Donn B. Murphy

Donn B. Murphy (July 21, 1930 – April 3, 2022

He served three years in the National Guard, 174th Military Police Battalion, in Leavenworth, Kansas. When the unit was activated in October, 1950 during the Korean War, he served as a Corporal for one year at 5th Army Headquarters, Fort Sheridan, Illinois, and then for one year at Camp Drake, Japan. In Yokohama he studied on special assignment under Margaret E. Lynn in the U.S. Army Entertainment Program.^[2]

In

He served on the National Advisory Board for City at Peace,[4] and the Advisory Boards of The Playwright's Forum^[5] and the Synetic Theatre in Washington, D.C.

He became partners with H. Jones "Jon" Carrow, III in 1990. Col. Carrow, US Army ret., and Dr. Murphy, were married in Vermont in 2010, and subsequently retired to Fort Lauderdale, FL.

Achievements

Murphy was on the faculty of Georgetown University from 1954 through 1999, retiring as professor emeritus. He taught successively in the Departments of English, Fine Arts, and Art Music and Theatre [now the Program in Performing Arts], and in the School for Summer and Continuing Education. He taught, at various times, Acting, Improvisation, Performing Arts in Contemporary Society, Playwriting, Public Speaking, Television Production, Theatre History and Theatrical Design.

For 21 years, he directed the Mask and Bauble Dramatic Society^[6] at Georgetown (1955–1976). He staged plays in the McDonough Gymnasium and in ornate Gaston Hall,^[7] where one of his star players was future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He also mounted productions in the theatre at Holy Trinity Church^[8] near the campus, and in Stage One, a 100-seat black box theatre which he and his students created in a basement storage area in Poulton Hall (a "temporary" classroom building built during WWII, but still in use in 2014).

Stressing the value of original writing, Murphy encouraged his students by establishing a one-act play contest and producing three winning plays each year. He also oversaw the development of the Calliope series of annual musicals, and directed the first 15 of these productions. He supervised the first directing projects of Jack Hofsiss, who would later direct the Tony-Award Winning The Elephant Man on Broadway. When John Guare was a Georgetown student, Murphy directed Guare's first play, The Toadstool Boy, and Guare's musical, The Thirties Girl. A generation later the Donn B. Murphy One-Acts Festival^[9] was established in his honor.

For 19 years, Dr. Murphy conducted a theatre workshop for patients at the Chestnut Lodge Psychoanalytic Hospital in Rockville, MD, where he produced and directed, among other plays, A View from the Bridge, Under Milk Wood, The Glass Menagerie, Hay Fever, The Importance of Being Earnest, Picnic, John Brown's Body and Dark of the Moon (1960–1979).

In 1960 he wrote Papers of Fire, a pageant dealing with America's founding documents, which was presented at the

With Kathleen Barry he wrote, produced, designed, directed and appeared in five interactive participatory children's shows, performed twice each weekday for six weeks over five summers at the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts (1975–1979). They were Creation of the World, Creation of the Nation, The Curious Computer from Planet Z, Happy Landings, and The Magic Falcon. In 1984, Murphy wrote Eleanor Roosevelt: First Lady of the World, a dramatic reading commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History, and presented there under his direction, starring Susan Stamberg and Jean Stapleton. ^{[citation needed]}

He appeared as Major Andrew Ellicott, the surveyor who placed the original boundary markers for the District of Columbia, in the Francis Thompson documentary film about the founding of Washington, DC, called City Out of Wilderness.

He was a founding member of the non-profit National Theatre Corporation, established in 1974, to save

With Douglas Lee and Roger Meersman, he wrote Stage for a Nation: the National Theatre - 150 Years published by University Press of America (1985),[10]^[11] a chronicle not only of the National Theatre, but in large measure a history of professional theatre in the national capital.

He is co-author, with Stephen Moore, of Helen Hayes: A Bio-bibliography (1993).^[12] Together, Moore and Murphy wrote a number of articles published in magazines and newspapers.

Awards and honors

Murphy won the Best Director Award from the Greater Washington, D.C., Theatre Alliance in 1960 and 1961, and received a

References