Megan Terry, an Obie Award winner, a founding member of the Open Theater troupe, and a prolific feminist playwright who wrote and directed a rock musical on the New York stage older than “Hair,” died on April 12 in a hospital in Omaha. She was 90.
Elizabeth Primamore, a writer working on a book about Mrs Terry and four other female writers, confirmed the death on Monday.
Mrs. Terry’s “Viet Rock: A Folk War Movie” premiered at the Martinique Theater, an off-Broadway home, on November 10, 1966, during the Vietnam War, after previous performances with the Yale Repertory Company and La MaMa ETC, in the East Village.
The lyrics of the rock songs were poignant and pointed: “The wars have merged into one/There was a war going 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 get gay with LBJ,” said one character, a twist on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “All the way with LBJ” campaign slogan. “I lost my green beret on the way to Mandalay.”
“Viet Rock” was believed to be the first American stage work to cover the Vietnam War.
“The play ended with an image of rebirth,” wrote critic Dan Sullivan in The Los Angeles Times, “but the image that stayed with the viewer was a heap of dead soldiers, men and women, muttering ‘Who needs this?'”
DailyExpertNews filmed the production. Walter Kerr, the paper’s chief theater critic, dismissed it as “essentially unthinking, only sound coming from the gut”. The Village Voice called it extraordinary.
A year later, one of the cast members, Gerome Ragni, and two partners presented their musical “Hair” at the Public Theater, which moved to Broadway in 1968 and achieved overwhelming international success.
Mrs. Terry, in her mid-thirties, 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 exuberant 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 and Marguerite (Henry) Duffy. Her father was a businessman. Marguerite became fascinated with theater after seeing a play at the age of 7 – a passion that, in her opinion, ridiculed her disapproving father, earning her nicknames like Tallulah Blackhead and Sarah Heartburn, as opposed to Bankhead and Bernhardt.
In high school, she worked at the Seattle Repertory Playhouse and learned early on that politics and theater could be powerful but tricky bedfellows. The playhouse closed in 1951 under pressure from the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Marguerite won a scholarship to Canada’s Banff School of Fine Arts, 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’s Cornish College of the Arts, in Seattle. Her first plays, including ‘Beach Grass’ and ‘Go Out and Move the Car’ were criticized for their candor, which led her to take two drastic steps.
She started doing her theater work under a pseudonym. Megan was the Celtic root of her given name and Terry was a tribute to 19th century British actress Ellen Terry. And she moved to New York City.
Her New York plays include “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).
One of Ms. Terry’s most talked-about techniques with the Open Theater, a New York experimental company founded in 1963 by Joseph Chaikin, was known simply as transformation. An actor can start speaking in one language and suddenly switch to another, after taking on the identity of a new character.
In a scene in “Viet Rock,” an actor pretends to be hit by gunfire and the others catch him. “Then, abruptly, the sounds change, the body is held high and the group, whirling strangely, has become a helicopter carrying the wounded to Saigon,” wrote the critic Michael Feingold in The Times in 1966. Seconds later, he wrote, the actors became the hospital and “turned it into a Buddhist burial shortly afterwards without hesitation.”
The last Open Theater production was “Nightwalk” (1973), written by Mrs. Terry, Sam Shepard and Jean-Claude van Itallie and performed in repertory with two other works. Mel Gussow of The Times called it “hugely enjoyable”, with a “strong and disturbing impact”.
Ms. Terry also worked with the Firehouse Theater in Minneapolis. In her 40s, she moved to Nebraska to become a playwright-in-residence at Omaha’s Magic Theater 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 Series” (1991).
Much of her work was, at least in part, aimed at a young audience. “The Snow Queen” (1991) was a playful adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. “Headlights” (1990) was a study of illiteracy.
Mrs. Terry co-founded the short-lived but influential Women’s Theater Council with five others in 1972. She received the Dramatists Guild Award in 1983. She co-edited “Right Brain Vacation Photos” with her wife, Jo Ann Schmidman, and Sara Kimberlain. (1992), an illustrated book covering two decades of Magic Theater productions.
Mrs. Terry is survived by Mrs. Schmidman.
Saying goodbye was one of Mrs. Terry’s least favorite pastimes. When she received her degree in education, she remembered the pain of losing the third grade she had taught as a student all year. In her career, she found a way to avoid that kind of forced divorce.
“I’ve always loved being in a theater company and being around people year after year,” she said in a 1992 interview at Wichita State University. “It satisfies my emotional needs and my intellectual needs. I come from a huge family, and theater gives you the chance to recreate the family in your own image.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.