Marguerite Duffy (July 22, 1932 – April 12, 2023), known professionally as Megan Terry, was an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatre artist.
Terry produced over fifty works for theater, radio, and television, and is best known for her avant-garde theatrical work from the 1960s. As a founding member of The Open Theater, she developed an actor-training and character-creation technique known as "transformation". She used this technique to create her 1966 work Viet Rock, which was both the first rock musical and the first play to address the war in Vietnam.
Life and work
Early life and education
Terry was born, as Marguerite Duffy, to Marguerite (née Henry) and businessman Harold Joseph in Seattle, Washington. She first showed an interest in the theatre after attending a play at the age of seven. She wrote, "I went and I looked at the stage and I fell madly in love... I knew I wanted to do that, whatever it was." As a child, she wrote, directed, and designed sets for productions staged in the backyard of her family's home, earning her the nicknames "Tallulah Blackhead" and "Sarah Heartburn" from her father. He was not pleased by her interest in theatre.
After years of participating in school plays, Terry became a member of the Seattle Repertory Playhouse during her senior year in high school. The liberal politics and activist attitudes of the company's directors, Florence and Burton James, had an effect on her view of theatre in society. She has credited their influence, as well as the 1951 closure of the Seattle Repertory Playhouse under pressure from the House Un-American Activities Committee, for her later use of political commentary on stage.
Terry went on to earn a scholarship to the Banff School of Fine Arts in Alberta, Canada, where she received certificates in theatre directing, design, and acting. While there, she took psychology and sociology courses at the University of Alberta, and served as technical director for the Edmonton Children's Theater, where she became interested in theatre as a tool for youth education. Midway through her degree program, Terry was forced to return to Seattle when her grandfather became seriously ill. She finished her degree at the University of Washington, where she was awarded a Bachelor of Education degree in 1952.
After graduation, she decided to focus on theatre for children and began teaching at Seattle's oldest performance conservatory, the Cornish School of Allied Arts. She also organized her first ensemble, the Cornish Players. At this time, she was writing a series of controversial short plays for youth dealing with issues like sex and politics, and adopted a pseudonym to shield her professional career as a playwright from her more conservative colleagues. She chose the name Megan because it was the Celtic root for Marguerite, and Terry in homage to the nineteenth-century actress Ellen Terry.
New York City, The Open Theater, and Viet Rock
Terry faced backlash for the edginess of her earliest plays, Beach Grass and Go out (1955) and Move the Car (1955). She became increasingly frustrated with creative and political restraint in the Seattle theatre community, and decided to move to New York City. Once there, she continued writing plays dealing with social and political issues, including The Magic Realist (1960), which uses vaudeville techniques to burlesque the inequity of a capitalistic economic power structure on individuals, families, and criminal justice, and Ex-Miss Copper Queen on a Set of Pills, the story of an ex-beauty queen who has begun working as a prostitute to support her drug addiction. Ex-Miss Copper Queen on a Set of Pills opened in 1963 at Edward Albee's Playwrights Unit Workshop. Despite the success of these early productions, Terry had to support herself by working as an actress in television serials.
In her free time, she began forming connections in the theatre community, including with fellow playwright Maria Irene Fornes and director Joseph Chaikin. Chaikin was then working with The Living Theatre. Terry and Chaikin, together with Peter Feldman and Barbara Vann, founded The Open Theater in 1963. The Open Theater was a cooperative that progressed from a closed experimental laboratory to an ensemble. The Open Theater used the methods of the worldwide collective theater movement and was particularly inspired by the work of the acting teacher, Nola Chilton, and the innovator of theater games, Viola Spolin.