Evangeline Morphos: Director,
Producer, and Drama Professor
At Newman we knew Evangeline Morphos as a serious student who was passionate about
theater. What we might not have known was her capacity for innovation, her generosity in
reaching out to new writers, and her spirit of inclusiveness. Evangeline was one of our two
National Merit Scholars, and she has had a long, successful career in academia, first in the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University and then for twenty-seven years in the School of the
Arts of Columbia University. While teaching her students, she was also directing and producing
extensively in theater, film, and television.
The word “new” appears in many descriptions of her work, and Evangeline was the Executive Director of a number of companies that developed new plays and new writers. She pioneered in narrative web content by co-founding eguiders.com, a website that makes daily recommendations regarding on-line videos. Evangeline flowed from acting to directing to producing and from theater to film to television, frequently coming in on the ground floor and following the evolution of writers in drama.
Before our interview, Evangeline had visited the class of 1967 website and re-read the
newsletters. She let me know immediately how very impressed she was by the mentions of
Mrs. Turpin’s mechanical drawing class at Newman. “I was mesmerized,” she said, by the class
and how it taught her and other Newman students “to translate from two-dimensions into
three-dimensions.” Looking back, she feels it was “unique for Newman to have such a pre-
architecture class.”
The mechanical drawing instruction has had a lifetime influence on Evangeline. She still writes
on graph paper, and she wrote her dissertation on huge architectural paper, which helped her
with organization. More importantly, she feels, “It has shaped my ability into areas of the arts
that are performative. You have to be able to think three-dimensionally.” She explained to me
that reading a play may begin as a two-dimensional experience, but directing the play requires envisioning it in three dimensions.
The mechanical drawing kit from Mrs. Turpin's class.
Photo courtesy of Pinky Rohm.
Evangeline is grateful to drama teacher Mr. Brown for introducing her to “what a director
does,” and she feels that this aspect of her Newman education shaped much of her life. When
she did not get the lead in the senior play, Mr. Brown, whom she described as “extraordinary,”
said that she could serve as his assistant director. For the first time, Evangeline realized that
she could think of the play as whole, instead of learning just one part.
In discussing the mechanical drawing class and the opportunity to help direct a play, Evangeline
is helping to answer some of the questions I posed regarding the many creative people in
visual-spatial fields in the class of 1967. She is the second person to describe how the
mechanical drawing class taught her to think three dimensionally and to translate from two to
three dimensions. Another key feature of visual-spatial creativity is the ability to envision the
big picture and see how the parts fit together into the whole.
Evangeline also feels that Newman was exceptional in influencing each student to “do the
things that you do well.” For Evangeline this was literature and drama (but, unfortunately, not
singing in the choir). She recalled Newman’s “special reading” projects from the third or fourth
through the seventh grades, where she and others did independent research. Developing the
ability to work independently at an early age, she feels, prepared Newman students for
tolerating the isolation of creative work.
Evangeline also credits both of her parents with developing her creativity by introducing her to
theater and fine arts at a very young age and by instilling confidence in her abilities. She
described both of them as “intrepid” regarding cultural events. Her father took her at age three
to see experimental theater under the direction of Richard Scheckner, the founder of the
Tulane Drama Review. At age four, she attended a Van Gogh exhibit, and as a young child she
saw Dame Edith Evans starring in Medea. During summer vacations she liked to spend her days
watching movies from the 1930s and 1940s. The family went to Europe frequently, and at one
point she and her younger brother Paul had their own apartment in Paris and attended the
Alliance Française.
Her father, Panos Paul Morphos (1904-1979), was born in Athens; he attended the Sorbonne in Paris and graduated with a law degree, with the family expectation of his returning to Athens and becoming involved in politics. His passion, however, was comparative literature, and he chose to go to the US to work on a doctorate at Johns Hopkins, which had the first program in that field. While a student there during World War II, he was recruited by the OSS (forerunner of the CIA). OSS members were sworn to absolute secrecy, and his family was told that he served as a war correspondent for Newsweek and the Baltimore Sun in Greece and Macedonia.
Evangeline only learned of his real purpose abroad much later when an article appeared in The New York Times explaining how OSS spies in WWII worked under the cover of journalism. He took part in highly charged operations in the Balkans under the code name “Egret.” Among his useful skills was his ability to speak five languages, including English, French, Greek, Italian, and
German.
Evangeline’s mother, Diane Belogianis Morphos (1913-2006), was born in Chicago and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932. She was a psychologist who worked at the Orthogenic School at the U of Chicago, created to educate children of above-average intelligence who were psychologically troubled. During the mid-twentieth century the school was directed by the controversial psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. After marrying Panos Morphos, Diane moved with him to New Orleans when he took a teaching position in French literature at Tulane. Diane was active in the arts and theater as Evangeline was growing up in New Orleans, in addition to her civic involvement in the Girls Scouts, the American Association of University Women, and local politics.
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Evangeline's father, Panos Paul Morphos, in Cairo during World War II.
Evangeline's mother Diane with Evangeline and her younger brother Paul.
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Evangeline and Paul with their father Panos.
After graduating from Newman, Evangeline carried her enthusiasm for theater to Wellesley
College, where she majored in art history and English. As a Wellesley undergraduate, she not
only directed plays but also started an intercollegiate theater company comprised of a group of
actors who moved on together in the world of acting. Through the company she also began a life-long friendship and association with Wendy Wasserstein, who was a student at Mt. Holyoke. The first play she directed at Wellesley was by LeRoi Jones and performed by a cast of all white actors. Later on when she was teaching in the drama program at New York University, she invited him, now with his name changed to Amiri Baraka, to speak to her students. Baraka later returned to work with her program, developing a musical, The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson, with music by Max Roach.
Evangeline earned a doctorate in English at Harvard University, and wrote her dissertation on
the changing interpretations of character in Shakespeare’s plays. Through friends she met Alan Brinkley, who was working on his doctorate in political history at Harvard. After moving to New York City to establish their respective academic careers, Evangeline and Alan married and had one daughter, Elly Brinkley. Very sadly, Alan passed away from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis two years ago after a distinguished career as a history professor and Provost of Columbia University. A National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist, he was regarded as a leading scholar of American political history.
Their daughter Elly graduated from Harvard
where she majored in philosophy and women’s gender studies. She attended a program called
Art Politics at NYU and then decided to become an attorney. Elly is currently enrolled in the
NYU School of Law.
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Evangeline and Alan at the PEN American Literary Gala.
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Evangeline and Alan with Elly and good friend Robby Browne.
Photos of Evangeline with Alan and their daughter Elly.
Lee Strasberg, Acting Teacher
From 1981 to 1988 Evangeline was Chair of the Department of Undergraduate Drama in the
Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Under her direction the Department became internationally
known for its award-winning productions and developed new work by some of the leading
experimental writers and directors. Among many other innovations and accomplishments, she
organized and produced a year-long tribute to the Group Theater, originally founded in 1931 by
the famous acting teacher Lee Strasberg and others. During this time she became friends with Strasberg, who hosted an open house every Sunday at his apartment, and for Evangeline this forum was a wonderful introduction to the actors’
world of New York.
After Strasberg’s death, his wife Anna asked Evangeline to finish his book, and this was published in 1987 as A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method, by Lee Strasberg, edited by Evangeline Morphos. As she met actors, playwrights, and directors who expressed an interest in teaching, she invited them to teach her students.
Strasberg's book, edited by Evangeline.
At the time of her retirement from academia in 2017 Evangeline was a Professor of Practice in
the School of the Arts at Columbia University. She started in the theater program at Columbia
and then taught Film, Television and New Media in the Film Program. Among the many “firsts”
and innovations in her long career, she is very proud of having initiated the first program
devoted to television at Columbia. She set up the first courses in the country in television as a
dramatic medium and taught television writing. Another first was speaking in 2011-2012 at
Cambridge University on “American Dramatic Character: O’Neill to Mad Men,” delivering the
first lectures to include television as a dramatic medium. Evangeline was also the first
professor to teach American theater at Oxford University (1998-1999).
Along with her academic work, she has produced over 25 plays off-Broadway and premiered
works by some of American’s leading playwrights, including David Mamet, David Rabe, and Sam Shepard. Her most recent production (2021) was Blue Valiant, written and directed by Karen Malpede, and before then, American Moor, written by Keith Hamilton Cobb and directed by
Kim Weild (2019).
Her productions have won or been nominated for numerous awards including the Obie, Drama Desk Award, Outer-Critics Circle Award, John Gassner Playwrighting Award, GLAAD Award, and being short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. She was the co-producer of the series, The Bedford Diaries, for the WB network, and she produced the film The Drowning in 2017.
She has written extensively about television, theater, and political narrative for The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Reuters. From 2010 to 2012 she wrote a blog called “Mad Men: A Conversation,” one of the most popular blogs on the The Wall Street Journal website. Another first is Evangeline’s pioneering work in narrative web content. With Marc Ostrick, she founded eguiders.com, a website that makes daily recommendations of the best on-line videos. The site became a Guest Curator on YouTube and was then syndicated to over 44 media outlets.
Looking back, Evangeline credits Newman with making dramatic literacy a part of the students’
ongoing experience, with those from the earlier grades seeing the high school students perform an
operetta every year. She loved studying Latin with Ms. McMillon; she saw diagramming
sentences as yet another tool of analysis. She learned from kindergarten on that Newman had
exceptional expectations, that she would become civically engaged, and that she had a
responsibility in the community. She feels that the teachers were supportive and could
suggest alternative ways of interpreting of subjects without being critical or cruel. Evangeline
also mentioned that students who were strong in athletics, such as her younger brother,
learned ethics and leadership from Coach Reginelli. Overall she experienced Newman as
inclusive, and she has carried the spirit of inclusiveness in her teaching and creative
productions.
Evangeline stated, “I came out of Newman with enormous academic self-confidence.” From
her learning experiences at Newman and the exceptional encouragement from both of her
parents, it seems it would have been impossible for Evangeline not to succeed as an innovator
in the fields of theater, film, and television. She described herself in our 50 th anniversary book as
lucky that her passions have coincided with her career.