Cloyd Head

Who was Cloyd Head?

Cloyd Head was a Chicago playwright and theatrical director born in Oak Park, Illinois. He was to spend his entire life in the Chicago theatre community. He graduated from Northwestern University where he began writing experimental plays. His most well-known piece was a play in verse, The Grotesque Decoration in Black and White, which was produced by Maurice Browne’s Chicago Little Theatre. Head was deeply involved in the Little Theatre Movement and inspired an entire issue of Poetry magazine which was devoted to this play. He also spent a brief stint as business manager of the Goodman Theatre, but resigned with Thomas Wood Stevens over creative disagreements with the direction of the theatre. In his later life, Head traveled internationally and taught and directed theatre in Miami. Head married fellow writer and editor of Poetry Magazine Eunice Tietjens in 1920. The couple had one son, Marshall. After Eunice’s death in 1944, he married Shirley Haycraft.