Jasper Deeter (July 31, 1893 - May 1972) [1] [2] was an American-born stage and film actor, stage director, and founder of Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, one of the first regional repertory theatres in the United States. [3]
Deeter gained prominence in the theatre world in the 1919 production of Eugene O'Neill's Exorcism: A Play in One Act. [4] A close relationship with O'Neill ensued, and Deeter joined the Provincetown Players, which was an experimental theatre group that produced many of O'Neill's one-act and full-length plays in New York City. Deeter appeared in several of O'Neill's plays, including The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones . Deeter is credited with convincing the playwright to cast a black actor, Charles Sidney Gilpin, in the lead role of Brutus Jones in The Emperor Jones. The play marked the first time that a major black role in a New York production was not performed by an actor in blackface. [5] [6]
Deeter left New York as frictions between members of the company arose as a result of what many saw as a commercialization of the plays produced by the Provincetown Players. Many of the original members, including Deeter, believed commercial success to be at odds with the Provincetown Players' mission to create experimental works that weren't judged by box office numbers. He travelled to Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, where he became involved with the Rose Valley Arts and Crafts Community. [7]
It was here that Deeter found artisans and craftsmen such as Wharton Esherick, Elenore Plaisted Abbott, and others who built theatre set pieces, provided scenic artwork, and designed costumes. He also attracted the talents of actors such as Ann Harding, Eva LaGallienne, and Phil Price Jr. Throughout its heyday from the late 1920s to the 1950s, Hedgerow Theatre presented plays by the leading playwrights of the time, including O'Neill, George Bernard Shaw, and Langston Hughes.
In 1958, Deeter appeared in the role of the Civic Defense Volunteer in the cult classic The Blob, and in 1959, he had a leading part in the sci-fi thriller 4D Man . In his later years, he remained active with the theatre and died in Media, PA in 1972 at the age of 78. [2]
A repertory theatre is a theatre in which a resident company presents works from a specified repertoire, usually in alternation or rotation.
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night is often included on lists of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
The Emperor Jones is a 1920 tragic play by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill that tells the tale of Brutus Jones, a resourceful, self-assured African American and a former Pullman porter, who kills another black man in a dice game, is jailed, and later escapes to a small, backward Caribbean island where he sets himself up as emperor. The play recounts his story in flashbacks as Brutus makes his way through the jungle in an attempt to escape former subjects who have rebelled against him.
Ann Harding was an American theatre, motion picture, radio, and television actress. A regular player on Broadway and in regional theater in the 1920s, in the 1930s Harding was one of the first actresses to gain fame in the new medium of "talking pictures," and she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1931 for her work in Holiday.
Larry Howard Shue was an American playwright and actor, best known for writing two oft-performed farces, The Nerd and The Foreigner.
Susan Keating Glaspell was an American playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. With her husband George Cram Cook, she founded the Provincetown Players, the first modern American theatre company.
The Provincetown Players was a collective of artists, writers, intellectuals, and amateur theater enthusiasts. Under the leadership of the husband and wife team of George Cram “Jig” Cook and Susan Glaspell from Iowa, the Players produced two seasons in Provincetown, Massachusetts and six seasons in New York City, between 1916 and 1922. The company's founding has been called "the most important innovative moment in American theatre." Its productions helped launch the careers of Eugene O'Neill and Susan Glaspell, and ushered American theatre into the Modern era.
Jason Miller was an American playwright and actor. He won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play for his play That Championship Season, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Father Damien Karras in the 1973 horror film The Exorcist, a role he reprised in The Exorcist III. He later became artistic director of the Scranton Public Theatre in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where That Championship Season was set.
Charles Sidney Gilpin was one of the most highly regarded stage actors of the 1920s. He played in critical debuts in New York City: the 1919 premier of John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln and the lead role of Brutus Jones in the 1920 premiere of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, also touring with the play. In 1920, he was the first black American to receive The Drama League's annual award as one of the 10 people who had done the most that year for American theatre.
Lazarus Laughed is a play by Eugene O'Neill written in 1925. Its sub-title was A Play for Imaginative Theatre. It is a long theo-philosophical meditation with more than a hundred actors making up a masked chorus. In theatrical format, Lazarus Laughed appears to be a Greek tragedy. But the underlying message is similar to the mystery plays from the Middle Ages. O'Neill's play, The Great God Brown, can be considered as an introduction to this play.
As the new medium of cinema was beginning to replace theater as a source of large-scale spectacle, the Little Theatre Movement developed in the United States around 1912. The Little Theatre Movement served to provide experimental centers for the dramatic arts, free from the standard production mechanisms used in prominent commercial theaters. In several large cities, beginning with Chicago, Boston, Seattle, and Detroit, companies formed to produce more intimate, non-commercial, non-profit-centered, and reform-minded entertainments.
Eduard Franz Schmidt was an American actor of theatre, film and television. Franz portrayed King Ahab in the 1953 biblical low-budget film Sins of Jezebel, Jethro in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956), and Jehoam in Henry Koster's The Story of Ruth (1960).
The Emperor Jones is a 1933 American pre-Code film adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's 1920 play of the same title, directed by iconoclast Dudley Murphy, written for the screen by playwright DuBose Heyward and starring Paul Robeson in the title role, and co-starring Dudley Digges, Frank H. Wilson, Fredi Washington and Ruby Elzy.
Hedgerow Theatre is a theatre company based in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, founded in 1923. It was "for many years the only true U. S. professional repertory theater." The building is a contributing structure in the Rose Valley Historic District listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Robert Joseph Litz was an American playwright, screenwriter, director and critic.
Beyond the Horizon is a play written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. Although he first copyrighted the text in June 1918, O'Neill continued to revise the play throughout the rehearsals for its 1920 premiere. His first full-length work to be staged, Beyond the Horizon won the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
The Provincetown Playhouse is a historic theatre at 133 MacDougal Street between West 3rd and West 4th Streets in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It is named for the Provincetown Players, who converted the former stable and wine-bottling plant into a theater in 1918. The original Players included George Cram Cook, Susan Glaspell, Eugene O'Neill, John Reed, Louise Bryant, Floyd Dell, Ida Rauh, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Djuna Barnes. Paul Robeson performed at the theatre, and E. E. Cummings had his play "Him" performed in the building. Ann Harding, Bette Davis, and Claudette Colbert made their New York stage debuts in the facility.
Thomas Montgomery Gregory was a dramatist, educator, social philosopher and activist, historian and a leading figure in the National Negro Theatre Movement.
Virgil Geddes (1897–1989) was an American playwright.
Cleon Francis "Throck" Throckmorton was an American painter, theatrical designer, producer, and architect. During the early 1920s, Throckmorton resided in Washington, D.C., where he created sets for stage productions by Howard University, a historically black college.