Norris Houghton

Charles Norris Houghton (26 December 1909 – 9 October 2001) was a renowned theatre visionary whose career spanned seven decades. Credited with over 50 theatre productions, he was stage manager, scenic designer, producer, director, theatre manager, academician, author, and public policy advocate: these myriad roles reflect his chosen life as a “generalist,” a multifaceted “theatre man.” He is celebrated for accomplishments that reflect this span: as the premier American expert of 20th-century Russian Theatre; as a major force in creating the “off-Broadway” movement and inspiring live theater throughout the country; as a mentor to actors and innovators in world theatre; as an influential advocate of arts education; and as a student and educator of global theater chosen by prestigious foundations to study and report on theater across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. His career culminated with his accomplishments as a distinguished scholar and teacher, selected to teach and promote theatre as part of a liberal education in such prominent universities as Princeton, Columbia, and Vassar; his academic career was completed at the State University of New York, where he helped create the SUNY Purchase campus and served as founding Dean of Theatre and Film. A prolific author, this multifaceted life is documented in his books and articles, and his work has been the subject of analysis and commentary by admiring colleagues and reviewers in numerous articles, books, journals, and newspapers. His books and papers are preserved for study in prestigious university and college library, archives, and rare book collections.

Charles Norris Houghton was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the youngest of three children of Grace Norris and Charles Houghton of Oxford, Ohio. After his parents separated in 1921 he was raised by his devoted, quiet, intellectual mother and her sister, Sarah. He remained close to them throughout their lives and their many influences included a lifetime of resilient faith.

Norris discovered the stage at age seven when taken by his maternal grandfather to see E.H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe in The Taming of the Shrew, and the following year to a musical brought from London, Chu Chin Chow. Live theater (“the road”) was a predominant form of entertainment, but this introduction was more than a shared cultural experience: in theater he discovered his life’s plan. By age 14, Norris offered festivals of short plays in the family home, recruiting and training the Stringscraft Players of nine young marionetteers. This period revealed the role he would pursue throughout his long life: “finding (or writing) the play, peopling it with performers, both the marionettes themselves and the manipulators of their strings; the former must be costumed, the stage decorated and lighted…and the whole put together by an impresario (myself).” By age 16 at the New Gothic style sanctuary of Tabernacle Presbyterian Church he created two Christmas pageant tableaux extravaganzas for 150 performers, including coaching the choir and an organist in unfamiliar excerpts of Monteverdi and Pergolesi.

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