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Preface I grew up in the other end of Rochester from where Philip Barry had lived a half century earlier. As a child, I would go with my family to see and smell the Lilac Festival at Highland Park, not far from where Barry was raised. I would explore Cobbs Hill, also near the Barry home, any number of times. But I would never hear of Philip Barry during my years in Rochester. I wouldn’t hear of him until my junior year of college, when I played Norman Rose in a production of Hotel Universe by the Cardboard Alley Players of Hartwick College. I don’t know how much I understood of the play at the time. I do know I found a fascination with its puzzling undulations and that lines from it have stayed with me. But I did not hear of him again for many years, until a viewing of the film version of The Philadelphia Story and its on-screen credits finally dislodged his name from my memory and brought about the connected realization that Barry had achieved a kind of afterlife through that play’s evolution into High Society in the 1950s and through revivals on Broadway in 1980 and London in 2005. The Philadelphia Story and Holiday, based on another Barry play, have, over time, become film classics. But where was Philip Barry in all of this? A dramatic force who for more than two decades seemed annually to have a show running on Broadway, he had become a brief item in most histories of the American theatre. My curiosity awakened, I began the process of discovering why he had been consigned to the bad view-lines of history and whether he deserved to be. I read the twenty-one plays that made it to Broadway. I dug into the archives at Georgetown and Yale and in the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library. I read as much as I could find about what others have had to say about him, during his lifetime and afterward. The answer to ix $QGHUVRQ)URQWPDWWHULQGG $0 the second question was apparent: he deserved better. In fact, one could argue (as I do) that he deserved even better during his own time, where the picture is a mottled one despite notable successes. Why this is so will be an added part of my purposes here, and I have been aided finally by a number of discoveries that grew out of my exploration of and about Barry: • He was too quickly and facilely categorized as a purveyor of “light comedies.” His plays were often about those in the upper strata of society at a time when the darker focus of literary naturalism undoubtedly added to the feeling that, at his best, he was a “light”-weight. • He understandably resisted being confined by easy labels. While he was seen as impeccable in appearance and style, he was nonetheless willing to muss things up. In fact, as we shall see, it was a necessity for him. He was not just a recorder of a certain lifestyle but was a questioner, a challenger—often a gamester like Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie but also with a sense of the absurd that anticipated playwrights of the midcentury. When his games became too challenging , he received punishment from his audiences and critics. When that happened, he could lose his veneer of impeccability. He could become prickly and defiant and, most important, self-punishing. His willingness to experiment had a boldness that sometimes propelled him ahead of his time or outside of the comfort zone of those who needed him to be a certain way. Today it is easier to see the artistic validity of many of these attempts, but without revivals of most of his work, it is impossible to prove him correct. • History—particularly cultural history (as I’ve discovered elsewhere)— can be lazy. It is simple enough to put an essentially forgotten figure in his place and leave him there, assuming enough has been said. Even those who have treated Barry kindly have tended to do so in a shorthanded way when there is so much more of value to be said about him and about what he wrote. There is a richer texture to his writing than has been brought forward yet. In him is a learnedness and awareness of more than the world of evening dress and steamer trunks and well-appointed places of...

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