Everything goes in threes, so they say, so this is our third big post in honor of the late Mari Lyn Henry.
The first was in the aftermath of our very fortunate meeting last year, wherein she introduced me to her wonderful collections and regaled me with stories. The second one marked her sad passing this summer. And the one you're reading now is about her legacy, going forward.
If you're alert, you'll have noticed that Mari Lyn began enriching the content of Travalanche not long after we met. She sent me scans of her archival materials over a period of several months, and many of them have already made their way into my blog posts. They include my pieces on:
John Barrymore
Keenan Wynn
Laurette Taylor and Sarah Bernhardt
Fred Stone
Fred Niblo
Maude Adams
Cressy and Dayne
James Barton
Florence Walton
Max Gordon
Much more of her materials will be added to Travalanche over the coming months. And there's much more. Mari Lyn left behind three unfinished book projects which I have been entrusted with completing and helping to bring before the public. She had told me about each of them when she met, and I understood the merits of each of them at once.
The most finished is Change Your Act, or Back to the Woods: The Drama in Vaudeville, 1893-1925. I think you'll understand my attraction to that one at once. My hope is to convince a publisher to bring it out by 2025, the centennial of the last year she treats of in the book.
The next in line is a book she was calling The Total Actor. This one would merge Mari Lyn's two great loves: theatre history and career advice to working actors. Basically she draws from the wisdom of past stage and screen figures in order to advise contemporary professionals. In some ways it would be a sequel to her first book How to Be a Working Actor, which is now in its 5th printing.
Helen Hayes and Mari Lyn Henry
The third project is not unrelated to the first two. As a young woman, Mari Lyn had gotten to act in a play with Helen Hayes, touring with her for several weeks. It was a kind of a passing of the torch. Mari Lynn had gotten quite far along in a one-woman show about Hayes. The manuscript may end up being a play or perhaps form the core of a book, or perhaps even be incorporated into The Total Actor. But maybe not, since everything goes in threes!
And, check it out, there's a third legacy. There's how she's enhanced Travalanche, there's her literary projects, and then there are her collections in their entirety, which her estate has recently donated to the Lambs Club. The material includes 700 books, plus historic correspondence and ephemera, artwork, posters, photographs, and unusual archival material such as scrapbooks. Theatre historians, researchers and Lambs members will all have access to this material for enhanced understanding theatre history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Mari Lyn's legacy was celebrated with a special memorial ceremony at the Lambs on November 6, where dozens of friends and colleagues convened to share their memories and appreciation of the late teacher, scholar, actress, and author. (Pictured above, actress and friend Romy Nordlinger, who connected me with Mari Lyn last year; and Kevin Fitzpatrick, Shepherd of the Lambs. The posters behind them were Mari Lyn's)
Adam Jesse Burns prepared this slide show (wherein you'll Mari Lyn shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Tony Bennett, Burgess Meredith, James Earl Jones, Keenan Wynn, Joe Montegna, et al.:
I dropped by the Lambs this week to scope out how the collections were faring in their new home. Here's just a little of the material in situ:
Mari Lyn materials sitting cheek by jowl with the Joe Laurie Jr collection
I like her taste in books! (note top shelf)
Much more to come!
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