Helen Krich Chinoy, a theater historian who collected the views of actors and directors about their crafts and documented the contributions of women to the American theater, died May 24 in Turners Falls, Mass. One of the first books I ever read on acting was “Actors on Acting” edited by Helen Krich Chinoy. She was 87.
Helen K. Chinoy, Theater Historian and Educator, Dies at 87
By BRUCE WEBER
New York Times, June 5, 2010
Ms. Chinoy taught at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., for nearly three decades, and was the chairwoman of the theater department from 1968 to 1971. But her influence in the world of theater education preceded her arrival at Smith in 1953.Her book “Actors on Acting,” written and edited with Toby Cole and published in 1949, was a scholarly collection of writings and interviews by actors from ancient Greece to mid-20th-century America, each selection placed historically in context with short introductory essays by the authors. It became a popular classroom text and remains in print today.
Ms. Chinoy and Ms. Cole followed up with another compilation, “Directors on Directing,” published in 1953, which traced the rise of the director as a theatrical force in the previous century using the words of the artists themselves.
In 1981 Ms. Chinoy and a collaborator, Linda Walsh Jenkins, published “Women in American Theater,” an extensive collection of essays, diaries and interviews by various writers dealing with the contributions of women to the theater as actresses, directors, playwrights, designers, theater managers and theater founders.
The work brought to the forefront women like Susan Glaspell, who started the Provincetown Players with her husband and later became a successful playwright; the monologist Ruth Draper; and Cheryl Crawford, who, with Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, founded the Group Theater in 1931.
Much of Ms. Chinoy’s later research focused on the Group Theater, the groundbreaking ensemble that performed contemporary plays and developed a system of actor training and rehearsal that became known as the Method. Her collection of interviews, “Reunion: A Self-Portrait of the Group Theater,” was published in 1976. Before her illness, she had nearly completed a full historical treatment of the ensemble.
“She was a pioneer of scholarship,” said Alisa Solomon, director of the arts and culture concentration of the master’s program at Columbia University and a former professor of theater at the City University of New York Graduate Center. “Without Helen Chinoy, it would have taken a lot longer for us to know about people whose central place in the theater is now taken for granted.”
Helen Krich was born in Newark, on Sept. 25, 1922, to parents who were Ukrainian immigrants. Her father, Benjamin, and his brothers ran an automobile showroom. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from New York University and taught at Rutgers and Queens College before arriving at Smith, as a part-time instructor in the English department, in 1953.
From 1956 to 1987 she taught in the theater department, with the exception of five years in the early 1960s, during which she completed her PhD. in English at Columbia University and taught at the University of Leicester in England.
She married Ely Chinoy, a sociologist, in 1948. He died in 1975. Besides her daughter, who lives in Madrid, she is survived by a son, Mike, of Los Angeles, a former Asian correspondent for CNN, and three grandchildren.
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