EMMA SHERIDAN FRY
Emma Sheridan Fry, born Emma Viola Sheridan (1864-1936) was an educator, playwright, and actor whose life was dedicated to teaching dramatic expression to children. Her book, Educational Dramatics, published in 1917, serves as the text of Emma’s speech in Part III of Fefu and her Friends, meant to inspire her audience at the fundraiser. As Elinor Fuchs so keenly observed in her essay The View from the Stone,"Emma taught theatre during the exact years that Isadora Duncan’s reputation was at its highest." Born in Painesville, Ohio, Emma attended Ms. Fry’s preparatory school in Boston, Massachusetts and graduated from what was then known as the Normal College (now known as Hunter College) in New York City. She was drawn to the theatre and enlisted in the New York Lyceum School of Acting. Over the course of six seasons, she ascended from bit-part player to a top-ranked American actor. In 1887, she performed abroad in an engagement in London, England, alongside noteworthy English actor Richard Mansfield, in several productions which included Prince Karl (1886), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1887), A Parisian Romance (1888.) Emma returned to America and continued to perform in Shakespeare plays alongside American actor Thomas Keene. She also began to write in publications such as the New York Dramatic Mirror, to which she contributed the “Polly Papers” - stories, criticism, and verses under the name of “Polly.”
Following her marriage in 1890 to Alfred Brooks Fry, Chief Engineer of the United States Treasury Service, Emma and her husband moved to Maine. She became a member of the New England Woman’s Press Association and was also a leading lady in the Boston Museum Company. Her focus began to shift away from acting and towards writing and pedagogy. In 1904, Emma was elected as Director of the Children’s Educational Theatre in New York’s Lower East Side, where she taught and directed theatre for children of Polish and Russian Jewish immigrant families. The experience of teaching children from different cultures and countries deeply influenced and informed her work. An extraordinary director, she arranged productions of Shakespeare plays such as Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for children’s audiences. Following the performance, she invited the children in attendance to recreate what they had just witnessed on stage. In an essay by theatre education scholar Beatrice L. Tewksbury, she noted:
“Fry’s work not only resulted in fine theatre for children, young people, and their parents, but reached into the lives of the players, raising their ethical, moral, and social standards, improving speech and appearance, stimulating imaginations, broadening horizons. The work reached back into the homes...introducing them to new literature, new ways.”
Emma continued to develop her unique theatre teaching methods, and began to refer to them as the Science of Educational Dramatics. In 1909, along with other members of the original Children’s Educational Theatre, organized The Educational Players. As the organization grew, the Players appealed for funds to obtain their own rehearsal spaces and classrooms. Emma continued to deliver lectures and taught classes to organizations throughout the region. In 1912, the People’s Institute of New York organized the Educational Dramatic League, and elected Emma to serve as Dramatic Director. In 1914, her biography was featured in the publication “Woman’s Who’s Who of America: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Women in the United States and Canada.” In 1917, her book Educational Dramatics was published. This work illustrated the core of Emma’s pedagogy, which was that theatre was not merely the process of rehearsal and performance, but rather an essential collaboration and practice critical to a transcendent understanding of the human soul. Emma referred to the body as “an instrument of expression” and placed emphasis on the development of the dramatic instinct which could serve as a direct channel to the consciousness of God. Emma was a pioneer of dramatic education and continued to work as an instructor at institutions such as Columbia University and the University of California at Berkley. Emma died in 1936 at the age of 72 in Westwood, New Jersey.
Helen Cespedes as Emma, reciting Emma Sheridan Fry's speech from Educational Dramatics in the 2019 production of Fefu and her Friends at Theatre for a New Audience | Photo by Henry Grossman
DRAMATIC LEAGUE FORMED.: PEOPLE'S INSTITUTE TO RAISE AMATEUR SOCIETIES TO AN EDUCATIONAL VALUE." New York Times (1857-1922), Jan 25, 1913
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“A certain speech in my play Fefu and her Friends actually comes from a little book I found called Educational Dramatics written by Emma Sheridan Fry...I found her book in a little secondhand store full of dust and I thought: ‘One day, I’m going to write a play about this woman.’ Of course I have plans to write many plays which don’t get written. In fact I did not write a play about her, but I thought she’d be a character in Fefu. Then it turned out that I couldn’t, but the character of Emma in Fefu recites from the prologue to Educational Dramatics. If people don’t notice the note in the program, they think that I wrote this and that Emma Sheridan Fry is my investigation. But this was inserted specifically to honor that person.”
Maria Irene Fornes, Maria Irene Fornes Discusses Forty Years in Theatre with Maria M. Delgado, 1999.