Margaret Webster

Margaret Webster’s Othello put Paul Robeson at the center of a major American Shakespeare production. Opening in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1942 before reaching Broadway in 1943, it joined Robeson’s Othello with Uta Hagen’s Desdemona and José Ferrer’s Iago. Webster also played Emilia. Its 296 Broadway performances made artistic authority visible in the box office, though commercial success did not dissolve the racial exclusions surrounding the production. Harvard preserves correspondence about proposed segregated performances in Texas. Those documents belong beside the celebrated photographs.

Born in New York on 15 March 1905, Webster was the daughter of British actors May Whitty and Ben Webster. Her early work included touring companies and the Old Vic; in the 1930s she was active in British Equity and the London Theatre Council. Her New York Richard II, starring Maurice Evans in 1937, established an important American collaboration. The profession she inherited became a field in which she exercised authority over actors, interpretation, and production.

That authority could bring conflict. Harvard’s account records her replacement as Emilia during the Broadway Othello, following a dispute with Robeson over star billing for Hagen and Ferrer. The evidence describes a particular professional disagreement, not a license to invent private hostility. It also resists a comfortable account in which a successful interracial production made its collaborators immune to disputes about recognition. A director worked inside the same machinery of contracts and reputation as her performers.

Webster’s partnership with Eva Le Gallienne joined an intimate relationship to a public theatrical undertaking. Yale’s exhibition identifies them explicitly as romantic partners when, with Cheryl Crawford, they founded the American Repertory Theater in 1946. The same exhibition discusses Webster’s casting correspondence with Theatre Guild producer Theresa Helburn: the director argued for an actor’s interpretive qualities over physical appearance. These are different kinds of evidence, one concerning partnership and another artistic judgment. Neither should swallow the other.

Her subsequent Shakespeare company carried productions through forty states by bus and truck. Touring made the question of audience practical: a repertory needed transport and schedules as well as actors. In 1950 she moved into another institutional setting. Her Don Carlo opened Rudolf Bing’s administration at the Metropolitan Opera on 6 November, with Fritz Stiedry conducting. The Met identifies her as its first female stage director. Its performance record preserves a precise division of responsibilities: Webster’s production, Rolf Gérard’s design, and Stiedry’s musical direction. [2,4,5]

Writing extended her work beyond rehearsal. Shakespeare Without Tears appeared in 1942; later books included The Same Only Different and Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage. She died in London on 13 November 1972. Milly S. Barranger’s biography also examines the political investigations that interrupted her career. Their consequences require examination of the full study and original records, rather than a simple story of uninterrupted professional ascent. [2,6]

Webster enters Natalie Clifford Barney’s Constellation through Le Gallienne, whose connection with Mercedes de Acosta links these theatrical circles. No direct Webster–Barney romance is established here. Her independent career expands the archive’s account of women who chose casts, organized companies, and negotiated institutions, making artistic work available far beyond a private salon.