Hedgerow Theatre’s glorious century, in pictures

In 1923, former Harrisburg newspaperman Jasper Deeter founded a repertory theater company with just nine dollars and seven actors. The troupe took over an old grist mill in Media, Pa.’s Rose Valley, a tiny town that had recently been established as an Arts and Crafts Movement community. In the decades that followed, the Hedgerow Theatre blossomed into a lively stage where intellectuals like Langston Hughes wrote plays and renowned actors performed and trained, including Ann Harding, Paul Robeson, Stephen Lang, and even Keanu Reeves.

2023 marked the 100th anniversary of Hedgerow Theatre, an impressive milestone for the small, scrappy, and ambitious theater in the Philadelphia suburbs.

For much of the theater’s history, the actors lived communally just up the hill, sharing house chores and preparing for their ever-changing play schedule. Beloved by celebrity playwrights from Eugene O’Neill to George Bernard Shaw, Hedgerow was a rare repertory theater, where actors had a slate of plays ready to stage at any time. Hedgerow persisted through the Great Depression — when actors began growing their own food and tending to livestock — brief closures, enormous debts, and two fires.

For 33 years, it was the country’s oldest and longest-running repertory theater, but in 1956, following an unsuccessful residency in Philadelphia, Hedgerow faced closure and ceased its repertory operations, citing exorbitant costs. The theater maintained its acting school, cofounded by Deeter and longtime actor Rose Schulman, and continued to produce new work.

Today, Hedgerow is known as the “mother of all Philadelphia theaters,” in part because its alums went on to found their own successful ventures, including People’s Light, Freedom Theatre, Theatre of the Living Arts, and Curio Theatre Company. Now under artistic director Marcie Bramucci, the theater opened its centennial season with Good Grief, a new play from Ngozi Anyanwu about a young Nigerian American girl coming of age in the Philly suburbs. Below is a brief look into Hedgerow’s 100-year history onstage and beyond.

Unless otherwise noted, images courtesy of the Hedgerow Theatre Company records, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania Libraries. In that collection, the image of “In Abraham’s Bosom” is located in Archive Box 37 while the images of “Candida” and “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” are in Archive Box 35.

Circa 1930s: Hedgerow Theatre founder Jasper Deeter sits at the head of the Thunder Table created by Malvern craftsman Wharton Esherick. To his left is movie and stage actor Ann Harding, who around this time purchased the Hedgerow building for Deeter to use indefinitely.

Est. 1939: Deeter directed the Broadway premiere of Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom in 1926, which examined racism, oppression, and hardship through the story of a mixed-race farmer trying to educate Black students in Jim Crow North Carolina. The play won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927 and months later Deeter staged it at Hedgerow with an all-Black cast of actors from New York, including notable actors Jules Bledsoe and Rose McClendon. This photograph comes from a later production in 1939, featuring Betty Howard and Amos Chew.

1932: Deeter and Harding perform Inheritors, by pioneering feminist playwright Susan Glaspell, considered “the mother” or “first lady” of American drama. Hedgerow staged the social justice play — about an outspoken college student who protests for free speech, against the wishes of her family who founded the institution — dozens of times throughout its history, including in 1973 as an ode to Deeter after he died.

1937: Miriam Phillips and fellow actors in Candida by George Bernard Shaw. The comedy was the first play performed at Hedgerow in 1923; this photo is from a later production.

1946: A look at Hedgerow’s repertory schedule in 1946, with the same group of plays staged in rotation between July and September.

1947: The U.S. State Department filmed an 18-minute documentary about Hedgerow, following its actors for a day, with the goal of illustrating a successful American theater beyond Broadway. The Hedgerow Story was never actually distributed because, according to longtime actor-educator Susan Wefel, images of the troupe’s communal living veered too close to Communism for a state-approved film.

1948: The Caucasian Chalk Circle, from German playwright Bertolt Brecht, premiered at Hedgerow Theatre. The play-within-a-play set in the Soviet Union became one of his best-known and often-produced works.

Circa 1940s: Left: Miriam Phillips and Rose Schulman in Family Portrait. Right: Richard Basehart, Dolores Tanner, and David Metcalf onstage at Hedgerow.

Mid-1950s: Hedgerow staged a season in Philadelphia, in the foyer at the Academy of Music. Unfortunately, they were unable to attract audiences in the city, leading to an organizational crisis. Hedgerow closed for three years and ceased operating as a repertory theater, reopening in 1959.

1957: As the theater struggled financially, Deeter had important friends pitch in. On behalf of her husband, Carlotta Monterey O’Neill put in writing that Deeter had permission to stage Eugene O’Neill’s popular works without any fees (with just three exceptions).

1968: The acting school, Hedgerow’s Theatre School of Expression, continued to thrive. In 1960, students Celia Silverman and Jean Goldman cofounded Theatre for the Living Arts, which ran on South Street for 30 years. (It’s now a movie theater.) Other theaters formed in this era, too — in 1966, John Allen founded Freedom Theatre, now considered Pennsylvania’s oldest African American theater, and in 1974, a breakout group of actors founded People’s Light nearby.

1985: An arson fire destroyed the interior of Hedgerow Theatre, closing it down. The troupe moved to Widener University temporarily, but months later in 1986, an electrical fire broke out. They took their performances on tour while fundraising to cover the repairs.

1988: A shot of the theater during reconstruction. The side of the building on Rose Valley Road wasn’t too damaged. After five years of community fundraising and rebuilding, Hedgerow reopened in 1990.

1990s: Mike Hagan, Penelope Reed (who would go on to lead Hedgerow), and Susan Wefel. In the ‘80s, a teenage Keanu Reeves lived and apprenticed at the theater for a summer, and Wefel remembered him always riding his skateboard. Longtime artistic director Penelope Reed’s son, Jared Reed, became an associate artistic director at Hedgerow in 2012.

2022: Current artistic director Marcie Bramucci shows off stage props in a sensory tour ahead of a relaxed performance of Cowboy Versus Samurai. Relaxed performances allow for the audience to move about and make noise without judgment, with the goal of expanding access to people with autism or experiencing disabilities.

2023: To begin its 100th season, Hedgerow staged Good Grief, a coming-of-age play by Ngozi Anyanwu, set in Bensalem, Pa., where she was raised.