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Lee Fierro, Artistic Director,
has been a part of Island Theatre Workshop since 1974. At first doing small jobs in Children’s Theatre, she soon became a colleague to Mary Payne, founder and director of Children’s Theatre and ITW. Over the years as Mary’s associate artistic director, Lee acted, composed, taught and directed in both Children’s Theatre and ITW. In 1978, after several older children begged for a winter program, Lee founded the Apprentice Players, a winter drama program for Island youngsters – with classes in acting, and performances. Apprentice Players is now thirty years old. |
Upon Mary Payne’s unfortunate death in 1996, Lee became the artistic director of ITW, and has been teaching and directing and writing plays ever since. Some of Lee’s directorial productions have been the Gilbert and Sullivan musicals Mikado, Pinafore, Pirates of Penzance and Iolanthe; also Sondheim’s Into the Woods, Dan Goggin’s Nunsense and many others. Dramatic works include Androcles and the Lion, I’m Not Rappaport and Lee’s original musical play about Harriet Tubman, One More River. During her acting career in ITW, Lee’s favorite roles included Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in Lion in Winter, Medea and the Madwoman of Chaillot. After thirty-one years working with Children’s Theatre, Lee turned the reins over to Linda Berg.
Lee discovered theater in third grade and has never let it go. She acted her way through elementary, junior high and high school, and then in 1946, started her serious study of acting in New York City with former Moscow Art Theater actor, Andre Jilinsky. While in New York, she worked in little theater, summer stock and early live TV: The Colgate Comedy Hour for NBC and Man Against Crime with Ralph Bellamy for CBS.
In 1950, Lee and her then-husband moved to Philadelphia and studied and acted with Jasper Deeter at The Hedgerow Theater in Moylan, PA (at that time America’s only repertory theater). While also raising her four young children, Lee taught drama in several places in the Philadelphia area to children and young adults. Before moving to the Vineyard in the late 1960s, she taught dance and drama at The School in Rose Valley, also in Moylan. Lee also founded the first integrated teenage drama group in that area, called the Youth Repertoire Guild.
In her early years on the Vineyard, Lee was busy building a house with her second husband and now raising five children. Then, in 1974, along came the motion picture Jaws in which Lee was cast as Mrs. Kintner. Soon after that she met Mary Payne and thus her work in ITW began.
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