Vollmer, Lula

(1895-1955)

   Born in Keyser, North Carolina, Lula (sometimes called Lulu) Vollmer was educated at a school that became Asheville College, after which she moved to New York to seek a production for her first play, Sun-Up. Rejected by most producers, including the Theatre Guild, where she worked as a secretary, Sun-Up was finally produced in 1923 for a short run during which it garnered positive response from critics for Vollmer's unique brand of Southern folk drama. Her subsequent plays, including The Shame Woman (1923), The Dunce Boy (1925), Trigger (1927), Troyka (1930), Sentinels (1931), and The Hill Between (1938), similarly brought to life the mountain people of North Carolina, particularly women living hardscrabble lives in rural poverty. None of Vollmer's works achieved long runs, although Sun-Up was revived by the Manhattan Little Theatre Club for one performance in 1930, was made into a motion picture in 1925, and was seen as an early British television* production in 1939. Vollmer's Trigger became a film under the title Spitfire (1934) starring Katharine Hepburn.* Vollmer wrote an episode for television's General Electric Theatre.