Crothers, Rachel
Rachel Crothers was a playwright and theatrical director known for her well-crafted plays that often dealt with feminist themes. She was born in 1878, the youngest of nine children born to Drs. Eli K. and Marie Louise (de Pew) Crothers. Her mother, Louise, is recognized as Bloomington’s first female physician. That role her mother held dominated Rachel’s youth and influenced the themes of the plays she would craft later in life.
Rachel developed an early love of theater and play acting while playing with her dolls at her mother’s knee. She traveled with her mother Louise while Louise attended medical school (because Rachel was too young to stay at home). At the age of 12 she wrote the elaborately titled “Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining, or The Ruined Merchant,” a five-act play performed at a friend’s house.
She attended elocution school in Boston, Mass., and after earning her certificate in 1892, returned to Bloomington to teach that same subject from her parent’s home at 414 East Jefferson St. Rachel also attended and graduated from Illinois State Normal University, and was an active member of the Bloomington Dramatic Club.
Her parents did not approve of theater, calling it “an abomination aimed to entice young feet in the ways of sin.” But since her father had passed away five years before, she received permission to leave Bloomington for the bright lights of New York City and its theater scene in 1896 or 1897. She eventually found success as an actor and then writer and director. Near the turn of the century, Crothers was writing her own one-acts and full plays and they started gaining attention. Her big break came in 1906, when at the age of 28, her first production Three of Us, was produced and enjoyed a 277-performance run at the Madison Square Theater. It was a huge success, even transferring to London in 1908. Within a decade she was the nation’s foremost female playwright.
At a time when farce and melodrama dominated the stage, she favored “the social problem drama” which dealt with the interplay of ideas, realistic characters, natural dialogue and commonplace settings. Many of Rachel’s plays focused on the modern woman amid the social-upheaval of a rapidly changing society and how women were viewed. “If you want to see the sign of the times … watch women,” Rachel said in 1912. “Their evolution is the most important thing in modern life.”
She wrote 37 plays, 24 of them being produced on Broadway. Many of her plays were successfully adapted to the silver screen, such as the 1940 Susan and God, starring Joan Crawford.
In 1939, she received the Chi Omega sorority national achievement award from Eleanor Roosevelt. This award was given annually to “an American woman of notable accomplishment in the professions, public affairs, art, letters, business and finance, or education.” She also was a winner of the Pulitzer Drama award.
Rachel broke new ground by directing, staging, and casting most of her own plays. She also directed several plays written by others. Though little-known today, Rachel is generally recognized as “the most successful and prolific woman dramatist on Broadway writing in the first part of the twentieth century.”