Theresa Helburn (1887–1959)

Theresa Helburn was born in New York City to Julius Helburn, a leather merchant, and his wife Hannah Peyser, who founded an experimental elementary school. She attended the prestigious Horace Mann School in NYC and Windsor School in Boston before graduating with honors from Bryn Mawr College in 1908. At Bryn Mawr she organized, directed, and acted in many school plays. She went on to study playwriting at Radcliffe College and at the Sorbonne in Paris. She then taught theater and wrote drama criticism and plays. By 1918, the first of her own creations was being produced on Broadway. Helburn’s plays included Enter the Hero (1916), Allison Makes Hay (1919), Other Lives (1921), and Denbigh (1927). She became a co-founder of the Theatre Guild, to nurture serious theater art, in 1919. There she acted first as a literary manager, then as casting director, and later as co-producer with Lawrence Langner. The Theatre Guild brought original dramas from European and American playwrights, such as George Bernard Shaw and Eugene O'Neill, to the Broadway stage, and established relationships with notable actors. Under her guidance, it also supported new plays and playwrights in smaller theaters. In the early 1930s, Helburn also worked briefly in Hollywood. As a pioneering producer, she envisioned a new kind of musical theater, and brought together song teams and dramatists. She developed the concept to turn the Theatre Guild's production of Green Grow the Lilacs into a musical that became Oklahoma! She also helped adapt the play Liliom into the musical Carousel. Among her other important Broadway productions were The Iceman Cometh (1946), Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1953) and The Trip to Bountiful (1953). In 1922, she married scholar John Baker Opdycke. Her autobiography, A Wayward Quest, was published posthumously in 1960.