Firsts & Founders: Early Women in Drama at Yale

Early Playwriting by Women

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As one of the earliest plays written in the Department of Drama, Maurine Watkins' Chicago might have opened the University Theatre, but its immediate New York production, its controversial nature, or both kept it out of that spot. Watkins studied in Baker’s 47 Workshop at Radcliffe, then covered murder trials in the mid-1920s as a Chicago Tribune reporter before coming to Yale. She wrote A Brave Little Woman based on the characters in those trials. Under its new title, Chicago, the play previewed at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven a few nights before its Broadway premiere in December 1926, forgoing a student production. The social satire on murder and celebrity offended some in its first audiences, including Yale faculty.

Watkins inscribed this copy of the 1927 published script (left) to Baker, and her papers reside at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Hallie Flanagan

A typewritten sheet of paper listing the two one-acts, "Celeste" and "Incense," with authors, characters, and staff.

Program for Two One-Act Plays, October 1925

In the fall of 1925, before the opening of the University Theatre, Hallie Flanagan’s one-act play Incense (right) was produced by the Department of Drama alongside Helen Gaskill’s Celeste. Both playwrights wrote their one-acts in the last Radcliffe class of English 47. Flanagan, best known for directing the Federal Theatre Project, kept up a steady correspondence with Baker during her year abroad researching European modernist theater on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In a November 1925 letter (below), Flanagan thanks Baker for staging Incense, saying, “It made me happy to be there at the beginning and to feel the mounting enthusiasm of the new group.” Baker referred to Incense in his recommendation letter for Flanagan to the Guggenheim Fellowship committee: “Mrs. Hallie F. Flanagan… is as distinguished a woman student as I have ever had in my 47 Workshop, and she holds her own well with the best of the men. She really has distinct ability as a playwright… I have just produced with marked success here a one-act play of hers, written in her work with me two years ago in Cambridge.”

First page of a handwritten letter on letterhead reading Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Department of English.

Second page of a handwritten letter on letterhead reading Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Department of English.

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Claire Williams

Front cover of paper program. Stylized illustration of four actors with masks over their eyes reveling under the moon, above the text "The 47 Workshop." Pencil annotation "the best cellar may 1926."

Program for The Best Cellar, 1926

The first full-length play written by a woman produced at the Department of Drama was The Best Cellar (left) by Claire Williams, in May 1926. In an April 1926 letter to Hallie Flanagan, Baker wrote, “I know it will delight you to hear that I am planning to produce a long comedy by Miss Williams… I am determined, if I can, to reveal her to herself as a genuine writer of comedy. She persists in thinking of herself as a tragic writer. As I cannot meet her for ten minutes without enjoying her delightful sense of humor, it positively irritates me to see her treating her humorous abilities with a kind of intellectual contempt...”

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Katharine T. Clugston

Another early comedy was by Katharine T. Clugston, who had performed in the University Theater’s first production in 1926. Clugton’s Finished (below), about headstrong girls at finishing school, was staged in February and March 1928, and the promptbook shows major edits that Clugston made to the script. Finished went on to a Broadway production in November 1928, under the title These Days, featuring a young Katharine Hepburn.

Program and flyer for Finished, 1926

View of a black hardbound book from the side. Paper label affixed over spine.

Clugston's promptbook for Finished, 1926

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Yale One-Acts 1930

Inside cover of the book featuring Baker's bookplate, facing page inscription "Geo. P. Baker first copies apr. 21 1930."

Frontispiece and title page of the book. Left page features a production photograph of "Han's Bulow's Last Puppet," with a woman in front of a home-like dwelling speaking, two men on either side. Facing title page reads Yale One-Act Plays edited with a forward by George Pierce Baker [ornament], followed by publication information.

This 1930 volume of Yale One-Act Plays belonged to Baker (note his ex libris bookplate and signature, above left). With a dedication to Edward Harkness, Baker wrote the foreword to his selection of the strongest plays written in the department during the first few years of its existence, including Immersion by Maude Humphrey and Hans Bulow’s Last Puppet by Grace Ruthenburg.

The latter has particular visibility with a production photograph featured on the the book's frontispiece (above right). Another production photograph from Hans Bulow's Last Puppet also survives (below).

Production photograph of the play with a man standing on the left, two characters standing in front of a low building, like a house, speaking to another character learning out a window.

Prodution photograph from Hans Bulow's Last Puppet

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Shirley Graham Du Bois

Before coming to Yale, Shirley Graham Du Bois (below left) studied composition at the Sorbonne and Oberlin College, and in 1932 composed Tom-Tom, an opera about African American history. In the mid-1930s, she supervised the “Negro Unit” of the Chicago Federal Theatre Project, which put on the popular Swing Mikado and Harlem Macbeth. During her years at the Department of Drama, Du Bois composed the music for Garden of Time, in which she also acted (below right). She wrote the one-act tragedy It’s Mornin’, set at the end of the Civil War, in which an enslaved woman kills her daughter rather than see her sold.

Carl Van Vechten, Shirley Graham DuBois, 1946. Carl Van Vechten Papers Relating to African American Arts and Letters. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, JWJ MSS 1050

Paper play program. Garden of Time. Yale University Theatre. 17, 18, 19 MAY 1939. Includes illustration of a head and lyre in the center.

Program for Garden of Time, 1939

She also wrote a full-length tragedy about coal miners, Dust to Earth (below), that was staged at Yale, directed by Constance Welch (see next page) in 1941. The Program Notes, under "Author of Tonight's Play," (below right) include great praise and tribute for Du Bois from Hallie Flanagan.

From cover of program. Dust to Earth. Yale University Theater. 29, 30, 31 JANUARY 1941

Internal pages of the program. Left side lists title, author, and cast. Right side lists scenes and staff.

Program for Dust to Earth, 1941

Back cover of program, Program Notes. Includes Author of Tonight's Play, Other Program Notes, Playwrights, and Actors, Designers, and Directors.

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