Background on Catharine Sargent Huntington
Actress, producer/director, theater company founder, teacher, activist, avid gardener, and devoted family-member, colleague and friend, Catharine Sargent Huntington was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts on December 29, 1887. She was the only daughter of Rev. George Putnam Huntington and Lilly St. Agnan Barrett Huntington to survive infancy, presaging the core of strength and independence that would drive her throughout her long life. She grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire with 5 brothers – 4 older: Henry Barrett, Constant Davis, James Lincoln, M. Paul St. Agnan; and 1 younger: Frederic Dane. She remained close with each of them throughout their lives, and with their progeny for her entire life. She never married.
From 1904 through 1906, Catharine lived in Roxbury, Boston, Massachusetts with her aunt Kate Sumner while attending Miss Haskell’s School in Boston, graduating in 1906. She spent 1906 to 1907 living in London, England with her brother Constant and his wife Gladys, traveling with them around the United Kingdom and Europe. She returned to Massachusetts to attend Radcliffe College, from which she graduated cum laude in 1911. She taught English and Theater at The Westover School in Middlebury, Connecticut from 1911 to c.1917. By the end of 1918 she had begun her theater career in earnest, working as a dramatic coach in the Boston area. In January 1919, following preliminary training through the American Red Cross, she became the Radcliffe College representative to the Wellesley unit of the Y.M.C.A., working in France on war reconstruction with the American Expeditionary Forces, the Réconstruction Aisne Devastée, and the Union des Femmes de France. Around this time, she also appeared in a theater production under the direction of artist Joseph Lindon Smith on the French Riviera, and directed and produced a pageant put on by and for French village children around Saint-Quentin, France.
Upon her return to Massachusetts in December 1919, Catharine continued to develop her profound engagement with the theater, particularly experimental theater, which was to endure for the next 60-plus years through her patronage, and her many performances, productions, and theater companies. Some of her professional highlights: In 1922, she co-founded the Boston Stage Society and directed her first production in Boston, a play (probably “Uncle Vanya”) by Anton Chekhov. Starting in 1927, she coached a group of black playwrights/artists looking to produce original plays through the Allied Arts Centre. In the 1930s, she mounted puppet productions with Mr. Punch’s Workshop of Boston and The Puppet Theatre. In 1938, together with Edwin Pettet and Virginia Thoms LePeer, she founded the New England Repertory Theatre Company, which performed in Boston during the winter season, and in Provincetown, Massachusetts during the summer season where it became known as the Provincetown Playhouse. Catharine owned the Playhouse building from 1940 to 1973. In 1966, the Provincetown Playhouse mounted its O’Neill Festival, performing 10 plays by Eugene O’Neill, a close friend of Catharine’s. In 1977, the Playhouse and its library were destroyed by fire. They were eventually rebuilt through a massive fundraising effort by Catharine and others, according to plans created through a design competition conducted by a committee overseen by renowned architect I.M. Pei. Catharine also founded the Poet’s Theatre, which was very active in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1950s and 1960s, and was associated with many other theaters throughout her life including the Brattle Theatre, the Peabody Playhouse, the Tributary Theater, the Proposition Workshop, and the Joy Street Theatre.
In 1966, Catharine received the Rodgers and Hammerstein Award for outstanding contributions to American Theater in the Boston area. She was similarly honored by the New England Theater Association and the Radcliffe College Alumnae Association. In 1984, Mayor Raymond Flynn and the Boston City Council declared March 28 to be Catharine S. Huntington Day, in recognition of “a life that has nourished and inspired generations of theatre artists”; and on December 29, 1984, her 97th birthday, Catharine received a citation from Governor Michael Dukakis and the Massachusetts State Legislature, commending her for her contributions to the American theater.
Throughout her life, Catharine devoted much of her prodigious energy to activism in connection with progressive politics, human rights, and issues of justice and equality before the law. In August 1927, as an active supporter of Nikola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Catharine – together with Edna St. Vincent Millay, Powers Hapgood, John Dos Passos, and other writers, poets, and artists – was among the 156 people arrested for participating in a demonstration outside the Massachusetts State House to protest Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s death sentences, which has come to be called the “Death Watch.” Additionally, she served for decades on the Sacco-Vanzetti Memorial Committee, assisting in the early efforts to have a memorial sculpture dedicated to the pair erected somewhere in Boston, for which she was recognized by Governor Michael Dukakis in 1977.
From the 1920s through the 1970s, Catharine lived at 66 Pinckney St., Boston (a much beloved family home that passed through generations of the Huntington Family), cultivating her love of gardening and her connections to family and friends, and writing poems, plays, speeches, and many, many letters to all her wide and varied circle of correspondents. Her garden at 66 Pinkney St. was featured in “Hidden Gardens of Beacon Hill'' published by the Beacon Hill Garden Club in 1972. She was also notably active, together with her brother James Lincoln Huntington, in the formation and perpetuation of the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation, Inc. in Hadley, Massachusetts, which has overseen the preservation of “Forty Acres” – the family homestead in Hadley – and the Porter-Phelps-Huntington House Museum and grounds since 1955. Catharine frequently visited Forty Acres during her life: first as a child to see various family members; then to visit her mother Lilly, who spent her final summers there until she died in 1926; and in later years, to stay with James, its owner from 1929 to 1955 until he donated it to the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation. On every visit, Catherine brought her love for her family and her expertise and enthusiasm for developing and maintaining its gardens. In the early 1980s, due to declining health Catharine moved to Sherrill House in Boston, living there until her death on February 27, 1987. She is buried in the Huntington Family plot in the Old Hadley Cemetery, Hadley, Massachusetts
