MEGAN TERRY (nee Marguerite Duffy), was an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatre artist born in Seattle, Washington on this date (d: 2023).

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.

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.

Along with her colleagues at The Open Theater, Terry began working on exercises to produce a new kind of collaborative performance based on a “radical program of communal engagement in the nonhierarchical and collaborative ensemble” that viewed the concept of a “play” as a continuing process rather than an end product. The resulting productions exhibited sudden changes in mood, time, or character meant to disrupt the audience’s sense of immersion and focus on creating a changing emotional state. These techniques resulted in a theatre experience that feminist scholar Rebecca Bell-Metereau described as filled with “… earthy language, sexual and political content, musical segments, humor, and vaudeville touches [that] all blend to create lively, dynamic experiences for audiences.”

Terry’s most significant contribution to The Open Theater’s growing repertoire of exercises was “transformation”, in which the actors would improvise overheard dialogue in an effort to “transform” into characters coping with various situations. These exercises fueled Terry’s work as she and the company produced such plays as Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place at the Sheridan Square Playhouse and Gloaming, Oh My Darling at the Martinique Theater, both in 1965. The self-guided theatre experiments were cut short by the ensemble’s outrage at the United States’ decision to go to war with Vietnam. In protest, Terry and her ensemble began work on what would become Viet Rock.

Following the mixed reviews of Viet Rock, which was translated and produced internationally, Terry left New York and The Open Theater. She moved to Minnesota and became the writer-in-residence for Minneapolis’ Firehouse Theater, where she had previously been a Rockefeller Fellow during the development of Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place.

In recognition of her achievements and innovations in the theatre, Terry was elected to lifetime membership in the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in 1994. Her other awards have included the 1983 Dramatists Guild Award, an Academy of Theatre Arts Silver Medal for “distinguished contributions to, and service in, the American theatre”, a Yale and a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert Chesley Award, two Rockefeller Foundation grants, and a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship.

Her papers are kept at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and at the Omaha Public Library. Many of her plays are available from Alexander Street Press, and some are available at the Rutgers Drama Library

Megan Terry died in Omaha, Nebraska on April 12, 2023, at the age of 90.