Maria Ley-Piscator (born Friederike Flora Czada, 1 August 1898 – 14 October 1999) was an Austrian-American dancer and choreographer. She is best known as the wife of

Erwin Piscator Erwin Friedrich Maximilian Piscator (17 December 1893 – 30 March 1966) was a German theatre director and Theatrical producer, producer. Along with Bertolt Brecht, he was the foremost exponent of epic theatre, a form that emphasizes the socio- ...

(1893–1966), Germany's famous left-wing

theater director A theatre director or stage director is a professional in the theatre field who oversees and orchestrates the mounting of a theatre production such as a play, opera, dance, drama, musical theatre performance, etc. by unifying various endeavors a ...

. Born on 1 August 1898 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria), Maria Ley sought to create a theatrical career for herself as a

dancer Dance is an The arts, art form, consisting of sequences of body movements with aesthetic and often Symbol, symbolic value, either improvised or purposefully selected. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoir ...

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

and

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

. Later, she turned to

choreography Choreography is the art of designing sequences of movements of physical bodies (or their depictions) in which Motion (physics), motion or Visual appearance, form or both are specified. ''Choreography'' may also refer to the design itself. A chor ...

and helped in several stage productions with

Max Reinhardt Max Reinhardt (; born Maximilian Goldmann; 9 September 1873 – 30 October 1943) was an Austrian-born Theatre director, theatre and film director, theater manager, intendant, and theatrical producer. With his radically innovative and avant-gard ...

, including ''

A Midsummer Night's Dream ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' is a Comedy (drama), comedy play written by William Shakespeare in about 1595 or 1596. The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. One s ...

''. Maria Ley also studied literature at the Sorbonne, where she met Erwin Piscator (her third husband) during his exile in 1936. After marrying in Paris, the couple moved to Manhattan in 1939, where they founded the

Dramatic Workshop Dramatic Workshop was the name of a drama and acting school associated with the New School for Social Research in New York City. The German expatriate stage director Erwin Piscator began a long association with the school in 1940. Among the facul ...

at the

New School for Social Research The New School for Social Research (NSSR), previously known as The University in Exile and The New School University, is a graduate-level educational division of The New School in New York City, United States. NSSR enrolls more than 1,000 stud ...

. Their students included

Harry Belafonte Harry Belafonte ( ; born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr.; March 1, 1927 – April 25, 2023) was an American singer, actor, and civil rights activist who popularized calypso music with international audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. Belafonte ...

Marlon Brando Marlon Brando Jr. (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004) was an American actor. Widely regarded as one of the greatest cinema actors of the 20th century,''Movies in American History: An Encyclopedia''

and

Tony Randall Anthony Leonard Randall (born Aryeh Leonard Rosenberg; February 26, 1920 – May 17, 2004) was an American actor of film, television and stage. He is best known for portraying the role of Felix Unger in the 1970–1975 television adaptation of ...

. Ley-Piscator directed several theatrical productions off Broadway. During the 1970s she worked as a teacher at the

Southern Illinois University Carbondale Southern Illinois University (SIU) is a public research university in Carbondale, Illinois, United States. Chartered in 1869, SIU is the oldest and flagship campus of the Southern Illinois University system. SIU enrolls students from all 50 sta ...

and at

Stony Brook University Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public university, public research university in Stony Brook, New York, United States, on Long Island. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is on ...

. Filmmaker

Rosa von Praunheim Holger Bernhard Bruno Mischwitzky (born Holger Radtke; 25 November 1942), known professionally as Rosa von Praunheim, is a German film director, author, producer, professor of directing and one of the most influential and famous LGBT social move ...

portrayed her in his film ''

Dolly, Lotte and Maria ''Dolly, Lotte and Maria'' (German language, German: ''Dolly, Lotte und Maria'') is a 1987 German documentary film directed by Rosa von Praunheim. The film recounts the lives of Lotte Goslar, Dolly Haas and Maria Ley-Piscator, three German women ...

'' (1987). Ley-Piscator lived at 17 East 76th Street, sometimes called the Piscator House, where Erwin and she had made a home prior to his return to Europe in the 1950s. Even after Erwin's death, Maria remained a fixture in NYC cultural circles. In 1988, encountering the 90-year-old matron of the arts at a reception at the former Goethe-Institut New York building at 1014 Fifth Avenue, journalist Claudia Steinberg described Ley-Piscator as a "tiny, delicate lady in the lilac velvet suit" who "continues to philosophize in whispers about the interplay between art and life." Ley-Piscator died in New York in 1999 at the age of 101.

Works

* Ley-Piscator, Maria. 1954. ''Lot's Wife''. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. * Ley-Piscator, Maria. 1967. ''The Piscator Experiment: The Political Theatre''. New York: Heineman. Revised edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1970. .

Other sources

* Rutkoff, Peter M. 1986. "Politics on Stage. Piscator and the Dramatic Workshop." ''New School: a History of the New School for Social Research''. Ed. Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott. New York: Macmillan. 172–195. .

References

External links

Short biography
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Ley-Piscator, Maria 1898 births 1999 deaths Austrian female dancers Dancers from Vienna Austrian emigrants to France Modernist theatre University of Paris alumni French emigrants to the United States