The collection provides some documentation of plays Coakley staged with the University Players, notably Arthur Millers After the Fall, and lecture notes for courses he taught. The collection is organized into three series: "After the Fall", Photographic Slides, Speech 230 "The Arts of the Theatre" and Scrapbooks.
James Francis Coakley was born on December 12, 1933, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He earned his BFA at the Carnegie Mellon Institute of Technology in 1955. From 1956 to 1958, he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps working as a cryptographer. In 1959, he earned his MA from the University of Minnesota, and soon after earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1964. During his years as a student, he earned a Mellon Scholarship while attending the Carnegie Mellon Institute of Technology, a graduate scholarship from Northwestern University, and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Year Fellowship.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Coakley was involved in many local theaters (in Northport, NY, Pittsburgh, PA, and at the University of Minnesota), serving either as director or stage manager.
Coakley first taught at Loyola University, then the University of Michigan, and concluded his teaching career at Northwestern University. He also taught for a short time at Roosevelt University, and served as a visiting professor at the Art Institute of Chicago.
While at the University of Michigan, Coakley taught classes on the technical aspects of theatre, and was in charge of the stage design or directorship for major productions of the Speech Department, such as The Homecoming, Lysistrata, Much Ado About Nothing and After the Fall. Some of his research topics included Shakespeare prompt books and Shaw-Craig literary and theatrical relations.
Coakley was a member of many theatre-related organizations, including the American Educational Theatre Association, the Speech Association of America, the American National Theatre and Academy, and the Shaw Society.
A small amount of processing was conducted for this collection, including re-housing of the slides, the removal of materials from binders, and conservation efforts to remove photographs that were glued to their original backing board.
The dates of the plays in the Slides series are based on the dates posted on the slides themselves, which is the date of development, not the date of the play itself (please refer to the scrapbooks for individual dates).
