Ronald Melville Whyte (1941–1989) was an American playwright, critic, and disability rights activist.
Early life
Whyte was born November 18, 1941, in Black Eagle, Montana, to Eva Ranieri, a homemaker. and Henry Melville Whyte, a railroad machinist. The family moved to Great Falls, Montana and later to St. Paul, Minnesota.
Whyte was born with congenital birth defects of both legs and one arm, and as a child he was put in leg braces built by his father and walked with the help of these devices. He was run over by a school bus in an accident while he was in high school, and both of his ankles were crushed. By the time he was at the end of his college years in San Francisco, he opted to have then-experimental surgery that amputated both legs below the knees, and after a period of recovery he began wearing prostheses.
Education
Whyte attended University of Minnesota High School, studying with Arthur H. Ballet, among others. He completed his studies in Spokane, Washington, where the family had moved as his father held a series of increasingly responsible positions with the Great Northern Railway.
He attended Whitworth College in Spokane for one year, then transferred to San Francisco State University, where he studied drama. Among his professors was Kay Boyle. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts, he was accepted for graduate study at the Yale School of Drama, from which he received a master of fine arts degree in 1967. His professors at Yale included Dean Robert Brustein, theater historian John Gassner, film and theatre critic Stanley Kauffmann, critic Harold Clurman, with whom he later worked at The Actors Studio in New York, and Stella Adler. He subsequently enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York of Columbia University, from which he received a master of divinity (M.Div.) degree in 1976. At Union, his mentor was the founder of Black Liberation Theology, James H. Cone. He was a member of The Riverside Church in New York during the ministry of William Sloane Coffin and was in care for ordination as a minister in the United Church of Christ.
Professional activities
Literature
As a young man, Whyte was a contributor to the Baum Bugle of the L. Frank Baum Scholarship and The Baker Street Journal ("an irregular quarterly of Sherlockiana," and the journal of The Baker Street Irregulars).
While a student at Yale School of Drama, he was a writer in the 1960s for Marvel Comics, authoring stories in Marvel's Western series, including Rawhide Kid, Two-Gun Kid, and Kid Colt. A comic-book character created by Whyte at Yale, "Method Man," was the subject of a graphic issue of a 1967 Yale Drama Review. Whyte also wrote for the magazines Creepy and Eerie in the 1960s. He compiled his experiences as an author into a book, contracted with St. Martin's Press but was not able to complete it before his death.
In the late 1970s, Whyte was one of the literary artists in the Cultural Council Foundation CETA Artists Project in New York City.
Whyte was Arts Editor and Book Review Editor of the SoHo Weekly News in New York; Drama Editor of The American Book Review; and a book reviewer for other publications. His books included The Flower That Finally Grew (New York: Crown Publishers, 1971); Welcome To Andromeda and Variety Obit (New York: Samuel French and Co., 1973), and Disability: A Comedy (New York: Theatre Development Fund, 1983). With the late art critic Gregory Battcock and Paul William Bradley, he coauthored a textbook on cinema history entitled The Story of Film (1979), contracted with E.P. Dutton but unpublished.
Theater
Playwriting
While in San Francisco, Whyte wrote the first of more than a hundred playscripts and screenplays. At the Yale School of Drama in 1968, he wrote Welcome To Andromeda, a one-act play for two characters written. It was produced in workshop in 1969 at The American Place Theatre in New York before going on to an Off-Broadway production at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 1973. The work was named one of the Ten Best Plays of 1973 by Time magazine, which said of it: "The hero was almost totally paralyzed, but Ron Whyte's first play quivered with instinctual dramatic life." David Richards, theater critic for the Washington Star called Whyte "the most original dramatic voice since Edward Albee." Welcome To Andromeda was also performed at Postus-Teatret in Copenhagen, Denmark, and the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1975. It was published in an acting edition by Samuel French.