The Dead End Kids were a group of young actors from New York City who appeared in Sidney Kingsley's Broadway play Dead End in 1935. In 1937, producer Samuel Goldwyn brought all of them to Hollywood and turned the play into a film. They proved to be so popular that they continued to make movies under various monikers, including the Little Tough Guys, the East Side Kids, and the Bowery Boys, until 1958.
Emanuel Hirsch Cohen, better known by the stage name John Randolph, was an American film, television and stage actor.
Donald Margulies is an American playwright and Professor (Adjunct) of English and Theater & Performance Studies at Yale University. In 2000, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Dinner with Friends.
The Group Theatre was a theater collective based in New York City and formed in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg. It was intended as a base for the kind of theatre they and their colleagues believed in— a forceful, naturalistic and highly disciplined artistry. They were pioneers of what would become an "American acting technique", derived from the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavski, but pushed beyond them as well. The company included actors, directors, playwrights, and producers. The name "Group" came from the idea of the actors as a pure ensemble; a reference to the company as "our group" led them to "accept the inevitable and call their company The Group Theatre."
Martin Ritt was an American director and actor who worked in both film and theater, noted for his socially conscious films.
Sidney Coe Howard was an American playwright, dramatist and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925 and a posthumous Academy Award in 1940 for the screenplay for Gone with the Wind.
Elmer Rice was an American playwright. He is best known for his plays The Adding Machine (1923) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of New York tenement life, Street Scene (1929).
Theater in the United States is part of the old European theatrical tradition and has been heavily influenced by the British theater. The central hub of the American theater scene is Manhattan, with its divisions of Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off-Broadway. Many movie and television stars have gotten their big break working in New York productions. Outside New York, many cities have professional regional or resident theater companies that produce their own seasons, with some works being produced regionally with hopes of eventually moving to New York. U.S. theater also has an active community theater culture, which relies mainly on local volunteers who may not be actively pursuing a theatrical career.
Frances Goodrich was an American actress, dramatist, and screenwriter, best known for her collaborations with her partner and husband Albert Hackett. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama with her husband in 1956 for The Diary of Anne Frank which had premiered the previous year.
John Guare is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.
Philip Ives Dunne was a Hollywood screenwriter, film director and producer, who worked prolifically from 1932 until 1965. He spent the majority of his career at 20th Century Fox. He crafted well regarded romantic and historical dramas, usually adapted from another medium. Dunne was a leading Screen Writers Guild organizer and was politically active during the "Hollywood Blacklist" episode of the 1940s–1950s. He is best known for the films How Green Was My Valley (1941), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), The Robe (1953) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965).
Arthur Gordon Smith was an American stage, film, and television actor, best known for playing supporting roles in Hollywood productions of the 1940s.
Morris Carnovsky was an American stage and film actor. He was one of the founders of the Group Theatre (1931-1940) in New York City and had a thriving acting career both on Broadway and in films until, in the early 1950s, professional colleagues told the House Un-American Activities Committee that Carnovsky had been a Communist Party member. He was blacklisted and worked less frequently for a few years, but then re-established his acting career, taking on many Shakespearean roles at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and performing the title roles in college campus productions of King Lear and The Merchant of Venice. Carnovsky's nephew is veteran character actor and longtime "Pathmark Guy" James Karen.
Sidney Harmon was a movie producer and screenwriter. Harmon was nominated for the 1942 Academy Award for Best Story for the movie The Talk of the Town. He began his career working as a writer for radio and the theater during the 1930s. Harmon produced Sidney Kingsley's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Men In White.
Madge Evans was an American stage and film actress. She began her career as a child performer and model.
Charles Edward Gordone was an American playwright, actor, director, and educator. He was the first African American to win the annual Pulitzer Prize for Drama and he devoted much of his professional life to the pursuit of multi-racial American theater and racial unity.
ThePlaywrights Company (1938–1960) was an American theatrical production company.
The Sidney Howard Memorial Award was a notable but short-lived theater prize established in 1939 by the Playwrights' Company. It was designed to support new playwrights who had no notable successes but had shown promise. Among the awardees are Robert Ardrey and Tennessee Williams.
Dead End is a stage play written by playwright Sidney Kingsley. It premiered on Broadway in October 1935 and ran for two years. It is notable for being the first project to feature the Dead End Kids, who would go on to star, under various names, in 89 films and three serials. These names include Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys, the East Side Kids and the Bowery Boys. The original play and the 1937 film adaptation were grim dramas set in a poverty-stricken riverside neighborhood in New York City, where the boys look on reform school as a learning opportunity. They played similar characters in several films; their later pictures are comedies.
American playwright and novelist George Sklar (1908–1988) was a pioneer of 1930's Social Protest Theater and a co-founder of the Theater Union, an organization that staged plays for working class audiences during the Great Depression. Many of Sklar's works emphasized social and political themes such as racial and union conflicts, civil rights, and environmentalism. Sklar was blacklisted from Hollywood in 1949 due to his affiliation with the American Communist Party.
