Helen A. Murphy Papers

Helen A. Murphy, children's author, playwright, storyteller and director of the Greenwich House Children's Theatre (G.H. Ch. Th.) was born on June 10, 1889 in New Brunswick, Canada and grew up in Boston, MA. Little information exists on the details of her life. It appears she was trained in the teaching profession, and ventured to New York in 1914 to do graduate work at Columbia Teachers College. Her talents at story writing and telling opened different avenues to her in New York, and she was a pioneer in early radio, telling folk tales on the air which supplemented her income as an instructor at Columbia Teachers College where she taught from about 1918 until the late 1920s.

Her desire to experiment with storytelling and teaching through drama was met with enthusiasm by Mary Simkovich, co-founder of the Greenwich House. Murphy was given complete freedom to come up with a design for the program, (which became official in 1923) and she allowed it to develop naturally without too much structure. Formal scripts were rejected and a program of improvisation and participation was initiated. The children chose the plays, wrote and casted them, and presented them their way, under the subtle direction of Murphy.

From the start, the Children's Theatre program attracted neighborhood children, mostly products of Italian immigrant families. The program proved a constructive way to keep the children off the streets. Favorite plays eventually became perennial staples, such as "Americana" and "Shanty in the Yard".

Though Murphy appears to have done work there from 1919, with the much heralded Joan of Arc pageant, it appears that she began her official tenure as Director of the Theatre Department in 1923.

Never married, she remained completely devoted to the theatre program until the early 1970's. Though her work was done both with the adult theatre group and the children's theatre group, the latter was her primary concern and received the greater part of her attention.

Since limited resources at Greenwich House allowed only a small salary for the beloved Helen Murphy, she supplemented her income through the publication of her stories in education and church magazines, lectures and radio work. After starting at Greenwich House, she continued teaching for a decade at Teacher's College, Columbia University, as well as at private schools in the New York area.

In 1967 she left Greenwich House unexpectedly to care for her ailing mother, Nora Murphy, who was then 102 years old. She returned in 1972 following her mother's death, but not in an official capacity. The motivation behind her return was to finish a writing project about the changes and theatre history in Greenwich Village. She found, however, that the notes and original materials to be used (both hers and projects of students) were missing. It seems from the incomplete selection of articles, plays, and stories in this collection, that the material was either never recovered, or partially recovered. Helen Murphy spent the last years of her life in Rockport, a small seaside town in northern Massachusetts. She died on March 26, 1986, a few months before her 97th birthday. The full-fledged theatre program at Greenwich House was not continued in her absence, and today, only a token class or two each season acts as a tribute to the earlier glory days of the program as it was under Miss Murphy.