Ida Rau

Ida Rauh (March 7, 1877 – February 28, 1970) was an American actress, suffragist, sculptor, and poet whose Broadway career spanned from 1915 to 1920. Her stage credits include The Power of Darkness, Ile, and Licensed. Beyond Broadway, Rauh was a co-founder of the Provincetown Players in 1915, a theater collective whose members included Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, John Reed, Hutchins Hapgood, and Eugene O'Neill. The group gave its earliest performances in a structure owned by Mary Heaton Vorse in Provincetown, Massachusetts, before relocating to a theater on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. In November 1918, Rauh directed the premiere production of O'Neill's one-act play Where the Cross Is Made, which opened the permanent Provincetown Playhouse at 133 Macdougal Street. In Greenwich Village she developed a reputation for intensely emotional acting.

Rauh was born the daughter of Samuel and Rosa Rauh of New York. She graduated from New York University law school in 1902 but did not practice law. Her civic engagement led her to the Women's Trade Union League, where she participated in efforts connected to the shirtwaist-makers strike in New York in 1909. She subsequently traveled to England to join the campaign for women's suffrage alongside other militant activists. Back in New York, she assisted Mabel Dodge in organizing her Village salon and became a member of Heterodoxy, a feminist group formed in 1912.

In 1911, Rauh married writer and editor Max Eastman in New York, and she made a deliberate choice to retain her maiden name after the marriage. Eastman, who edited the left-wing journals The Masses and The Liberator with his sister Crystal, credited Rauh with introducing him to socialism. The couple had one child, a son named Dan. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1922, well after the two had separated, and Eastman had no contact with Dan for twenty-three years following the separation.

Rauh remained active in feminist causes throughout her Greenwich Village years, including support for Margaret Sanger's birth-control campaigns. In 1916 she was arrested for distributing birth-control information, charged with obscenity, and received a suspended sentence.

By 1922, Rauh had moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her son Dan, and was living with painter Andrew Dasburg and his son Alfred. Rauh, Dasburg, and the two boys lived together until 1927–28, spending time in both New Mexico and Woodstock, New York. Rauh left the theater in 1920 to pursue sculpture, painting, and related work. Among her sculptural pieces is a bust of writer D. H. Lawrence, who was a personal friend. A collection of her poetry, And This Little Life, was published in 1959. Her son Dan became a psychologist and died of a heart attack in 1969 while speaking with his mother by telephone. Rauh died a few months later, on February 28, 1970. Her collected papers, comprising poems, television scripts, stage plays, and correspondence, are held at the American Heritage Center of the University of Wyoming in Laramie.