Theater

May in Theatre: Company Geburt, Pulitzer Laureate’s B-Day, and Early Miller Works

This month highlights a major theatre group's founding, the birthday of a Pulitzer-winning playwright, and Arthur Miller's early, lesser-known works.

American Theatre·May 5, 2026·via American Theatre

May in Theatre: Company Geburt, Pulitzer Laureate’s B-Day, and Early Miller Works

Washington Square Players costumers prepare costumes designed by George Wolfe Plank for “A Merry Death,” by Nicholas Evreinov, the first production of the Washington Square Players 1916 season. Florence Enright stands on a chair dressed as Columbine. (Photo via Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain-23360)

Theatre History

May 5, 2026 The Oscar G. Brockett Center for Theatre History and Criticism Leave a comment

This Month in Theatre History

May highlights include a major group’s founding, a Pulitzer winner’s birthday, and Arthur Miller juvenilia.

By The Oscar G. Brockett Center for Theatre History and Criticism

1916 (110 years ago)

The Washington Square Players, a short-lived theatre troupe in New York City, produced The Seagull by Anton Chekhov. The troupe’s core belief was that the American theatre needed to be free of “commercial considerations” and have space to experiment. The troupe aimed to bring about “the birth and healthy growth of an artistic theatre in this country.” At its founding in 1915, the group attempted to operate democratically regarding play selection and casting decisions, but quickly moved to a structure with a governing board of five members. They prioritized the work of American playwrights and often produced plays by members of the troupe, but when they did produce foreign plays, they were scripts they felt had been “ignored by commercial management.”

1931 (95 years ago)

Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg, and Harold Clurman compared notes and selected 27 actors who would become the Group Theatre . Though they did not seek out Broadway professionals, they tried to avoid “amateurism” in their selection. According to Mark Connelly’s book The Group Theatre: An Enduring Legacy , the average age of the group was 27. They called themselves the “chosen ones.” By June, the chosen ones were driving to Connecticut to spend the next three months becoming an ensemble. “You were different from other actors, and the Group was different from other play companies,” Clifford Odets, an actor who would become one of the Group’s main writers, said about the experience.

1936 (90 years ago)

Arthur Miller won a Hopwood Award for his first play, No Villains , as an undergraduate and was awarded $250. The win encouraged him to keep writing, unaware that he had actually split the award with another winner because two of the three judges selected his play for second place. One judge wrote that the entire pool of applicants seems “to me quite without indications of talent.” Miller refused every later request to stage a production of the play, indicating that he was aware of its lack of merit. He did, however, continue exploring some of the themes from this first attempt in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman . No Villains received its world premiere at the Old Red Lion Theatre in London in 2015, 10 years after Miller’s death. Reviewing the production for the Guardian, Mark Lawson called it “recognisably the apprenticeship of a theatrical genius.”

1981 (45 years ago)

Katori Hall was born on May 10. After becoming the first Black valedictorian of her high school, Hall was accepted to Columbia University with a full scholarship. In an acting class, she asked her instructor for help finding a scene for two Black women. When the instructor could think of none, Hall thought, “I’m going to have to write some plays with scenes for two young Black women.” Some of her works include Hurt Village , Hoodoo Love , Our Lady of Kibeho (published in the February 2015 issue of this magazine), and, her best known play, The Mountaintop . In 2021, Hall won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for The Hot Wing King . She wrote and produced Tina: The Tina Turner Musical on Broadway and is currently the show runner and executive producer of P-Valley , a television adaptation of her play Pussy Valley .

1991 (35 years ago)

A Sunbeam by John Henry Redwood premiered at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre , three years after winning the McDonald’s Literary Achievement Award for Best Play in 1988. The play is an Ibsenesque exploration of disability. When he was younger, Redwood received a basketball scholarship to the University of Kansas, but after participation in a desegregation sit-in, the university withdrew his scholarship and Redwood enlisted in the Marines for two years. His work was widely produced in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. He was commissioned by Allegheny General Hospital and Saltworks Theatre Company to write What if You’re The One? , a one-act play encouraging women to screen for breast cancer, which toured the Pittsburgh area and was mounted in other cities.