Mary Hunter Wolf; Trailblazer in American Theater, Arts Education

Mary Hunter Wolf, who was one of the first women to direct a Broadway production and who later won an early sex discrimination case over her ouster from a Broadway show, has died at 95.

The Bakersfield-born Wolf died Nov. 3 at an assisted-living facility in Hamden, Conn.

A trailblazer in American theater and arts education, her first Broadway directing stint was the 1944 production of Horton Foote’s “Only the Heart.” It was followed a year later with “Carib Song,” starring Katherine Dunham, the first black Broadway musical.

After a string of successful New York shows in the mid-1940s, her career hit a roadblock when she was hired to direct “High Button Shoes” in 1947. The producers suddenly decided they wanted George Abbot to direct the production and fired Wolf before the start of rehearsal. Wolf filed suit claiming sexual discrimination. The New York state Supreme Court agreed with her in a ruling two years later.

Wolf’s life took many sharp turns. Orphaned as a teenager, she discovered her love for dramatic arts while studying at the Hollywood School for Girls. Among her classmates was Agnes de Mille, who became a world renowned choreographer and Wolf’s lifelong friend.

The future director studied at Wellesley for three years before moving to Santa Fe, where an aunt had a health resort. She directed her first production there in 1927, a 17th century Spanish verse play called “Los Moros y los Cristianos,” which was performed on horseback. In Santa Fe, she fell in with a crowd of literary figures that included D.H. Lawrence, Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis.

A year later, she enrolled at the University of Chicago and began working with the Cube Theater, one of the first integrated companies in America. There she directed some of the first American performances of Luigi Pirandello’s modern classic “Six Characters in Search of an Author.”

While in Chicago, she also began a career in radio acting, winning the part of Marge in the WGN radio comedy “Easy Aces.” She moved with the show to New York in 1933, staying with it until it went off the air in 1945.

She also picked up her studies, earning an anthropology degree from Columbia University.

Fascinated by theater, Wolf helped found an early off-Broadway group, the American Actors Company, whose members included de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Jean Stapleton and Foote, then an aspiring actor who began writing at Wolf’s insistence.

“Mary was our guiding light,” Foote told a reporter years ago. “She suggested we should improvise things about different sections of the country.”

The focal point of Foote’s writing was his hometown of Wharton, Texas. One of his first plays, “Texas Town,” earned good reviews, and Foote left acting for writing.

Including “Only the Heart,” Wolf directed five of Foote’s early works in New York.

Other directing stints included Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Respectful Prostitute,” a hit 1948 production on Broadway. In the 1950s, she was associate director in the production of “Peter Pan” that starred Mary Martin and was directed by her close friend Robbins.

Key Player in Shakespeare Theater

That was her last Broadway show. She married Herman Wolf, a television executive, and settled in Connecticut, where she became a key player in the opening of the American Shakespeare Theater in Stratford. She was the company’s first executive director and later served as an executive producer.

Increasingly turning her attention to arts eduction in schools, she founded the Center for Theatre Technique in Education and was instrumental in developing some of the first and most productive “art magnet” schools in the country. She also served as chairwoman of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.

A strong proponent of arts education, Hunter established the Professional Training Program of the American Theater Wing after World War II. About 1,700 students sponsored by the GI Bill studied under that program.

Some years ago, she offered a warning on the value of arts curriculum.

“We downgrade arts in our schools at the peril of society, and, more important, at the peril of society’s future,” she wrote in an article in the Anchorage Daily News. “We must stress and restress the importance of arts in the learning process, not for the sake of artists, but for the sake of the next generation, the children who face a bewildering world, brimming with questions and ravenous for answers.”

Her papers, which included letters from some of the leading figures in American theater, such as Tennessee Williams and Robbins, have been donated to Yale University’s Collection of American Literature in New Haven.

She is survived by her ex-husband Wolf, from whom she was divorced in 1965; two stepsons; a stepdaughter; six grandchildren, and a great-grandchild.