Rachel Crothers: Early Life
Rachel Crothers (standing) with her sister Lulu in 1935.
Rachel Crothers, New York playwright and native of Bloomington, IL, and her sister, Bloomington, IL 1935. Bill Frank, photographer. April 15, 1935. McLean County Museum of History.
Rachel Crothers was born on December 12, 1878, in Bloomington, Illinois. Her parents, who were both doctors, had three other children, with Rachel being the youngest. Dr. Eli Kirk Crothers, her father, started practicing in Illinois in the 1850’s. Rachel’s mother, Dr. Marie Depew Crothers, began practicing medicine later in life. In the 1880s, she became Bloomington’s first female doctor. However, Marie’s initial efforts to establish herself in Bloomington were “met with a good deal of opposition, even from the profession, they not taking very kindly to the idea of women entering the profession” (2). Marie’s life had a profound impact on her daughter’s outlook on the world. Rachel chose her own path, sometimes against the wishes of others. Additionally, her writings are populated by women who do the same—Crothers’s characters determine their own fate and make their own choices.
A play put on by students at Normal High School during the 1940's. Although much later than when Crothers attended, she speaks to the importance of drama programs during her own high school experience.
University High School play, 1946. Phyllis Lathrop, photographer. October 3, 1946. McLean County Museum of History.
From the very beginning of Crothers’s life, it was clear that she was destined for the theater. She attended Illinois State Normal University High School, where she was able to nurture her passion. In a lecture on playwrighting that she gave to University of Pennsylvania students in 1928, she jokes about her obsession with drama from a young age, saying that her “readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic were rapidly going to the dogs because of the Dramatic Club” (3). It was around this time that she began writing her own plays (and even re-writing the work of other playwrights in order to make it work for the high school drama club). After graduating high school at just thirteen, Crothers was ready for her next step into the theatre world. She attended the New England School of Dramatic Instruction in Boston, where she excelled and graduated in 1892, after just one term. Even as a teenager, Crothers knew that her future would be one in the theater.
Her desired next step was to move to New York City, but Crothers’s family wanted her to return to Bloomington after drama school. She obliged, but only for a few years; around the time she turned eighteen, she finally made the move to New York City. She wrote about this period in her life, describing the difficulties she encountered. She did not know a soul in the city, and no one recognized her talent, so she was unable to secure a job. She took the only course of action she could think of, which was to return to school. She had no intention of giving up her life in the city. She described her mindset at this point in her life during an award acceptance speech in 1934 (quoted in Gottlieb 1979): “I couldn’t turn back. I had burned my bridges” (4). Despite the dire tone Crothers takes, she retained the support of her family, as well as her hometown. A newspaper in Bloomington, the Daily Pantagraph, often wrote about her, as it seems her success was a point of pride for the town. In New York, Crothers began attending the Stanhope-Wheatcroft acting school as a way to stay in the city, and ended up staying there as a teacher for the next four years. Crothers had thus far devoted her life to theater, but it was at this point that others started to take note of her work.
(2) SJ Clarke Publishing Company, The Biographical Record of McLean County, Illinois (Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1899), 471.
(3) Rachel Crothers, “The Construction of a Play,” in The Art of Playwriting: Lectures Delivered at the University of Pennsylvania on the Mask and Wig Foundation (Philidelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928), 132, http://archive.org/details/artofplaywriting00unse.
(4) Lois C. Gottlieb, Rachel Crothers (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), 17, http://archive.org/details/rachelcrothers0332gott.