I was saddened to hear from my friends at Peculiar Works Project about the death on April 12 of Megan Terry (Marguerite Duffy, 1932-2023).
Terry wasn't just one of the top female playwrights of the off-off-Broadway generation, she was one of the best known of them all. Her most successful play was Viet Rock (1966), which was both the first play to protest America's involvement in Vietnam, and, more lastingly, the first rock musical. The play was also a major influence on Hair, developed by Gerome Ragni, one of the cast members of Viet Rock. Created with the Open Theatre, Viet Rock premiered at the Yale Rep and then at La Mama. My aforementioned friends at PWP had presented a portion of Viet Rock as part of OFF Stage: The East Village Fragments in 2007.
Terry was one of the founders of the Open Theatre with Joseph Chaikin in 1963. Her first plays were produced in her hometown of Seattle, but the avant-garde nature of their form and their political progressivism motivated her to seek a more receptive audience (which she found) in New York. Over the course of her career Terry wrote over 70 plays. Others included The Magic Realists (1960), a vaudeville and burlesque influenced take-down of capitalism; the drug-themed Ex-Miss Copper Queen on a Set of Pills (1963), which was produced at Sheridan Square Playhouse, later the home of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company and the Axis Theatre; Calm Down Mother (1964), Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool, Dry Place (1965); In the Gloaming, Oh My Darling (1966); Nightwalk (1973, with Sam Shepard and Jean-Claude van Itallie), Babes in the Big House (1974), and Molly Bailey's Traveling Family Circus: Featuring Scenes from the Life of Mother Jones (1982). Many of her early plays were directed by Tom O'Horgan. After the Obie winning Finding Simone (1970) much of her work took on a feminist focus. She had been based in Omaha for the last five decades.
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