervine, proved to be an artistic and financial success, providing a much-needed transfusion to the operating budget and establishing the Guild as one of New York's viable new art theaters. Helburn, who had impressed board members with her innate business sense and her quick grasp of theater management and production, was promoted to executive director. With the new title came a membership on the Guild's board, and an equal voice in the selection and casting of new plays.

By the end of its first decade, the Theatre Guild had built its own playhouse in the Broadway district and boasted 25,000 patrons. Between 1926 and 1928, it produced 14 successful new productions, an unprecedented number. Much of the early success can be directly attributed to Helburn. It was through her insistence that Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were cast together in The Guardsman (1924), which established them as the most distinguished acting team in America. Helburn also fought against the censorship of Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude (1928) and was instrumental in producing the plays of S.N. Behrman and Philip Barry.

In 1934, reacting to dissension on the board, Helburn took a leave of absence to work in films. For a year, she was a producer for Columbia Pictures, but she missed the theater and returned to New York in 1935, to take up once more with the Guild. While in California, however, Helburn, with the help of seven major film companies, had organized the Bureau of New Plays, which held several national competitions for new playwrights and then sponsored seminars for the winners. When she returned to New York, the seminars were transferred to the New School for Social Research, under her directorship.

In the late 1930s, after a succession of failures brought growing economic and managerial concerns, the Guild reorganized, replacing the six-member board with Helburn and Langner as co-directors, and bending the mission to embrace more commercial offerings. Helburn's role expanded considerably to include not only play selection, but all aspects of production. Still, much of her managerial effort was devoted to working with playwrights in developing scripts, and she often rankled some of the writers in her role as "play doctor." Several major playwrights, including Maxwell Anderson, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, and Robert E. Sherwood, became so disgruntled that they left the Guild to form the Playwrights Company. More often than not, however, Helburn's instincts were on the mark. In 1943, when the Guild was once again on the brink of bankruptcy, she had the idea to turn the play Green Grow the Lilacs by Lynn Riggs into a musical, and she brought together Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II to write it. The resulting production, Oklahoma!, with its tightly integrated music, story, setting, and dance (choreographed by Agnes de Mille ), not only saved the Guild but changed musical comedy forever. Two years later, Helburn once again enlisted Rodgers and Hammerstein to rework Ferenc Molnar's play Lilliom which they turned into the musical Carousel (1945), another smash hit for the Guild.

An elfin woman, snub-nosed and crinkly-eyed, Helburn was described by Lawrence Langner as having nerves "like whipcord," and will-power "like steel." Richard Rodgers thought her "the quietest and most imperturbable woman I've ever known," but added that during her later years she turned into something of a character. Helburn and her husband, who died in 1956, maintained an apartment in New York City, and spent weekends in their Connecticut country home called Terrytop, "Terry" being Helburn's nickname. She remained active in the Theatre Guild until 1953, when her health began to fail. She died of a heart attack on August 18, 1959, at her Connecticut home. Helburn's memoir, A Wayward Quest (1960), was completed after her death by her assistant Elinore Denniston .

sources:

Current Biography. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1944.

Rodgers, Richard. "A Remembrance of Terry," in Critics Choice. Vol. 3, no. 3. November 1969.

Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol Hurd Green, eds. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980.

Wilmeth, Don B., and Tice L. Miller, eds. Cambridge Guide to American Theatre. MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993.