THEATRE TCU HISTORY

GAYLAN COLLIER

Gaylan Jane Collier was born in Fluvanna, Texas, located about 90 miles northwest of Abilene, in 1924. She earned a BA from Abilene Christian College (now University) in 1946, an MA from the University of Iowa in 1947, and a Ph.D. from the University of Denver in 1957. Her early teaching years included one year on the theatre faculty at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro (1949-50), a ten year stint at her undergraduate alma mater, Abilene Christian College (from 1950 to 1960), three years at Idaho State University (1960-1963), and four years at Sam Houston State College (now University) in Huntsville (1963-67). Dr. Collier joined the TCU theatre department in 1967 and remained on the faculty until her retirement 24 years later in 1991.

During her long career at TCU, Dr. Collier was a renowned director and teacher of acting and directing. Her long time colleague, Dr. Henry Hammack, said it this way: “Directing was life itself to this lady.” She was especially proud of the undergraduate studio directing program she instituted in the TCU Theatre Department annex known as the Barracks Theatre (located where the William E. and Jean Jones Tucker Technology Center now stands), where hundreds of directing projects by first-time student directors were performed under her supervision.

Her more than 40 directing credits at TCU included a wide range of contemporary and classical work, including plays by Shakespeare, Moliere, Sheridan, Williams, Hellman, Miller, and Wilder. She also acted occasionally at TCU, including playing Amanda Wingfield in a 1980 production of The Glass Menagerie, directed by Harry Parker, and playing Ethel Thayer opposite longtime colleague Henry Hammack in a 1982 production of On Golden Pond, directed by David Coffee.

Dr. Collier was published in many journals, including Southern Speech, Western Speech and Rocky Mountain Theatre News, and authored the Harper & Row book Assignments in Acting (1966). She was listed in the Directory of American Scholars and the Dictionary of International Biography, as well as many other reference books. After her retirement from TCU in 1991, she moved to Abilene, but continued to direct. She served as a guest director at theatres in Lake Charles, Louisiana and Abilene. Her final directing project in Fort Worth was Steel Magnolias at the Fort Worth Theatre in 1989.

Gaylan Collier passed away in November, 1994, in Abilene at the age of 70. Abilene Christian University established a theatre scholarship in her name to honor one of their most accomplished alumni. Burial was at Fluvanna Cemetery, in the town where Dr. Collier was born and spent her childhood.

Eulogy for Gaylan Jane Collier
Fluvanna, Texas
November 4, 1994
By Henry E. Hammack

She came from West Texas, a diminutive girl from Fluvanna out on the Cap Rock, and never looked back. She studied Theatre and Drama at Abilene Christian University, the University of Iowa, Cornell University and the University of Denver, earning all three of her academic degrees along the way. In the process, she wrote a widely used text on the Fundamentals of Acting and became an authority on stage dialects. She taught at her alma mater, Abilene Christian University, the Universities of Idaho and North Carolina at Greensboro and Sam Houston State University.

It was our great good fortune that Dr. Gaylan Collier accepted the invitation to join our faculty of Theatre Arts at Texas Christian University in the fall of 1967, and she stayed there until her retirement. She headed our programs in Acting and Directing since her arrival, and developed for TCU, almost single-handedly, an enviable Studio Theatre program in undergraduate directing that was almost unrivaled anywhere else in the country. I know personally of a number of students who came to TCU specifically because of Dr. Collier’s Directing program. Gaylan was a gift to educational theatre and very early in her career she aligned herself with the development of gifted students in Theatre. She was a distinguished asset to the Department and to the University until her retirement in 1990.

Thankfully, though she retired from the University, she did not retire from the Theatre. During these last four years she was guest director for major stage productions in Abilene and in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and not so long ago she was invited to hold a master class in Directing at Flagstaff, Arizona.

Long ago Gaylan Collier and I became fast friends, both on professional and personal levels. We were from the same generation of teachers and were trained by pioneers in the field of theatre education, she by E. C. Mabee at Iowa and I by Glenn Hughes at Washington, so it is not unusual that we should have agreed so heartily on matters of pedagogy and excellence in stage production. Her knowledge of the bibliography of theatre and especially of drama was astounding.

She directed me twice in her productions in Fort Worth and we performed together in On Golden Pond, a harrowing experience, since both of us were twenty years out of practice in performing on the stage. I found her directing to be meticulous, detailed and demanding – though always gentle. Directing was life itself to this lady. Nothing, not even her own ills, was allowed to interfere when she was in rehearsal for a new production. Once, during the beginning of a rehearsal period on a new show, she broke her wrist and could not write, so I went to her apartment daily and wrote her blocking and notes in her script as she dictated them to me, so rehearsals could continue uninterrupted.