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The Carolina Playmakers, organized at UNC by Frederick H. Koch in 1918, staged new folk plays in Chapel Hill; their first bill, in March 1919, included Thomas Wolfe's The Return of Buck Gavin with Wolfe in the title role. In 1925 they opened their own theatre in the remodeled Smith Hall.
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People named in events about this site, ordered by number of mentions. Each example links to an entry with a source citation.
Books, articles, records, and images about Carolina Playmakers. Each has been reviewed for relevance; materials held at OCPL appear first.
Walter Spearman's account of the Carolina Playmakers, the theater company at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, across its first fifty years, as the subtitle puts it. The company was founded in 1918 under Frederick H. Koch. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1970, 178 pages with illustrations and portraits.
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Brief biography of Frederick Henry Koch (1877-1944), founder of the Carolina Playmakers at the University of North Carolina, by Samuel Selden and Mary Tom Sphangos, with notes by Jonathan Daniels and others. It reprints Koch's own essay 'Folk playmaking' on pages 59 to 68. Published by the University of North Carolina Library in 1954, viii and 92 pages with illustrations and a portrait.
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Reviewed in Educational Theatre Journal (1956).
Archibald Henderson's short history of the Carolina Playmakers, the University of North Carolina's theater company at Chapel Hill, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1945, 104 pages. Written while the company was still in its first decades, it gives a contemporary view of how the Playmakers saw their own mission as a people's theatre.
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Cecelia Moore on the Carolina Playmakers, the folk drama company Frederick H. Koch built at the University of North Carolina. The text is the talk she gave on April 8, 2014 in Wilson Library for the Gladys Hall Coates university history lecture series, printed by the university. Topics include the Playmakers, Koch and theatrical companies in Chapel Hill.
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Dedication ceremony program for the Paul Green Theatre at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, printed in 1978 in nine unnumbered pages. It includes Walter Spearman's essay on the Carolina Playmakers from 1918 to 1978.
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Short article on the Carolina Playmakers, the university drama group, reprinted from Players magazine for February 1963, pages 140 to 143. Topics include theater at Chapel Hill and the Playmakers themselves, so the piece is a period account of playmaking on the campus at the start of the 1960s.
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Frederick H. Koch looks back on twenty-five years of the Carolina Playmakers, the folk drama company he founded at the University of North Carolina. Detached from the June 1944 Bulletin of the National Theatre Conference and printed in Cleveland, it concerns theater in Chapel Hill and Koch himself, who died in the same year the piece appeared.
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Frances Fox Sandmel's 1941 critical evaluation of the Carolina Playmakers, the folk drama company of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Written as an academic study in the history and criticism of American folk drama, it runs past 138 leaves and closes with a bibliography on leaves 139 to 144.
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An address delivered in the Playmakers Theatre at Chapel Hill on April 5, 1940 by Frederick H. Koch, during the Southern Regional Theatre Festival that commemorated the founding of the Carolina Playmakers in 1918 and 1919. He traces the company's first twenty-one years of folk drama in the South. Printed at Chapel Hill.
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Ralph Westerman's article on the Carolina Playmakers, the university theater company at Chapel Hill, printed in Progressive Education for January 1931 and issued separately by the Progressive Education Association in Washington. It connects the company to the teaching of playwriting at the university.
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A 1924 item out of New York, from the Theatre Magazine office, on the Carolina Playmakers production of The comedy of errors at the Forest Theatre in Chapel Hill. Topics include theater in Chapel Hill and the Playmakers themselves. The Forest Theatre is the outdoor stage on the university campus, which is the setting the piece records.
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Paul L. Benjamin's account of the Carolina Playmakers, written for Survey and published in the number of 1 July 1922, then detached and issued on its own by Survey Associates in New York. An outside magazine's early notice of what the company was doing in the town.
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An unsigned notice of the Carolina Playmakers in the American Review of Reviews for September 1919, detached and issued by the Review of Reviews Company in New York. It is the earliest of three separately issued magazine pieces about the company.
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Material about the Carolina Playmakers, the theatre company founded at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Included because: The site is named in the title, catalog subjects, or description.
An issue devoted to Frederick Henry Koch, called a pioneer playmaker in its title, dated July 1954 in the University of North Carolina Library Extension Publication series from the University of North Carolina Press at Chapel Hill. Part of DigitalNC's North Carolina Yearbooks collection.
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A twelve page illustrated booklet marking forty years of the Department of Dramatic Art and the Carolina Playmakers at Chapel Hill, 1918 to 1958, with a register of Playmakers alumni. The University of North Carolina printed it in two versions in 1958: one on white glossy paper, which adds a view of Playmakers Theatre to the back cover, and one in blue wrappers with wheat colored paper inside.
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Cecelia Moore's dissertation traces how the folk drama program of Frederick Koch and Paul Green at UNC, the Carolina Playmakers, shaped the Federal Theatre Project's plans for regional theatre in North Carolina from 1935 to 1939.
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Samuel Selden spoke to the Chapel Hill Historical Society in 1974 about the Playmakers Theatre on the UNC campus, long the home of the Carolina Playmakers. Cassette recording in the Society's Audiovisual Materials Collection, CHHS.012.
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Louise Fletcher, James Sechrest and James Pritchett performing together in a 1955 Carolina Playmakers production, photographed on stage. From the Playmakers group of the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection.
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Hugh Morton's photograph of the cast of 'George Washington Slept Here,' staged by the Carolina Playmakers, probably taken in April 1942. When the Daily Tar Heel ran it on April 16, 1942, the caption identified Lee Zimmer, Elizabeth Blair and Diddey Kelley (perhaps Hortense E. Kelley).
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Hugh Morton photograph of the Carolina Playmakers cast of 'George Washington Slept Here', probably April 1942. Diddey Kelley, perhaps Hortense E. Kelley, sits on a man's lap, with Elizabeth Blair at left. Similar pictures ran in the Daily Tar Heel on 15 and 16 April 1942.
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Lib Trautman and Buddy Westover in the Carolina Playmakers production of 'George Washington Slept Here', probably April 1942. The picture illustrated an article in the Daily Tar Heel of 12 April 1942, with Trautman as Annabelle. Hugh Morton, sheet film negative.
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Shirley Brimberg as the mountain sprite lures Peer Gynt, played by Douglass Watson of Barnesville, Georgia, in a Carolina Playmakers production at the Forest Theatre. Hugh Morton's photograph ran in the Daily Tar Heel on 17 May 1942.
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Bayard Wootten's view of the inside of the Playmakers Theatre on the Chapel Hill campus, home of the Carolina Playmakers, on a hand-colored postcard sold by the university's Student Supply Store. A sender in August 1938 wrote that after the fire the room might never look this way again.
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Press clippings about the Carolina Playmakers covering 1933 to 1938, kept in a scrapbook whose title was supplied by a cataloger. No compiler is named. The clippings concern the company and theater in Chapel Hill. A folio volume in UNC's North Carolina Collection.
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Theater papers of Lynn Gault, who died in 1998, covering 1937 to 1998, in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, collection 4987. Subjects include the Carolina Playmakers, Paul Green and his play 'The Lost Colony', with further subjects for American dramatists and authors, theater in North Carolina and Virginia, and the university faculty at Chapel Hill.
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Forest Theatre of the Carolina Playmakers at the University of North Carolina, on a postcard sold by the Student Supply Store and printed by the Albertype Company of Brooklyn. A visitor mailed it from Chapel Hill on 12 April 1937 to a friend named Edythe, praising the campus. The view shows an audience at an open-air production.
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A magazine profile of Frederick H. Koch, the drama teacher who founded the Carolina Playmakers at the University of North Carolina, written by Winifred Camp for a Southern personalities series. Detached from Holland's, volume 55, number 7, for July 1936.
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Wooden postcard from 1930 by the Dixie Novelty Co. of Asheville honoring Frederick Koch, founder of the Carolina Playmakers at the University of North Carolina. The drawing shows Koch with his pipe, the Playmakers Theatre and the Playmakers emblem.
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Albertype Co. postcard of 1922 with portraits of two Carolina Playmakers actors in costume: Allen McGee as the first mate in 'Blackbeard, Pirate of the Carolina Coast', and Harold Williamson playing Ved, a farmhand, in 'Peggy', a play he wrote himself.
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Three actors seated around a table on stage, in a 1920 photograph given as the first performance at the Playmakers Theatre. From the Carolina Playmakers group of the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection.
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Actors on stage in a Carolina Playmakers production of the Tar Baby play, 1920, in a print kept with its negative. Part of the Playmakers photographs in the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection.
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Thomas Wolfe, then a University of North Carolina student, in a 1919 candid photograph from 'The Return of Buck Gavin', his own one-act play for the Carolina Playmakers. From the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Artists binder, Prints and Photographs Collection.
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Papers of Samuel Selden (1899-1979) spanning 1918 to 1977, in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, collection 4378. The papers concern the Carolina Playmakers and the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with college theater in North Carolina, American dramatists and open-air theater in the United States.
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Carolina Playmakers actors at rehearsal, scripts in hand, receiving notes. Undated. From the Playmakers photographs in the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection.
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Spectators watch an outdoor play at the Forest Theatre of the Carolina Playmakers in Chapel Hill, on a postcard sold by the Student Supply Store at the University of North Carolina. Undated.
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Correspondence, newspaper clippings and copies of published pieces about the Playmakers, the university theater company in Chapel Hill. Undated folder from the University of North Carolina series of the Chapel Hill Historical Society's vertical files.
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Promotional image of the Playmakers Theatre in Chapel Hill: an exterior view of the building framed by headshots of actors around the border. Undated. Part of the Carolina Playmakers photographs in the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection.
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Seven undated slides of actors on stage at the Playmakers Theatre in Chapel Hill. Part of the Carolina Playmakers group in the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection.
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The second series of one-act plays from the Carolina Playmakers, the UNC theater company Frederick Koch founded in 1918, published in 1922. Includes Thomas Wolfe's 'The Return of Buck Gavin', 'Fixin's' by Paul and Erma Green, and plays by Elizabeth Lay, Lucy Cobb and Frances Gray, with appendices listing Playmakers productions.
Included because: Published by or for this institution.
John W. Parker's gathering of four Carolina Playmakers scripts, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1963: 'Singing valley', 'Spring for sure', 'A little to the left' and 'The battle of the carnival and Lent'. An appendix lists plays by student authors, and topics include twentieth century American drama. 333 pages with illustrations.
Included because: Published by or for this institution.
Bernice Kelly Harris's collection of eastern North Carolina folk plays, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1940. Associated with the Carolina Playmakers of Chapel Hill, the volume has 294 pages, a frontispiece and plates.
Included because: Published by or for this institution.
Commemorative issue of the Carolina play-book, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Carolina Dramatic Association in 1973. The play-book was the magazine of the Carolina Playmakers at Chapel Hill and had ceased publication in 1944, so this special edition brought the title back for the occasion. Topics include theater in North Carolina along with both organizations.
Included because: Published by or for this institution.
Transcript of the forum held on March 29, 1969 at Playmakers Theater for the fiftieth anniversary of the Carolina Playmakers, the theatre company of the University of North Carolina. Reported by Elizabeth Overby across 52 leaves. The proceedings cover the company's first half century and the Chapel Hill building it performed in.
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A commemorative number of the Carolina Play-Book marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Carolina Playmakers, published by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1944. The second of the anniversary issues, it gathers material on the company's folk drama work. Its subjects are the Playmakers and theater in Chapel Hill.
Included because: Published by or for this institution.
A program for the dedication of the Forest Theatre in Chapel Hill, issued by the University of North Carolina in 1943 and marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Carolina Playmakers, 1918 to 1943. Frederick H. Koch, who founded the Playmakers, and university president Frank Porter Graham are both also named for the open-air theater.
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Issued by the Carolina Playmakers in Chapel Hill as a commemorative number of their play-book, this 1940 publication records the regional theatre festival of April 1 to 6 that marked twenty-one years of the company under Frederick H. Koch. The same week carried the seventeenth annual festival and tournament of the Carolina Dramatic Association.
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The Carolina Playmakers presented a Shaw and Henderson festival in Chapel Hill in honor of Archibald Henderson, the university mathematician who became Bernard Shaw's biographer, and this piece reports on it. Detached from the May 1933 issue of Sigma Nu Delta and printed in Indianapolis by the fraternity, it concerns drama festivals in Chapel Hill and names both Henderson and Shaw.
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Playbill for the Carolina Playmakers at Chapel Hill announcing the first production of Strike song, described as a new play of Southern mill people. Printed by the Playmakers in 1931, it carries the list of cast members, an outline of the drama and a short history of it. Topics include playbills in Chapel Hill and drama about mills and mill work.
Included because: Published by or for this institution.
The Carolina Play-book, a drama and theater periodical published at Chapel Hill from 1928. It includes plays and commentary from the university's playmaking circle and the folk drama movement.
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Jane Toy Coolidge's eight-page play set in Hillsboro, North Carolina, in 1867, during the early years after the Civil War. Coolidge wrote it while a student at the University of North Carolina. Publication is attributed to the Carolina Playmakers and dated approximately 1922, based on her student years.
Included because: Published by or for this institution.
Playbills from the Carolina Playmakers, the university theater company at Chapel Hill, pasted into a scrapbook that covers productions from 1929 to 1954. A cataloger devised the title, since the volume carries none of its own. A folio volume in UNC's North Carolina Collection.
Included because: Published by or for this institution.
Frank Porter Graham writing in 1946 for the Koch Memorial Theatre, published at Chapel Hill by the Carolina Playmakers at the University of North Carolina. The theatre was to honor Frederick H. Koch, the Playmakers' founder, who died in 1944. Topics include theaters and university buildings at Chapel Hill.
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How the Koch Memorial Theatre at Chapel Hill was to be built and endowed, set out in 1946 as the campaign in memory of Frederick H. Koch went forward. Topics include theaters and the buildings of the University of North Carolina.
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A mimeographed case for building the Koch Memorial Theatre at Chapel Hill, named for Frederick H. Koch of the Carolina Playmakers and probably issued by the Playmakers in 1945. A typed letter dated 26 January 1946 is bound in at the end, setting out the pledges received toward the building to that date.
Included because: Published by or for this institution.
A 1944 fundraising leaflet from the Carolina Playmakers for a theatre at Chapel Hill in memory of Frederick H. Koch, its cover promising to honor a gallant life and to fulfill a gallant dream. Published at Chapel Hill by the Playmakers.
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John Manning Booker's address on the beginnings of dramatic instruction at the University of North Carolina, tracing the Committee on Dramatics that came before the Chapel Hill department of dramatic arts. Reprinted in 1940 from the commemorative issue of the Carolina play-book, and issued by the Carolina Playmakers and the Carolina Dramatic Association. It concerns the study and teaching of acting in Chapel Hill.
Included because: Published by or for this institution.
Posters gathered by the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina, dated 1936. The sheets advertise campus theater, including work of the Carolina Playmakers and the PlayMakers Repertory Company, so they survive as graphic evidence of drama in Chapel Hill. The collection concerns theater in North Carolina.
Included because: Published by or for this institution.
Advertisement from November 1932 for the Carolina Playmakers' staging of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' in the Playmakers Theatre on the UNC campus in Chapel Hill, promising new scenery, footlights and costumes. From Duke's Broadsides and Ephemera Collection.
Included because: Published by or for this institution.
Playbills from productions of the Carolina Playmakers, collected by the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina and given a title by the cataloger. The group dates to 1927. Topics include theater in North Carolina, North Carolina drama, the Playmakers and the PlayMakers Repertory Company.
Included because: Published by or for this institution.
Dramatic art department records from Chapel Hill running from 1922 to 2019, roughly 29,000 items across 39 linear feet, University Archives at UNC, collection 40080. The files concern the Carolina Playmakers, the Carolina Dramatic Association, the PlayMakers Repertory Company, the Laboratory Theater and the Institute of Outdoor Drama, so the files document theater teaching and production in North Carolina through the twentieth century.
Included because: Published by or for this institution.
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