Born Viola Mills in Chicago in 1906 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Spolin was raised in a lively extended family who came together to sing, play parlor games, and mount plays they’d written and improvised. She later recalled that the children were allowed to play free of adult supervision for hours at a time, often creating their own dangerous and thrilling games at nearby construction sites or abandoned lots in their Humboldt Park neighborhood. Spolin developed an interest in the theater, both through family theatricals and the productions her father would take her to see while he was on opera detail with the Chicago Police. Viola Spolin was an actress, educator, director, author, and is the creator of the theater games, a system of actor training that uses games she devised to teach the formal rules of the theater.…show more content… Boyd was an early theorist of the educational and social benefits of play who trained social workers in group work. Miss Boyd’s curriculum included folk dancing, storytelling, arts and crafts, table games, and the playing of traditional children’s games that she had gathered from across The United States and Europe. For three years starting in 1923, Spolin studied at Boyd’s Recreational Training School at Hull House, though the school would later be moved to Northwestern University where Boyd became a professor of sociology. In Boyd’s essay “The Theory of Play,” she wrote, “Social living cannot be maintained on the basis of destructive ideologies – domination, hate, prejudice, greed and dishonesty. A society cannot hold together without a good way of life for all. . .
