Theodore Albert Viehman was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on January 17, 1889, to Henry William and Anna Gertrude (Werner) Viehman. He attended Pittsburgh grade and high schools prior to working for the U.S. Weather Bureau in Pittsburgh as an observer (1906-1910). Viehman was in business in Pittsburgh from 1910 to 1914, and served as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in World War I. He attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology's newly-founded Drama Department (School of Applied Design), receiving a B.A. in 1918 and an M.A. in 1922; he subsequently served as an instructor in the department until 1929. While at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon University), Viehman and his classmates founded the Guild Players of Pittsburgh, where he also acted and directed until 1924. He taught English folk dance (which he studied under Sir Cecil Sharpe, founder of the English Folk Dance Society) at the University of California at Berkeley's Summer School in 1919, 1920, and 1923, and served as a drama teacher and director for the summer theater programs of many colleges, including the University of Toronto (Hart House Theatre, 1926), University of Michigan (1942), State University of Iowa (1949), and University of British Columbia (1946-1948, 1951). Viehman also directed two Cap and Gown musicals at the University of Pittsburgh (1935 and 1936).
Viehman directed professional actors both on Broadway and at Eugene O'Neill's Provincetown Playhouse (1927-1928), and in various summer stock companies, including the Maverick Theater in Woodstock, New York (1930). He also directed for the Federal Theatre Project of the WPA in Chicago and in Cleveland (1936); and he directed English folk dances on the Village Green at the Chicago World's Fair in 1934 and assistant-directed several Shakespeare productions there as well. Viehman's major directorial contributions, however, were in community theater; he directed in such diverse places as El Paso, Texas (circa 1920); Pasadena, California (1928); Youngstown, Ohio (1939-1942); Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (The Pittsburgh Playhouse, 1942-1943); and Tulsa, Oklahoma (Tulsa Little Theater. which he ran from 1942 to 1961).
In addition to directing plays for professional and community theaters, Viehman worked actively on many community pageants, an interest which he developed under the guidance of Thomas Wood Stevens, his teacher at Carnegie Tech. Viehman acted in Stevens' Red Cross War pageant “The Drawing of the Sword” in 1917 and 1918, as well as serving as assistant director of the production, which received much national attention, playing in Carnegie Music Hall in New York in 1918. Also under Stevens, Viehman was the stage director of “Pageant and Masque of Freedom” at the Pittsburgh Centennial in 1916 and of the Masque of Niagara (Falls) in 1934. Viehman directed pageants in Winona, Minnesota and Eau Claire, Wisconsin (summers, 1921); the color day pageant of Wooster College (Ohio), 1917; the Ohio in Education Pageant in Cleveland, 1931; the pageant for the University of Alabama centennial, 1931; and the Yorktown Centennial, 1932. In addition, he both wrote and directed the Pageant of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1916.
Viehman, in his forty years of directing, staged both well known and obscure plays. On Broadway, he directed the premiere of Every Thursday, by Doty Hubard, with whom he worked extensively on the script (1934). In Cleveland, with the Federal Theatre Project, he directed the American premiere of Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here (1936), while at the Tulsa Little Theatre, he directed the premiere of the Ford Foundation prize play The Golden Age of Pericles Pappas, by John Vlahos (1959) and the first non-professional production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1954). At the Youngstown Playhouse, Viehman directed his own play, Second Sight, in 1940. Other notable plays he directed include The Philadelphia Story (Cain Park, Cleveland, 1945), The Curtain Rises, and in Tulsa, Blithe Spirit (circa 1946), Goodbye, My Fancy (1951), Born Yesterday (1955), and Death of a Salesman (circa 1960).
Theodore Viehman married Gerda Wynyard on July 21, 1941. During his lifetime, Viehman was an active member of the American Educational Theatre Association (AETA), the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), the National Theater Conference (NTC), and the Southwest Theatre Conference. He was also a longtime member of the Players Club. Viehman died in 1970.
For further biographical information, consult The Biographical Encyclopedia and Who's Who of the American Theatre (1966).
