Shauneille Perry

Shauneille Gantt Perry Ryder, born July 26, 1929, in Chicago, Illinois, and died June 9, 2022, was an American actress, stage director, and playwright who became one of the first African-American women to direct off-Broadway. She appeared on Broadway in 1961 in The Octoroon.

Perry was born into a prominent African-American family on Chicago's west side. Her father, Graham T. Perry (1894–1960), served as one of the first African-American assistant attorneys-general for the State of Illinois, and her mother, Laura Pearl Gantt Perry (1903–1957), was among the first African-American court reporters in Chicago, having studied business at Morris Brown College. Perry was an only child. Through her father's family she was connected to the Hansberry household: her aunt Nannie Louise Perry married real-estate broker and political activist Carl Augustus Hansberry, making Perry the first cousin of playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Carl Hansberry's brother, Africanist scholar William Leo Hansberry, was also her uncle by marriage.

Perry graduated from Marshall High School on Chicago's west side. She had initially intended to pursue journalism, but after enrolling at Howard University in 1946 to study that subject, she was informed the program was unavailable and found her way instead to the university's little theatre. There she studied under faculty members Anne Cooke Reid, Owen Dodson, and James Butcher, and became a member of the Howard Players. Fellow students during her time at Howard included Roxie Roker, Zaida Coles Edley, and Toni Morrison. In 1949, Perry was among twenty-one Howard Players and three faculty members who toured Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany that fall, performing fifty-nine alternating performances of Mamba's Daughters, adapted by Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward, and Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck. The group departed on the SS Stavangerfjord and was seen off by Howard University Trustee Eleanor Roosevelt. On the opening night of Mamba's Daughters in Denmark, the company received fifteen curtain calls. Perry played Lisa, the granddaughter who returns from New York to Virginia, and was required to purchase her own costume dress in Oslo after the production failed to provide one for the tour. She also acted in productions at Clark Atlanta University and Lincoln University in Missouri under Thomas Desiré Pawley III as part of the HBCU Summer Theatre Program. Perry received a BA in drama from Howard University in 1950.

She continued her education at the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago, now affiliated with DePaul University, from 1950 to 1952, earning an MFA in directing in 1952 with a thesis production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. In 1952–1953 she served as an instructor and director in English and theatre at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, followed by a year as instructor and department chair of theatre at Dillard University from 1953 to 1954. In 1954–1955 she held a Fulbright Scholarship in London, where she initially studied classical theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before transferring to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art after she and other foreign students encountered racial harassment.

Perry returned to Chicago to care for her mother and from 1956 to 1958 worked as an adjunct director at the Goodman School of Drama. During the same period she wrote for the Women's Page of The Chicago Defender's national edition and for the Daily Defender, contributing feature stories on people and theatre. In 1957 she married architect Donald Ryder in Chicago; Ryder later partnered with J. Max Bond Jr. to form the architectural firm Bond Ryder and Associates. In 1958, Perry placed second in the Picturama Contest, an essay competition sponsored by Ebony Magazine, receiving a $4,000 prize. She and her husband used the prize money to travel to Paris in 1959, where she met Richard Wright. By the end of the decade both of her parents had died, and the couple relocated to New York City.

In New York, Perry established herself as a stage actress in the late 1950s and early 1960s, appearing in productions including The Goose (1959), Dark of the Moon (1960), directed by Vinnette Carroll and featuring James Earl Jones and Harold Scott, Talent '60 (1960), Ondine (1961), Clandestine on the Morning Line (1961), and The Octoroon (1961), the last of which brought her to Broadway. Her performance as Lilly Ruth, a pregnant girl, in the off-Broadway production of Clandestine on the Morning Line drew particular critical attention for its quiet strength and the depth she brought to the character. From 1961 to 1962 she also served as a lecturer in speech at Hunter College, and from 1962 to 1968 she taught speech and drama at the Fieldston School.

Despite her success as a performer, Perry grew dissatisfied with acting and redirected her energies toward directing, writing, and family. Following Vinnette Carroll, she became one of the first African-American women to direct on the New York stage, working with the Negro Ensemble Company and numerous other Black theatre organizations including Afro-American Total Theatre, Roger Furman's New Heritage Theatre Group, and the Billie Holiday Theatre. Among her early directorial efforts was the Off-Off-Broadway production of Mau Mau Room, written by J. E. Franklin, presented as part of the Negro Ensemble Company Workshop Festival at St. Mark's Playhouse in 1969, with a cast that according to Franklin included Richard Roundtree. In 1971 she directed three productions, among them Rosalie Pritchett by Barbara and Carlton Molette and The Sty of the Blind Pig by Phillip Hayes Dean, both staged by the Negro Ensemble Company Workshop at St. Mark's Playhouse.