[clockwise from upper left] Eloise Alice, Mary Lou, Walter Michael, Jayne Anne 

[not shown: Ann Marie, George II, George III (Hibiscus), Frederic Joseph]

The Harris Family is comprised of Mom (Ann Marie Harris), Dad (George Edgerly Harris II), George Edgerly Harris III (aka Hibiscus), Walter Michael Harris, Frederic Joseph Harris, Jayne Anne Harris, Eloise Alice Harris, and Mary Lucile (aka Lou) Harris.  The unique phenomenon of this family is that they all were involved in theater as a group, either separately or together, for approximately 15 years in the downtown scene of New York’s Off and Off-Off-Broadway theater as well as on Broadway.  The parents met in Bronxville and moved to Clearwater, Florida where they built a home-grown theater in their garage titled The El Dorado Players, named after the street their house was on.  Mother Ann had written plays and musicals in college.  They were discovered by her son George III and then produced by The El Dorado Players. BLUEBEARD and THE SHEEP AND THE CHEAPSKATE were two such plays. The entire community was pressed into service creating the shows with such loans as costumes, wigs and Klieg lights, all procured by George III.  Ann also wrote the music, taught them tap dancing, and every child was involved in the shows.  Many shows were based on the record albums of musicals the family owned using the liner notes for information to create the scripts. When the family moved to Clearwater, they discovered the Clearwater Little Theater Children’s Workshop.  Here the children learned everything they needed to know to construct sets, costumes, do lights and sound, run the box office, and perform.  This professional training combined with their El Dorado Players productions taught them, as a group, that they could run their own theater and do anything else needed in the theater.  They were then prepared when they moved to New York.  George II, the father, went ahead.  He met up with Ellen Stewart in her earliest days of La Mama.  They became fast friends and she had an apartment ready for the family to move into.  Once in New York the shows they had created for The El Dorado Players were recreated at La Mama.  Ellen Stewart called the children ‘zee babies,’ and produced THE YOUNG PLAYWRIGHTS SERIES, plays written by the children detailing what they were doing at the moment.   Soon the children were the ‘go-to source’ (Robert Heide) for directors and producers doing experimental work in venues such as Judson Poets’ Theater (where George III and George II both performed in GORILLA QUEENby Ron Tavel, playwright and family friend), Caffe Cino, La Mama, The Players Theater (SKY HIGH with Ann, George III, Mary Lou, Frederic, Walter Michael, Eloise and Jayne Anne all either performing or playing music or doing choreography under Johnny Dodd’s lights), Theater for the New City and Circle in the Square.  Eloise at 9 years old was the first of the children to get her Actors’ Equity card performing in AN INVITATION TO A BEHEADING at The Public while her father performed on Broadway in The Great White Hope as well as the movie Superman, and her brother Walter Michael in Hair, on Broadway.  Ann and George II Harris both performed in Lanford Wilson’s THE RIMERS OF ELDRITCH at La Mama, and George II in Wilson’s THIS IS THE RILL SPEAKING at Caffe Cino.  Ann was also in the movie The Honeymoon Killers.  The family household was busy 24/7 with food cooking at all hours of the day, family in corners learning lines and Ann writing music, collaborating and creating a Utopian theatrical heaven for the family.  Ann’s music was inspired by Busby Berkeley movies and The American Songbook classic composers such as Gershwin, Porter, Berlin, and Rogers and Hammerstein.  Ann and George II were dubbed ‘The Lunts of Off-Broadway’ by Robert Patrick and Marshall W. Mason called the Harris family  ‘The First Family of Off-Off-Broadway.’  

George III renamed himself Hibiscus, moved to San Francisco and created The Cockettes and The Angels of Light, a psychedelic gay liberation theater collective.  He also collaborated with his mother performing her songs for The Angels of Light shows he created in San Francisco and in New York when he returned.  The sisters became The Screaming Violets and performed with him in the Peppermint Lounge and Studio 54.  George III became a national figure when he joined the March on the Pentagon in 1967, an anti-war march surrounded by the 503^rd Military Police Airborne Battalion.  George (wearing a turtleneck sweater) placed flowers in the muzzles of the guns aimed at him which became a prize winning photo by Bernie Boston labeledFlower Power and an iconic image for the anti-war movement.  George III was one of the first to die of AIDS in 1982.  Some of his movies are Elevator Girls in Bondage, Luminous Procuress, and The Cockettes.  Some of the Off and Off-Off-Broadway shows the family worked on include: MISS NEFERTITI REGRETS (1965), THE SAND CASTLE (1965), THE LITTLE BIRDS FLY (1965), THE PEACE CREEPS (1966), THIS IS THE RILL SPEAKING (1966), A FUNNY WALK HOME (1966), GORILLA QUEEN (1967), THE BROWN CROWN (1967), INVITATION TO A BEHEADING (1969), and THE CELEBRATION (1972).