He was Lighting Director at Starlight Theatre in Kansas City, Missouri for two summers, where he worked with Jeanette MacDonald, Gisèle MacKenzie, Penny Singleton and Charles Nelson Reilly.

He was an Assistant Director at NBC-TV Channel 4[3] in Washington for one summer, where he worked with puppeteer Jim Henson, then a college student.

He studied Psychodrama under James Enneis at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., and with Jacob L. Moreno at Beacon, New York.

He taught, at various times, Acting, Improvisation, Performing Arts in Contemporary Society, Playwriting, Public Speaking, Television Production, Theatre History and Theatrical Design.

He staged plays in the McDonough Gymnasium and in ornate Gaston Hall,[7] where one of his star players was future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

For 19 years, Dr. Murphy conducted a theatre workshop for patients at the Chestnut Lodge Psychoanalytic Hospital in Rockville, MD, where he produced and directed, among other plays, A View from the Bridge, Under Milk Wood, The Glass Menagerie, Hay Fever, The Importance of Being Earnest, Picnic, John Brown's Body and Dark of the Moon (1960–1979).

In 1960 he wrote Papers of Fire, a pageant dealing with America's founding documents, which was presented at the National Sylvan Theater on the grounds of the Washington Monument.

In 1984, Murphy wrote Eleanor Roosevelt: First Lady of the World, a dramatic reading commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History, and presented there under his direction, starring Susan Stamberg and Jean Stapleton.

[citation needed] He appeared as Major Andrew Ellicott, the surveyor who placed the original boundary markers for the District of Columbia, in the Francis Thompson documentary film about the founding of Washington, DC, called City Out of Wilderness.

Murphy won the Best Director Award from the Greater Washington, D.C., Theatre Alliance in 1960 and 1961, and received a Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1963-1964.