LEST WE FORGET ALICE GERSTENBERG
(August 2, 1885 - July 28, 1972)

Founder of  the Playwrights Theatre in Chicago

Born in Chicago, Illinois, she was the only child of Julia and Erich Gerstenberg.  Her grandfather was a founder and member of the Chicago Board of Trade in 1848, a position her father inherited. Her family enjoyed a higher standard of living than most middle-class families in Chicago.  Alice enjoyed travel and social indulgences including the commercial theater. After attending a private school in Chicago she later graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1907 (the alma mater of Theresa Helburn and Katharine Hepburn).
While at college she had developed an interest in writing fiction. Early novels include Little World (1908), Unquenched Fire (1912), and The Conscience of Sarah Platt (1915).

In 1915 she also wrote her first full-length play, a dramatization of Alice in Wonderland, which played at the Booth Theatre and at the Fine Arts Theatre in New York.

 
Her next play, Overtones, first produced in 1915,  was directed by
Edward Goodman (one of the founders of the Theatre Guild) and performed by the Washington Square Players at the Bandbox Theatre in New York. The play crystallizes her use of the experimental form with a familiar dramatic conflict. It enjoyed many productions due to its innovative use of the split subject, a technique Eugene O'Neill would later use in his play
Strange Interlude. 

  Lily Langtry starred in the subsequent London production. Alice  later expanded the play to three acts and directed the longer version at the Powers Theater in Chicago.

Overtones was published in Ten-One Act Plays (1921), her second collection, along with Pot Boiler (The Dress Rehearsal), which she entered in the Little Theatre Tournament in New York in 1923.  The New York Times reviewer reported that the production was interestingly staged and played and it met with the approval of the audience.

She continued to write many one-act plays early on in her career, many of which were performed by regional or little theaters in and around Chicago. The majority of these plays demonstrate her feminist tendencies--critiquing the social roles and decisions which constrained women of the time.

Eugene O'Neill claimed he was influenced by the psychological dimensions of her characterizations.  She always tried experimental techniques in her writing and the staging of her plays.

She was a charter member of the Chicago Little Theatre and used her pen and influence to promote the openings of other amateur theatres around the country.  In her tenacious efforts to make drama accessible to the public, to make theatres available to fledgling playwrights she was most notable in founding the Playwrights Theatre of Chicago  (1922 - 1945).    

In 1921 she founded the Junior League Children's Theater in Chicago to give them an early experience with the theater, the opportunities to act, write, and become involved.  She hoped her work would bring Chicagoans to support non-commercial theater.  She was one of a handful of women invited to speak at the National Drama Council and National Theatre Conference in 1936 and won the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award in 1938.  She was criticized for not moving to New York like many of her female Midwestern colleagues including  Zoe Akins and Susan Glaspell.  But her decision to remain in Chicago demonstrated her commitment to the Little Theater movement, women's issues in the Midwest, as well as a developed sense for the regional community which she wrote for and about.

Resource:  Wikipedia, Notable Women in American Theatre.  Debra Young
References:  Shafer, Yvonne. American Women Playwrights (1900-1950).  1995
Hecht, Stuart. The Plays of Alice Gerstenberg: Cultural Hegemony in the American Little Theater. 1992
Atlas, Marilyn. Alice Gerstenberg's Psychological Drama.  1982.