Philadelphia Theater Scandal!

Would Sunday in New York perform on Saturday in Philadelphia? Were the "riffraff and lowlifes" of Brecht'sThreepenny Opera  suitable for its Playhouse in the Park? Could the first publicly funded and owned city theater in the country survive in the maelstrom of Philadelphia city politics?

Find out on today's episode - as we continue our Season Two "Drama Is Conflict," about censorship in Philly theater!

Visit our website for a blog post with photos about events in this show, "Playhouse in the Park":
https://www.aithpodcast.com/blog/playhouse-in-the-park/

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Copyright 2023 Peter Schmitz - All Rights Reserved

[AITH OPENING THEME]

Welcome to Adventures in Theater History! Here on this show we try to bring you the best stories from the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. I’m Peter Schmitz, and our sound engineering and original music are by Christopher Mark Colucci. On this episode we continue our series of episodes about the history of censorship and public controversy on the Philadelphia stage. And today we’re bringing you a story in Three Acts, that we’re calling Philadelphia Theater Scandal!

[“DRAMA IS CONFLICT” THEME - then, "Sunday in New York"]

ACT ONE - November 1961: The play Sunday in New York had its pre-Broadway tryout run at the Walnut Street Theatre. The stars of the romantic comedy were Patricia Stanley, who had played the ingenue in the hit musical Goldilocks just a few years earlier, and a young actor playing his first major role on the commercial stage, a guy named Robert Redford.

Sunday in New York was penned by Norman Krasna, a successful screenwriter and Broadway playwright. His Hollywood film scripts included those for Princess O'Rourke and White Christmas, and his Broadway shows included the highly lucrative romantic comedies John Loves Mary and Dear Ruth. Now living in Switzerland for tax reasons, Krasna was turning out the occasional stage show like Sunday in New York, which was being produced by David Merrick and directed by Garson Kanin.
[MUSIC OUT]

The show was making the usual pre-Broadway out of town tryouts. In the early 1960s the Shubert Organization controlled almost all major commercial theaters in large American cities close to New York, and that included Philadelphia, where they had three big houses - the Forrest Theatre and the Sam S. Shubert Theatre, which they had built, and the Walnut, which they leased. It often had hosted such premier tryout shows for them such as A Streetcar Named Desire, 

The other thing that an out of town pre-Broadway tour was supposed to allow the producers to make cuts, make adjustments - make casting changes, if necessary - but the other things it was supposed to do was to generate publicity. And by the time Sunday in New York reached the Walnut, the production of Sunday in New York had already gained considerable notoriety - even making national news.

Earlier in the month of Nom the show was in Washington DC, and so was a large high school group from Sayreville, NJ on a senior class trip. As a fun night out in the Capital city, the school had booked a large block of seats for Sunday in New York at the National Theater . But just before the end of the first act, the school's principal Margaret Walsh had suddenly ordered all 137 students to get out of those seats and to leave the theater immediately. The play was not suitable for young people, Miss Walsh declared. 

Now what about this play had caused all the hubbub? Well it was different from Norman Krasna’s earlier works. Though he insisted that Sunday in New York was “quite innocent” and “an exercise for the pure in heart,” it was sort of his attempt to catch up with modern mores - an early “Those Crazy Kids and Their Sexual Revolution” play. Pat Stanley's role was termed an "Albany newspaper girl" a “charming, but reluctant virgin” who running away from her fiancé in a pre-wedding ceremony panic. While Robert Redford played a Philadelphia sportswriter, temporarily on assignment as the "interim music critic for the Inquirer.'' The young lady unexpectedly shows up at the New York apartment of her brother, an airline pilot who had lots of sexual adventures - a fact he tries to hide from his little sister. Farcical cover ups and misunderstandings result. Nonetheless, she discovers that a single girl in Manhattan certainly receives LOTS of male attention, and when she meets the attractive fella, she thinks she might quite like a fling with him, maybe, before marrying the other fella back home. By the end of the first act the two are sitting around in bathrobes talking about sex. Redford was sitting on stage bare-chested, and Stanley even took off her robe at one point and was seen in her underclothes. This is the point in the show when the scandalized Miss Walsh ordered her students out of the theater. 

The Central Jersey Home News in Brunswick wrote an item about the incident, and other papers around the country picked it up - including those in one of the production's next stops, Philadelphia. Playwright Krasna protested that if Miss Walsh had just waited a few more minutes, she would have seen that the couple didn’t sleep together and the play wasn’t going in a “free love” direction at all, really. Producer David Merrick, rather than being incensed, was delighted with all the free publicity. Scandal is always great for a show's box office, as we have seen repeatedly over the past few episodes, and of course Merrick knew this fully well. He gleefully told reporters that every single one of the Sayreville High students could come see the show for free when it reached New York, just by presenting their ticket stubs. Miss Walsh didn't even need to bring hers, he declared. She was always welcome.

So it arrived in the Quaker City with a bit of a buzz. But when it opened it wasn’t really a scandal. In the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, reviewer Ernest Scheier thought it was funny, but took too long to get started, rather “banal treatment of the familiar sex comedy.” Henry Murdock, writing in the Inquirer, also found the show a bit of a "one-joke" play, but thought it was pleasant enough, and not really risqué. Could use a song or two, perhaps. Patricia Stanley did a fine job, he wrote, as did Ron Nicholas in the role of her Albany fiancé. Conrad Janis played the airline pilot brother with "a modern bounce," while Pat Harrington and Sondra Lee transformed themselves into a wide variety of bit character parts. Both men agreed the second act was really better than the first, and that Miss Walsh and her charges really should have stuck around if they wanted to have some laughs.

Robert Redford, wrote Murdoch presciently, was the real reason to see the show. His portrayal of his character, who isn't sure "if he should be a Philadelphia gentleman or a Philadelphia roué," was "a joy to watch." So, there it was, it had a nice run at the Walnut, and as it turned out it also had a nice run in New York - despite these only middling reviews - went on to have a quite respectable run in New York. Redford never really cared for the play himself, though it was a major step on his road to stardom. Later it was made into a Hollywood film of the same title, starring Jane Fonda and Cliff Robertson.And from the movie soundtrack, we got that great Bobby Darin version of its theme song:

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Okay, so that was Act One, and now a brief interlude, before we go on to Act Two.

We’ve covered a lot of the history of local Philadelphia politics lately on this show, which is not really our field, admittedly. But we’ve dived right into it anyway, as it became important to explain the power dynamics behind efforts to ban or censor certain plays or operas. And, you know, we’ve always maintained on this podcast that the theater of any era necessarily reflects the political and social atmosphere of its time. 

By the year 1962, however, we’re just at that unfortunate historical moment when Philadelphia starts to take a huge nosedive - in terms of its population, economy, housing, social justice issues, infrastructure, everything really. We won’t cover that now, but I’m planning to go into that in our next episode quite a bit, really. But in terms of the situation in Philly in 1962 I need to quickly sketch out two things here. 

The first thing is: Philadelphia was now a Democratic City. The longtime Republican political machine had managed to hold on into the late 1940s, but it finally collapsed amidst a storm of corruption scandals. In an absolute sea-change in the political landscape, the Democrats had then swept into power, led by the dynamic duo of Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth. Clark became Mayor in 1952, and then moved on to become Pennsylvania’s US Senator in ‘56. Dilworth, who had been Clark’s reform-minded District Attorney, moved up into the Mayor’s office. It was a breath of fresh air, the  whole thing. He even moved his family into a sweet little townhouse on Washington Square, quite near the Walnut Street Theatre. 

Here’s the Second thing: Dilworth accomplished a lot. The revised 1950 Philadlephia City Charter had given the mayor’s office more power and a revised Civil Service code had brought a new cadre of competent and service minded administrators to Philadelphia. Even Jack Kelly Sr., the successful businessman and former champion Olympic rower who had almost become mayor in 1935 was back - this time as the head of the Fairmount Park Commission, governing the largest urban green space in the nation, which spread graciously across both sides of the Schuylkill River Valley. That’s why Kelly Drive, which snakes gracefully up the East Side of the Schuylkill, past all the boathouses, is now named after him. And of course he was the dad of Grace Kelly, the movie star and later the Princess of Monaco. But we strongly feel that for our purposes, on THIS podcast, Jack Kelly, god bless him, should be remembered for one great achievement: He established the first - and ONLY publicly built and publicly funded theater in the history of Philadelphia: The Playhouse in the Park, near the historic Belmont Mansion in West Fairmount Park. 

I'm going to read - excerpts from an article that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine on May 31, 1962, entitled: “They Called it Kelly’s Folly: But Park Playhouse Opens its Tenth Season,” by Inquirer reporter Edgar Williams. Here we go:
__________________
[MUSIC, UNDER] Ten years ago, when the late John Kelly proposed a municipally operated summer theater in Fairmount Park, he took a verbal lathering from some quarters. “Kelly’s Folly”, said the scoffers. “It hasn’t got a chance.” After all, no American city had tried such an experiment.  . . .[But] It has served as a model for similar enterprises in other cities. And it has brought to Philadelphia not only established stars in the theatrical firmament but on-the-way-up actors who since have achieved stardom.

Of course, there was Grace Kelly, John B.’s daughter. In 1952 she received second billing to John Loder when she appeared at the Playhouse in For Love or Money. A year later, having established herself as a star of films and TV, she returned to play the lead in The Moon is Blue.

The Playhouse also has been a training ground for directors. Philadelphian Morton DaCosta, who staged several Playhouse productions in 1954, since has staged a string of Broadway hits, including The Music Man, Auntie Mame, No Time for Sergeants, and Plain and Fancy. Another Philadelphian, Martin Ritt, who was a resident director at the Playhouse, now is a motion picture director in Hollywood.

It all began in 1951 when the late Theron Bamberger, former operator of the Bucks County Playhouse, broached to Kelly the idea of erecting a tent theater on Belmont Plateau. Kelly, a member of the Fairmount Park Commission, was enthusiastic. In the face of considerable opposition, he put the idea across. On February 11, 1952, a special recreation co-ordination board, appointed by then mayor (now U.S. Senator) Joseph S. Clark, agreed to the establishment of a tent theater under the sponsorship of the Park Commission and the Recreation Department. Bamberger was named managing director.

It took some doing to get the Playhouse ready for opening night. Shows and actors had to be booked. A production staff had to be gathered. Actual construction of the Playhouse didn’t begin until mid-May, just six weeks before the scheduled opener. 

The Playhouse opened on June 30, 1952, with Sylvia Sidney and Conrad Nagel starring in Goodbye, My Fancy. That first season at the theater drew 75,000 customers, grossed $102,654.

Originally, the Playhouse had 1000 seats under canvas. In 1954 the seating capacity was increased to 1100, and in 1955 to 1240. Then, in 1958, the tent was abandoned and the present structure, with 1500 seats, was built. Mrs. Ethelyn R. Thrasher,  . . .who then was production assistant to Bamberger, recalls those days of construction:

“We of the production staff had to climb over piles of building materials to reach the partially finished office building, “ she says. “To gain entrance we had to climb through windows. Once inside, we worked at improvised saw-horse desks.”

Last season, in 1961, the Playhouse had 122,219 paid admissions and a gross of $261,154 for its best-ever summer. But on Monday evening, May 29, 1962, the Playhouse in the Park will begin its 10th season. Now officially named the John B. Kelly Playhouse in the Park, its opening week production will be the hit revue Show Girl, starring Carol Channing.”

[MUSIC OUT]
______________________

Okay so that’s actually a pretty good summary as to how things stood at the Playhouse in the Park, Both Bamberger, who conceived the idea, and Jack Kelly, who had really made it happen, had recently passed away. Ethelyn R. Thrasher, once the enthusiastic young assistant producer, was now managing director of the Playhouse. And as the article said, she was doing quite well in the job, by all accounts and was going about the hard business of booking a new summer season and gathering in the Broadway and film stars to attract the general public.

But there was one thing that this article did not mention. Quietly, Philadelphia Mayor James Tate had made it clear to Mrs. Thrasher that she simply could NOT schedule one of the shows she had shown him in her initial plans - that “dirty” play that had been at the Walnut the previous year: Sunday in New York.

The former head of the City Council, James Tate had just become the Mayor earlier that year when Richardson Dilworth had resigned to run for Governor of Pennsylvania. He was the first Irish Catholic mayor of Philadelphia, but he was not much of a theater-goer and was definitely not an aristocratic type of wealthy Irish Catholic, like the new US President John F. Kennedy. He was a graduate of Temple University, not a fancy Ivy League school, like Penn or Yale or Princeton.  He was a fairly liberal-minded man, nonetheless Tate was glad he had not subjected his own teen-aged daughter Anne Marie to that sort of thing, in which actresses run around on the stage in their underwear, and openly talk about losing their virginity before marriage. It was fine for New York, perhaps, but not Philadelphia. Oh, and there was another show he definitely wasn’t going to allow to be produced under his administration:  

[MUSIC, UNDER]

ACT TWO - On July 17, 1962,  a scandal broke in the Philadelphia newspapers. It seems that The Playhouse in the Park, the city-owned summer theater, had been refused permission to stage two shows: The sex comedy Sunday in New York by Norman Krasna, and the Marc Blitzstein version of the Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weil musical The Threepenny Opera. The order banning managing director Ethelyn Thrasher from staging the two shows came from Mayor James Tate himself, apparently. The first was too "dirty," and the second was full of nothing but lowlifes and riffraff, he complained.

“Tate’s objection to what he felt were ‘dirty’ shows were reportedly transmitted to Mrs. Thrasher through Thomas J. LaBrun, general manager and publicity director and a personal friend of Tate’s,” reported the Inquirer. The two shows, previously tentatively scheduled, had then been dropped. 

[MUSIC OUT,]

When the story came out, the Mayor’s Office immediately denied that it had acted as a censor, but Mrs. Thrasher stuck to her story, and provided further details. “She had been told by LaBrun that Tate objected to plays with morally controversial themes. The Mayor was said to fear that such productions would reflect on the city.” In fact, one anonymous member of the Philadelphia City Council said that Mrs. Thrasher had been “bullyragged” by the mayor.

This political interference in the selection of plays evidently still rankled Thrasher, especially as she watched the disappointing box office returns of the July shows she had scheduled instead. “I believe I have a greater working knowledge of theater tastes than any one individual who is not connected to it,” she was quoted in the papers. “I wouldn’t put on a dirty show. You have to look hard for a good script nowadays.” She’d never had any trouble with the previous mayors, she noted. This only began when Tate took office in February.

It wasn’t that anybody really cared much about the loss of the insubstantial “Sunday in New York,” but the supposed censoring of the well-known Brecht musical was being commented on widely. 

The Threepenny Opera had been running for years Off-Broadway at the Theatre De Lys, in a production translated and revised by Philadelphia’s own Marc Blitzstein. The show had finally closed and the rights to the show had just been widely released, and, you know - they weren’t that expensive. It was regarded as great summer fare, with a lot of opportunities for actors to do a lot of fun stuff as doxies, beggars and thieves, and there was that great Kurt Weill score!  Every theater across the nation, it seemed, was suddenly doing Threepenny Opera - except now for Philadelphia’s Playhouse in the Park.

The colorful and elegantly named producer St. John Terrell, who ran a string of summer theaters across the Delaware in New Jersey took out ads in the Philly papers to mock Philadelphia and boast about his version of Threepenny, which was then set to open: “BANNED IN PHILADELPHIA - WELCOMED IN LAMBERTVILLE,” they blared. The Society Hill Playhouse, the tiny independent non-profit house in South Philly, immediately got the rights, and scheduled its own production of the show. “NOT BANNED IN PHILADELPHIA!” its ads crowed. “The Threepenny Opera - 5 weeks opening September 19!” The Philadelphia Drama Guild, an amateur community theater, immediately put the show on its season for next year. Even the tiny Abbe Art Cinema in West Philadelphia quickly announced they would screen the old G.W. Pabst movie - in German - from the 1930s. “We present THE COMPLETE, ORIGINAL, UNCUT AND UNCENSORED film version of this highly controversial sensation featuring low-lifes, riffraff, beggars, thieves, ladies’ men and fast women, con men, second-storey men and all types of people never seen in Phila. ON OUR SCREEN - MACK THE KNIFE!”

[TRANSITION MUSIC, UNDER]

The next day, reviews appeared about that production in Lambertville, New Jersey. Theater critics could not resist taking the obvious line of badinage in their reviews. Wrote one: “Mayor Tate was right. No self-respecting Administration would allow The Threepenny Opera to be shown at the Playhouse in the Park . . . Why its hero is a veteran con-man . . and no such character is ever seen around City Hall. . ..”

And the public ribbing of Mayor Tate didn’t stop there. On July 25th, Tate attended a gala dinner, a party he was giving for the Philadelphia journalists at the Belmont Mansion near the Playhouse in the Park. Afterwards, as a gesture of reconciliation, he was taking them all over to the Playhouse to see Winterset, the current show at the theater. But at one point during the dinner, the Mayor's table was approached by a trio of roving musicians, and they all started playing the tune “Mack the Knife” right in his ear - much to the amusement of the crowd. Mayor Tate and his wife pretended to enjoy the joke and they laughed and they smiled. But no powerful man ever really likes being made fun of, really, not if he can do something about it.

And Mayor Tate was not happy. As the fall election approached in which he wanted to be confirmed as Mayor by the voters of Philadelphia, he and his political advisors felt that this "censorship" story had to be put to bed, and a new narrative had to take its place. So two weeks later, Philadelphians awoke to see another story was on the front page of the Newspapers: PHILADELPHIA THEATER SCANDAL. Ethelyn Thrasher was being accused by the Philadelphia City Comptroller of unauthorized expenditures and misappropriation of public money - $61,000 to be exact. Horrible scandal! You can fight City Hall, it turns out - but be ready for a counterpunch, because City Hall has lots of ways of fighting back .

[ MUSIC OUT]

ACT THREE - It turned out that Mayor Tate was not the one who ordered the investigation in Thrasher. 

This report was from the office of Philadelphia City Comptroller Alexander Hemphill, who was thought to have higher political ambitions of his own. In fact, the citizens of Philadelphia were used to seeing headlines about Hemphill's investigations by that point. The crusading Comptroller was very busy in those days, supposedly weeding out graft and corruption in the infamously shady side of Philadelphia's city government. Hardly a week went by without Hemphill making a report about bribes, kickbacks and self-dealing from union bosses, department heads, and other elected officials. But, you know, most of these accusations were pretty small beer. Parking meters, and that sort of thing. Hemphill, in fact, seems to have been taking a page from the playbook of S. Davis Wilson, who as you remember from episode 51, first made a name for himself in the office of Philadelphia City Comptroller, doing investigations on his way to becoming Mayor. Hemphill, like Wilson, was nominally a Democrat, but seemed willing to attack other members of his own party if it helped his career. It certainly didn’t make him very popular among his fellow politicians. Former Mayor Dillworth, speaking to the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, publicly called Hemphill a “Judas and a Bum.”

Now, whatever he was, he was still the Comptroller, and Hemphill had accused Thrasher of overspending $61,000 as well as other misappropriations. And again, this was not an overwhelming sum, but the fact that the Playhouse had reported a loss that year of $10,000 made it look all the worse. Yet Thrasher had publicly dismissed this 'sniping,' as she called it and accused Hemphill, for his part, of libeling her reputation. The Fairmount Park Commission had supported Thrasher, and her $14,000 a year contract was renewed. Ethelyn Thrasher went to work planning the next season - she even finally managed to get air conditioning installed in the theater building, to the relief of Philadelphia theatergoers. The assurance of being able to watch shows in comfort led to a welcome increase in early subscriptions for the 1963 season.

And it also helped that the 1963 season of the Playhouse in the Park featured much more comedies and light fare than the previous year, including Menasha Skulnik in Neil Simon's Come Blow Your Horn, Shirley Knight in Little Mary Sunshine, and the film star Walter Slezak in Romanoff and Juliet. In a dig at Mayor Tate, she even scheduled the sex comedy Sunday in New York for a week in June. When the summer season was over, Thrasher happily announced that the theater's box office even returned to the black, showing a surplus of about $40,000.

Nonetheless, Hemphill kept up the pressure. A revelation that Thrasher had her own private New York production company, Thrasher Productions, which organized and cast shows for the Playhouse and other summer tent theaters, was held up as proof of her self-dealing. Hemphill kept feeding newspapers seemingly scandalous details - though the amounts he cited were really laughable in a city which historically had seen corruption scandals over millions of dollars in misappropriated funds.

Mrs. Thrasher bought letterhead stationery for her company, said Hemphill, and billed the city $115! Or, she had the city pay a $210 cleaning bill for costumes which were being sent to another theater! The city was paying rent for Thrasher Production's New York office! Worst of all, he accused her of demanding a $1000 kickback from Walter Slezak's salary. His investigators had spoken to Slezak personally, and supposedly the actor had confirmed the story.  "Kickback in the Park"  one newspaper headline called it. Ethelyn Thrasher, for her part indignantly denied all the charges, stating that her production company was just a convenient arrangement which allowed her to negotiate between the wildly different financial demands of operating a public institution, and actually operating a theater company. She had to do a little creative cash management to get Slezak reimbursed for all the "expenses" that was actually part of his agreed compensation, sure. Theater stars wanted guaranteed salaries for summer theater gigs, she pointed out, and the union Actors Equity required they be paid in cash.

In November Mrs. Thrasher announced she had had enough. She handed in her resignation from the Playhouse, although the City claimed she was fired. In a December 12th press conference, Hemphill called Thrasher a "liar", and said she was operating a "scheme" to convert public money to her own personal use. The City of Philadelphia had been cheated! She was even wrong about the supposed box office surplus, he said. Actually the Playhouse had lost money for the city, again. He had even called Mrs. Thrasher in to testify under oath. HEMPHILL-THRASHER DRAMA AT PLAYHOUSE NEARS GRAND FINALE, read the headline in the Inquirer.

On December 26th - the day after Christmas - Hemphill had a judge issue a warrant for Mrs. Thrasher's arrest, charging her with forgery, embezzlement and fraud. He demanded that Thrasher return all the money she had supposedly misappropriated. Thrasher angrily denied all the charges, and her lawyer Walter Stein responded in the papers that the City of Philadelphia actually owed her $2500 in back pay. Nonetheless, on January 2, 1964, the former theater manager was arraigned in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court.

Thrasher’s attorney, Walter Stein, defended her vociferously. "The image of Philadelphia is at stake here," he told the judge. "This is a very serious case and the amount is so trivial. Here is a responsible woman in the community who took on the operation of the Playhouse in the Park and brought it from nothing to the best in the country." The accusations against her would be laughable, if the possible consequences weren't so serious. "You make a mistake in a bill in Philadelphia, and you can go to jail, it seems," he said. Stein threatened civil action against the city. He asked that the case be dismissed. But the judge continued the proceeding till a later date, and released Mrs. Thrasher on $1000 bail.

All of the next year, 1964, Thrasher was left in legal limbo. Her trial was scheduled for September, then moved to November. Walter Slezak's testimony was necessary to prove Hemphill's case, after all, and the actor kept begging off, citing scheduling difficulties with his career. And then the trial was bumped all the way to May 1965 to accommodate him. By this time, most public sentiment was shifting to Thrasher's side. Philadelphia Daily News theater columnist Jerry Gaghan accused the city of  "making a hemphill out of a molehill" in the case. Slezak was still mysteriously unavailable, and the trial was shifted again, this time to September, by which time many other actors who had worked under Thrasher's management were publicly defending her, and offering to testify on her behalf. No problem with their schedules!

But it wasn't until November 1965 that Philadelphia district, citing insufficient evidence, finally dropped the charges. "COURT CANCELS TRIAL OF MRS. THRASHER FOR LACK OF A SECOND ACT," said a headline in the Inquirer. In a short ten-minute session, the judge apologized to Mrs. Thrasher, and said the proceedings should have properly been a civil matter the whole time, and the case was closed. Comptroller Alexander Hemphill, unabashed, told the press he still thought the case should have proceeded, and would have been "a blow out" in his office's favor.

But the worst of the drama, and conflict, was over. Ethelyn Thrasher went on with her producing and directing career. A comedy she was backing, Me and Thee, opened at the New Locust Theatre in Philadelphia that very week. 

[‘DRAMA IS CONFLICT’ CLOSING THEME]

 But you know, Thrasher’s career never really recovered. After her husband died a few years later unfortunately, she moved to Arizona, and then out to California. As time went on her story was mostly forgotten in the Philadelphia theater community. 

Meanwhile Tate and Hemphill’s ambitions came into open opposition. Hemphill resigned as Comptroller to run against Tate in the 1968 mayoral election, But Tate defeated Hemphill in the Democratic Party primary - which is pretty much the only election that matters around here, then and now - and he went on to serve in office until 1972. Tate died in 1983, and Hemphill in 1986. Ethelyn Thrasher passed away in Orange County, California in 1994. Her family, however, brought her body back East, and had her quietly interred at Mount Vernon Cemetery in North Philadelphia. By the 1990s, of course, Playhouse in the Park itself was sitting empty and derelict. The city had stopped producing plays there decades before, and eventually it was torn down.

When I first posted about this whole story on social media last summer, asking for more information about Ethelyn Thrasher’s gravesite, I was very lucky to hear from her grandson, Mark Thrasher. He wrote: “My grandmother never bemoaned Philadelphia. Rather, she loved it and her time in the theater. Being a female manager in a time when agents, directors, actors, etc were predominantly male was something she was always proud of. She was a menacing 4'11", but she was as tough as nails to the end. ... she never made herself rich and simply loved the theater.”

My thanks to Mark and to all the Thrasher family. And once again we should mention that the Mount Vernon Cemetery, where Ethelyn is buried is in need of support - I’ll put a link in the show notes if you’d like to get involved in one of their weekly clean-up crews!

Well that’s our show for today, thank you so much! Remember that we’d love to hear from you our audience about anything in this episode, or other episodes. Just send us a quick email. Tell us why you tuned in, why you keep tuning in, what you’re particularly enjoying about the show or what you’d like to know more about - and maybe you can suggest something that we’ve maybe missed so far. We’d love to hear from you. Our email is aithpodcast@gmail.com. Or you can contact us right on our website AITHPodcast.com. Second, there is another way you can help us out. Find our Patreon account - there’s a link in our show notes. We give away a lot of stuff for free here, but there are ongoing costs to creating and producing this show. In return for your support, there’s all sorts of extra information on Patreon and additional material - I recently posted a bonus episode about the opening of the film Birth of a Nation in Philadelphia, way back in 1915, for example. It’s a really good episode, check it out! Sign up, give us a little support, and find out all about it!

Coming up in our next episode: Philadelphia enters into the era of non-profit regional theater, with the Theater of the Living Arts on South Street. Until that show is ready, please go ahead and catch up with any of our other episodes you may have missed along the way. They’re all there on our website AITHpodcast.com, where there is also a blog post with images and additional information about everything we’ve discussed today. Look for the link, again, in the show notes. And finally a big shout out and a hug and a thank you to my sister, Mary Santen of St. Louis Missouri, for all her help to me with proofreading and editing the blog posts on the website. I depend on her for that, and for so much else besides. 

We all thank all of you so much for listening today, and for coming along - on another Adventure in Theatre History, Philadelphia.

[AITH END MUSIC]