Bohen, Thomas

Motley, a theatrical design team consisting of Margaret (Percy) Harris, her sister Sophia, and their friend, Elizabeth Montgomery, designed sets and costumes in England and the United States from 1932-1976. Beginning with their design work for John Gielgud in 1932, Motley came to dominate theatrical design in London in the 1930s. During the Second World War, Margaret Harris and Elizabeth Montgomery worked in New York. Montgomery stayed on after the war working on Broadway musicals and for the Metropolitan Opera and the American Shakespeare Festival as well as painting commissioned portraits of opera stars. She returned to London in 1965. Harris had returned years earlier continuing her design work at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the English National Opera and the avant-garde Royal Court among others. In all, Motley designed sets and costumes for over three hundred productions across the spectrum of drama and including film. The women also established a theatrical design school in England. Thomas Bohen was a design assistant and friend.

From the guide to the Thomas Bohen papers regarding Motley, 1931-2001, (The New York Public Library. Billy Rose Theatre Division.)

Grace Paley, born in Bronx, N.Y. in 1922, wrote poetry and short stories during the second half of the twentieth century.

Thomas Bohen, her literary agent, was an employee of MCA Artists, Ltd., a division of Music Corporation of America, for part of the period represented in the papers.

From the description of Thomas Bohen papers regarding Grace Paley, 1956-1989 (bulk 1958-1961). (New York Public Library). WorldCat record id: 163131919

Motley, a theatrical design team consisting of Margaret (Percy) Harris, her sister Sophia, and their friend, Elizabeth Montgomery, designed sets and costumes in England and the United States from 1932-1976.

Beginning with their design work for John Gielgud in 1932, Motley came to dominate theatrical design in London in the 1930s. During the Second World War, Margaret Harris and Elizabeth Montgomery worked in New York. Montgomery stayed on after the war working on Broadway musicals and for the Metropolitan Opera and the American Shakespeare Festival as well as painting commissioned portraits of opera stars. She returned to London in 1965. Harris had returned years earlier continuing her design work at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the English National Opera and the avant-garde Royal Court, among others. In all, Motley designed sets and costumes for over three hundred productions across the spectrum of drama and including film. The women also established a theatrical design school in England. Thomas Bohen was a design assistant and friend.

From the description of Papers regarding Motley, 1931-2001. (New York Public Library). WorldCat record id: 289533472

Grace Paley was born in 1922 in the Bronx, New York, to a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants. She married in 1942 and subsequently had two children in 1949 and 1951. Regardless of her status as a housewife in New York during the 1950s, Paley focused on her writing, mainly poetry and short stories. In 1959, a collection of her short stories were published in The Little Disturbances of Man. Although the book received excellent reviews from critics in both Britain and America, it was never entirely welcomed by the general public. She won the Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 1961, and continued writing into the 1990s.

Thomas Bohen was an employee of MCA Artists, Ltd., a division of the Music Corporation of America, which was solely a music booking agency and television distributor during the 1950s. Bohen spent much of his time searching for and reading new TV scripts for programs. He signed Grace Paley onto an MCA Exclusive Management Contract in 1957, but later left the company to pursue other career opportunities, retaining Paley as a client.

From the guide to the Thomas Bohen papers regarding Grace Paley, 1956-1989, 1958-1961, (The New York Public Library. Manuscripts and Archives Division.)