Rice: The Public Life of a Playwright

RICE: THE PUBLIC LIFE OF A PLAYWRIGHT IF ONE HAD TO DRAW A DIVIDING LINE between the modern drama and the old in America, the year 1914 would not be a bad choice. That year saw the first stages of a conflict which would draw the United States forever out of its cozy shell of isolationism, and in the theater that year saw the first hints of the modem American drama. A young man, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, the son of a famous actormanager of the old school, published his first one-act plays in a now rare and valuable volume entitled Thirst. Another young man, Elmer Leopold Reizenstein, had his first play produced on Broadway, a play called On Trial. O'Neill's volume went almost unnoticed, but Reizenstein's play. which was conventional in subject but startling in technique, was phenomenally successful. It ran for 365 performances in New York; three touring companies played it in such (to modem ears) surprising places as Eau Claire, Mankato, Waco, Hot Springs, and Altoona; it spawned dozens of imitations; it was made into a film and a novel; it was produced in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, France. Germany, Holland, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Norway. Scotland, and South Africa; and it earned its twenty-one year old author the dazzling figure of $100,000 in royalties. These two young men, Eugene O'Neill and Elmer Reizenstein- -or, as we now know him, Elmer Rice-were the first American dramatists whom we could call modern and the first whom we could call excellent. To this critic, fifty years later they still remain in every way-by chronology, by quantity, and by quality-the first and second of our dramatists. However, several years in their wake, in the 1920S, there appeared Maxwell Anderson, Philip Barry, S. N. Behrman, Paul Green, Sidney Howard, George Kelly, Edwin Justus Mayer, and Roben E. Sherwood. With this array of talent, the modem American drama was more than brilliantly launched; it was firmly established as one of the productive and vital theaters of the world. In recent years, most of these playwrights who appeared at the beginnings of the modem American drama have either died or retired from active production. O'Neill is still very much a part of the contemporary theater, but largely because his excellent posthumous plays saved him from that neglect into which he began to 426 1966 RICE: PUBLIC LIFE OF A PLAYWRIGHT 427 fall immediately after his death. Rice had a play in New York in 1958, Behrman in 1963. For the most part, however, these early practitioners have been superseded-first by Odets and Saroyan, then by Williams, Miller, and lnge, and now by Albee, Richardson, and Kopit. The reason for this disturbing fact is not that Albee is a better writer than lnge, Odets, or Anderson, but that the theater, as Rice once remarked, is treated in this country as news and not as art. What is new is news, and what is old is as dead as yesterday's television schedule.1 This situation has been accepted without demur by college and community theaters who are apparently more interested in today's success than yesterday's masterpiece. Even we academics, who anthologize plays and who should be the ones to remind people of the excellences of the past, largely follow the lead of the dramatic journalists and emphasize those writers most currently successful. I have found, for example, that my own students in various universities are familiar with the works of Williams, Miller, and Albee, but only the best informed of them have ever even heard of the names of Anderson, Sherwood, or Rice. It seems singularly appropriate, then, now that Rice has passed the fiftieth anniversary of his debut in the theater, to redirect attention to one of the largest and best bodies of work in our dramatic literature. And though there is no space in a short article for an adequate evaluation of forty plays, there is another side of Rice's activity that the critic may legitimately deal with, for it bears directly upon any final estimate to be made of the man as a force in American...