The announcement in the New York Times on October 9, 1917, was straightforward and short: "WISCONSIN PLAYERS COMING." The amateur acting company from Milwaukee, which had been at the vanguard of the American Little Theatre Movement for the better part of a decade, was about to make its East Coast debut.

In bringing the Wisconsin Players to New York, producer Laura Sherry was doing her small part to turn the world of theatre inside out. Before 1910, New York had practically controlled the American stage. A handful of business managers syndicated formulaic Broadway drama across the country, sticking to profitable sensationalism and locking out competitors. Laura Sherry and the Wisconsin Players represented something different: the Little Theatre, an emerging movement of non-commercial and non-professional drama. It was time for the actors and writers of the Midwest to bring their new ideas to Manhattan.

Laura Case Sherry, whom the New York Times called "the guiding spirit" of the Wisconsin Players, had experienced the theatre from both sides — big and little, commercial and amateur. Born in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, in 1876, Laura's parents were Emily Avery and Lawrence Case, owner of the small town's leading general store. Her parents' position afforded Laura an education at the University of Wisconsin and the school of speech at Northwestern University. From there she went to study theatre in Chicago and at last New York, where in 1897 she joined the Richard Mansfield Company as an actress and toured the country in its famous production of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

At the start of the twentieth century, Case settled back into Wisconsin life. She married Edward P. Sherry, a lumber and paper tycoon from Neenah, and the couple made a home in Milwaukee. There, Mrs. Sherry set to work gathering a club of like-minded theatre devotees and performers. By 1909, her efforts had produced an association that held regular meetings, play readings, and rehearsals in the homes of its members.

In 1911, the nascent Milwaukee association received a boost in the form of support from University of Wisconsin English professor Thomas Dickinson. Unable to establish a drama department at the university, Dickinson lent his credence to Sherry's group and encouraged his students to join. Together, Sherry and Dickinson founded the Wisconsin Dramatic Society with branches at Milwaukee and Madison. Very quickly, the society's members were ready to begin staging productions at theatres in the two cities. The Wisconsin Players were born.

The Wisconsin Dramatic Society was among the first in a wave of amateur community theatres that cropped up around America in the 1910s. These groups, which also appeared early in cities such as Chicago, Boston, and Detroit, formed a reaction against the melodrama and commercialism that had characterized turn-of-the-century Broadway. Each of these independent theatres had a slightly different goal, and many had a particular moral or social objective. The aim of the Wisconsin Players was, at first, more modest: the society sought to stage plays that had little chance of being shown at Wisconsin's larger theatres, and to show them at prices anyone could afford. Apart from this interest in making more shows more accessible, the society admitted no moral or artistic agenda.

During their first years, the Wisconsin Players achieved their goals by producing a number of foreign and unfamiliar plays, often in translation, and charging only so much for tickets as would cover costs. Dickinson led the group in Madison, while Sherry directed the group's Milwaukee performances, acting in several of them. Offstage, Sherry also organized readings, fundraisers, and guest lectures for the society. Her vision was to make the group more than an acting company. It was to be a workshop for theatrical innovation and aspiring talent.

As Sherry and Dickinson pushed the society to become more experimental, several of the members began to write their own plays. In 1913 the society began publishing a magazine, The Play-book, with original plays and essays on acting, production, scenery, and other elements of stagecraft. The following year, the society released the first of two volumes of Wisconsin Plays, a hardbound collection of one-act dramas selected from its repertory. These new plays and news ideas came from a diverse base of members that included men and women, professors and students, trained performers and stage neophytes, and people from across Wisconsin and its neighboring states.

The experimental work of the Wisconsin Dramatic Society led the group towards more concrete artistic goals. On stage, the Wisconsin Players sought to develop clarity and realism in their acting, while eliminating distracting flourishes, spotlights, and curtain calls. The society's plays often featured small casts and short durations, and many of the writers focused on Wisconsin or Midwestern themes in their work. One newspaper critic wrote of the society that, "for shockers and thrillers they don't give a hang, but work more to present life as we generally find it and not its exception."

Among its playwrights, the society boasted such talented authors as Zona Gale, William Ellery Leonard, and Howard Mumford Jones. Gale, a native of Portage, Wisconsin, wrote her first play, The Neighbors, for the society in 1914. The play was a comic but warm commentary on neighborliness in the small town setting that Gale knew so well. Leonard, a UW English professor alongside Dickinson, looked to local history for his play Glory of the Morning, which centered on two métis children in early Wisconsin forced to choose between the lifestyle of their Winnebago mother or their French father. Jones, a student at Madison, explored a more mystical style in The Shadow, a rumination on the disappointments of love set in the clearing of a golden October forest.

Sherry and Dickinson also tried their hand at experimental play writing. Sherry's play On the Pier was, in the words of a New York Times reviewer, "a not uninteresting but quite undramatic dialog" with just two characters who meet on a lonely nighttime pier in New York, both uncertain about their future in the big city. Dickinson, meanwhile, played with timing, light and silence in his play In Hospital, which centers on a man awaiting the outcome of his wife's surgery.

The Playhouse of the Wisconsin Dramatic Society in Milwaukee, c. 1916.

To further the experimental cause of the society, Sherry helped the group acquire a five-story Tudor Revival townhouse in Milwaukee and convert it to a theatrical workshop featuring a tearoom, little theatre, reading room, dance hall, and craft studios. At this spacious headquarters, the players could toy with every aspect of the theatre of their era.

By 1917, the Wisconsin Players had a established a wide repertoire of original dramas and a high reputation across the Midwest. The group was, by Sherry's estimation, ready to showcase its ideas in the east. On October 20 that year, the Wisconsin Players made their New York debut at the recently built Neighborhood Playhouse on Grand Street in Lower East Manhattan — a venue that, coincidentally, still exists almost unchanged in its exterior appearance. The East Coast premier was an astounding achievement for the group of Midwestern amateurs.

The New York Times and other papers devoted plenty of attention to Wisconsin group. In a profile of Sherry, the Times commended her for invigorating local theatre so that "a community which occasionally boasted of so-and-so who was successful as an artist in Chicago and New York, actually found that they had young people in their own midst who could act, paint, dance, and make music." Critics had both praise and derision for the society's productions, commenting on the wide difference in talent among the society's amateurs. The Times gave high marks to Zona Gale's writing and Laura Sherry's acting, but questioned the casting and condemned one play by Wallace Stevens as "intended neither for the stage nor the library." The New York Tribune, meanwhile, congratulated the players for "acting sufficiently unprofessional to achieve the illusion of life which the sharp edges of the trained actor are successful in keeping at arm's length."

After the close of their eastern tour, the Wisconsin Players found their schedule interrupted by the American entry to World War I. In 1918, Sherry took a position with the YMCA to direct plays for American troops serving in France. Her commitment to theatre even in a war zone matched her bold assertion that "The theatre is as necessary an institution in our midst as is the hospital — in fact if we had more theaters we would need fewer hospitals. The human mind, in order to be a normal healthy one, requires a certain amount of relaxation — it must be taught to play as well as how to work." This perspective was a complete reversal from the puritanical view that was popular not long before, which had deemed the stage a degrading and immoral influence on the spirit.

In Europe until late 1919, Sherry toured the battlefields of the Western Front and, at one point, composed a letter to her husband in Milwaukee on the backs of one hundred French postcards. During her time abroad she developed a fascination with Europe that prompted several return trips, including one voyage to Russia to meet famed director Constantin Stanislavski.

There were no more major tours for the Wisconsin Players following the war, but the group remained active in Milwaukee. Laura Sherry continued to direct the players until 1930. Many of the early members of the society went on to further success during this time. In 1921, Zona Gale became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for her play Miss Lulu Bett. W.E. Leonard achieved wide recognition for his translation of Beowulf to Modern English in 1923, and Howard Mumford Jones joined the faculty at Harvard where he would garner his own Pulitzer Prize much later in life for his scholarly work. Sherry also followed new interests, most notably publishing a volume of poetry in Paris in 1931 entitled Old Prairie du Chien, which drew on the French-Canadian culture of her childhood home.

The Wisconsin Dramatic Society came to an end in the years of the Great Depression, and Laura Case Sherry passed away in 1947 at the age of 71. The Little Theatre Movement was largely over, but it had inspired an outgrowth of community theatres across America and set the scene for the Off-Broadway movement of the mid-Twentieth Century. Today, as go in search of experiences for our own lives richer than those afforded by TV screens, we would do well to remember how Sherry and the Wisconsin Players made theatre out of the men, women, and materials in their midst. "The sheer ecstasy of emerging from one's everyday self into an imaginary creature of another world or plane," said Laura Sherry, "is invaluable."