Julia Heflin

Who was Julia Heflin?

Julia Dorn Heflin was a journalist, a theatre producer and a teacher. The Washington Post aptly called her "a firebrand." In the 1930s, with an English-speaking cast, she staged an incendiary production of the Clifford Odets play Waiting For Lefty on a truck-bed in a Moscow street—where perhaps the only words understood by the Russians who gathered to watch were "Strike! Strike!" which brought clamorous cheers from the comrades. She was still making sparks in 1977 when, at the formal ceremony marking her retirement from Mount Vernon College in Washington, DC, she chided the administration for insufficient support of the theatre curriculum.

As a Phi Beta Kappa, fresh from Smith College and Columbia University, Julia joined the Hedgerow Repertory Theatre, where she acted and was assigned to the production office. She worked briefly on Broadway before heading to the Soviet Union. She was one of the first Americans to work in the theatre there before World War II. She was a Reggisseur Practicant at the Meyerhold and Vahktangov theatres, and helped workers on a collective farm produce the opera, Quiet Flows the Don.