Hazel MacKaye

Hazel MacKaye (August 24, 1880 – August 11, 1944) was an American theater professional, pageant producer, and advocate for women's suffrage whose Broadway appearances spanned 1907 to 1908. Born into a prominent theatrical family, MacKaye was the daughter of actor, playwright, and producer Steele MacKaye (1842–1894), after whose hit play Hazel Kirke she was named. Her mother, Mary Medbery MacKaye (1845–1924), adapted Pride and Prejudice for the stage in 1906. MacKaye's siblings included engineer and writer James MacKaye (1872–1935), dramatist and poet Percy MacKaye (1875–1956), and conservationist Benton MacKaye (1879–1975). The family settled in Shirley, Massachusetts, in 1888.

MacKaye originally intended to pursue a career as a concert pianist before enrolling in 1907 in theater classes at Radcliffe College taught by George Pierce Baker. She did not graduate but was made an honorary member of the class of 1910. Her stage work during this period included touring with the Castle Square theater company of Winthrop Ames and acting in her brother Percy's productions Sappho and Phaon and Jeanne D'Arc, both in 1907, and Mater in 1908, the latter two of which constitute her verified Broadway credits. She also worked as an instructor at the Children's Educational Theatre in New York City.

Following her time at Radcliffe, MacKaye assisted on various pageant productions, including several alongside her brother Percy, and became a charter member of the American Pageant Association in 1913, for which she compiled a "Who's Who" of its members. That same year, organizers of the Woman Suffrage Procession, scheduled for Washington, D.C., on March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, commissioned MacKaye to create a pageant for the event. The resulting work, titled Allegory and directed by Glenna Smith Tinnin, was staged on the steps of the U.S. Treasury Building as the procession's culmination. Later in 1913, MacKaye and Tinnin collaborated on Uncle Sam's 137th Birthday Party, a pageant held on the National Mall on July 4 that involved 2,000 children and 200 adults.

MacKaye was present at the first meeting of Alice Paul's Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the forerunner of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage and the National Woman's Party. Her 1914 production The American Woman: Six Periods of American Life, created with collaborators Bertha Remick and James E. Beggs, was presented by the New York City Men's League for Women's Suffrage and included historical scenes depicting the economic, political, and social oppressions of American women. Her 1915 pageant Susan B. Anthony, presented at Convention Hall in Washington, D.C., raised funds for Paul's Congressional Union and celebrated the life of the early suffrage leader. In 1916, MacKaye staged a Jubilee Pageant for the National Young Women's Christian Association, and by 1919 she was serving as the organization's Director of Pageantry and Drama, writing multiple pageants for its use.

In 1921, MacKaye and Marie Moore Forrest oversaw the ceremony presenting Adelaide Johnson's Portrait Monument to Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony to the U.S. Capitol. Two years later, she produced a pageant in the Garden of the Gods park in Colorado Springs, Colorado, marking the 75th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention and promoting the National Woman's Party's campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment. MacKaye also wrote The Enchanted Urn, a fantasy pantomime, in 1924, and her pageant The Quest of Youth was published that same year by the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education. From 1923 to 1926, she taught drama at Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York, before leaving to work with the United Mine Workers in Illinois, where her labor drama class produced a traveling ensemble.

By the mid-1920s MacKaye's health had begun to decline, and she moved in with her brother Benton in Shirley. She suffered a nervous breakdown in 1928 and entered Gould Farm, a rest home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Her condition worsened in 1937, and she was transferred to a facility in Greens Farms, Connecticut, where she experienced severe depression for much of her remaining years. MacKaye died on August 11, 1944, and was buried in the Center Cemetery in Shirley, Massachusetts.