Remembering Richard O. Bell, educator and playwright who co-founded the Upstart Crow Theatre Company

Richard Bell was born Richard Orville Beliel on June 30, 1933 in Shanghai, China. His father, Clarence Alton Beliel, had been a United States Marine stationed in China who, after his enlistment terminated, took a position as a journalist with the English language Shanghai Evening Post. His mother, Elena Michaelovna Fingerut was a Russian refugee, a Menshevik whose family had opposed the Bolshevik government and fled the Russian revolution.

In 1939, the China-Japan war had broken out and the Beliel family moved to Manila where his father continued as a journalist, and he became the NBC bureau chief in the far East. To appeal to the upper class Spanish speakers in Manila, he took the name Don Bell for his broadcasts. (Don was a title, not a name.)

Manila was bombed by the Japanese on the same night as the Pearl Harbor bombing. The family continued to live in their home in Manila for a couple of months until his parents were interned the the Santo Tomas Internment Camp. The children, Richard and his brother Clarence, were interned in a nunnery; the Convent of the Holy Ghost. A few months later, Holy Ghost was closed by the Japanese, and Richard and Clarence were moved to join their parents at Santo Tomas.

In February 1945, the First Cavalry Division of the United States Army liberated Manila. That summer the Beliels moved to their father’s home town, Hutchinson, Kansas.

In the late 1940s, Richard moved among a few cities following his father as he worked radio stations in Hutchinson, in New York City and in Silver Springs, Maryland. He graduated from Hutchinson High School in 1951. He and his brother had, by this time, legally changed their last name from Beliel to Bell.

He had been active in the theatre program in his high school and at Hutchinson Jr. College and did some theatre work at community theatres and college programs in the early ‘50s. Not being regularly enrolled in any college program he lost his student draft deferment. In the summer of 1953 he was attending The University of Colorado and acting in its summer Shakespeare production. That year he was drafted and spent most of the next two years serving in the First Logistical Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He continued his theatre work there, at the community theater program, the Fort Bragg Players. He was discharged in 1955 and returned to CU Boulder and earned a BA in Speech and Drama there in 1959.

In his senior year he married Mary Elizabeth Herndon. They had a daughter, Vivian Elizabeth, now Vivian Elizabeth Sutherland. They were divorced in 1973.

He began his graduate work in theatre at Ohio University, Athens, where he received his MFA in theatre in 1962 and went on to teach at Southern Illinois University at St. Louis and Edwardsville. There he was the theatre department’s technical director. His first two years at SIU were spent directing plays and building sets in the old building that had been East St. Louis High School.

In 1964, SIU moved to a new campus in Edwardsville, Illinois, where he divided his teaching time between the theatre department and the English department. In his last year at SIU he moved back to East St. Louis as a senior lecturer at the university’s Experiment in Higher Education, a program that involved 100 students who had graduated high with good grades but were denied admission to at least five universities. Ninety five of the 100 were Black. Two years later all those students were admitted to universities as juniors.

In 1969, he resigned from SIU to pursue graduate studies in English at Washington University. In his last year there he was the holder of a Shubert Fellowship in playwriting.

That year, he took a position as an instructor in the fine arts department at California State College in Bakersfield. He taught literature and drama there. He resigned from teaching in 1974 and returned to Boulder and tried (unsuccessfully) to earn a living as a freelance playwright. That summer he directed a staged reading of The Two Noble Kinsmen at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.

He continued his theatre at the Nomad Playhouse in the early ‘70s. In 1975, he met Joan Lee Kuder when they acted together in The Dybbuk. In 1977, they married and their daughter, Alexis Teresa was born in 1978.

In 1980, they created The Upstart Crow Theatre Company and acted, directed or designed virtually all its show until 2018 when both retired from the company.

In 1994, Richard took a temporary job at McGuckin Hardware; a job he held for 21 years.

In 1979, Richard and Joan wrote and published Auditions and Scenes from Shakespeare, a directory of some 700 scenes and audition pieces from Shakespeare’s plays. In 2018, Richard completed Speak the Speech, a Shakespearean glossary designed for actors rather than readers. Richard O. Bell is survived by: his wife of 47 years, Joan Kuder Bell; his daughters, Alexis Teresa Bell and Vivian Elizabeth Sutherland (Dan Gary Sutherland III) and granddaughters Elizabeth Amber Sutherland (Luigi Pasquale Capra) and their daughters Lillia Hope Estrada and Izabella Abigail Larson as well as his second grand-daughter Miranda Elyena Sutherland and her two daughters, Noelle Elyena Luketu and Kali Vivian Rose Lee.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in Richard’s name to The Upstart Crow theatre company, PO Box 18045, Boulder CO 80308.