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Molly Day Thacher Kazan died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage three weeks after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and her funeral, like many other events that cold winter, was obscured by a nation in mourning. Those attending, however, had to be content with standing room only among a roster which was the firmament of the American theatre. Williams, Miller, Burrows, Chayevsky, Logan, Schulberg, Strasberg, Clurman, Inge, Whitehead, and Dunnock were numbered in the over 400 that stretched the capacity of St. Clement's Episcopal Church on West Forty-sixth Street. Among the recited tributes was a poem that Molly Kazan had written just days earlier, on Thanksgiving 1963, mourning the dead president.
Molly was 56 and although her obituary announced her as a "playwright," her resume is relatively thin and does not account either for the outpouring at her funeral or the esteem in which she was held by her peers. A few days later, Robert Anderson wrote a tribute to Molly which was published as a letter in the New York Times and which summarizes why so many grieved.
She was an appreciator of other people's plays and talents, and that is something very difficult for a playwright to be. At Theatre Union, the Group Theatre, the Theatre Guild and Actors Studio, Molly read thousands of scripts by young playwrights and advised, encouraged and followed up her enthusiasms with action which opened the way for many of the playwrights of today's theatre. . . . Molly read all my plays hot out of the typewriter. It was she who carried a copy of my play, Tea and Sympathy, to Gadge. . . . We who were constantly in her debt as friends have suffered a great personal loss. The theatre has also suffered a loss, not just in the plays she might have written, but also in the plays she might have read.1
Long before American dramaturgy became popular and in an era when "play doctoring" was the out-of-town remedy for Broadway-bound plays and musicals, Molly Kazan insisted on the need for identifying and nurturing promising playwrights. At the Theatre Union and with the Group, she spoke and wrote passionately about the need to make the theatre relevant and political. Although she had a patrician background...