Street Scene (play)

Last updated
Street Scene
Street-Scene-FE-1929.jpg
First edition (1929)
Written by Elmer Rice
Characters
  • Anna Maurrant
  • Rose Maurrant
  • Samuel Kaplan
  • Frank Maurrant
Date premieredJanuary 10, 1929
Place premiered Playhouse Theatre
New York City
Original language English
SettingThe exterior of a walk-up apartment house in New York City

Street Scene is a 1929 American play by Elmer Rice. It opened January 10, 1929, at the Playhouse Theatre in New York City. After a total of 601 performances on Broadway, the production toured the United States and ran for six months in London. The action of the play takes place entirely on the front stoop of a New York City brownstone and in the adjacent street in the early part of the 20th century. It studies the complex daily lives of the people living in the building (and surrounding neighborhood) and the sense of despair that hovers over their interactions. Street Scene received the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Contents

History

Playwright Elmer Rice Elmer Rice2.jpg
Playwright Elmer Rice

Street Scene has its origins in a play that Elmer Rice began in the mid-1920s titled Sidewalks of New York—a play without words that he wrote as a technical exercise for his own entertainment. Rice devised 15 vignettes that were a microcosm of New York life. One of these scenes presented the front of a brownstone in the early morning hours. "There was neither plot nor situation," Rice recalled. "One merely saw the house shaking off its sleep and beginning to go about the business of the day." [1]

In the autumn of 1927, Rice returned to New York after living for almost three years in Europe, and was so taken with the vitality of the city that "almost without thinking about it" he began to reshape the brownstone-front scene into a full-length play. He began work in November 1927, addressing the play's many technical challenges—introducing some 30 characters, devising more than 75 entrances and exits in the first act alone, and making the playing of intimate scenes on a city sidewalk credible. Rice completed the play in mid-February 1928. [1]

Street Scene was rejected by at least a dozen New York producers before it was accepted in July 1928 by Sam H. Harris. Rice's theatrical agent for this deal was Frieda Fishbein. The contract required that the play be staged by November 15; Harris' production schedule caused him to release the manuscript in October. Shortly thereafter, producer William A. Brady accepted the play. [1] When director George Cukor walked out in the first days of rehearsal, [2] Brady agreed to Rice directing the play himself. [1]

Production

Original Broadway production of Street Scene (1929) Street-Scene-1929.jpg
Original Broadway production of Street Scene (1929)

With settings by Jo Mielziner, Street Scene opened January 10, 1929, at the Playhouse Theatre in New York City. [3] Rice's script indicates the play's setting is "the exterior of a 'walk-up' apartment house in a mean quarter of New York. It is of ugly brownstone." [4] Rice was thinking of a building on West 65th Street in Manhattan while writing the play. [4]

The main characters are Anna Maurrant, dealing with issues of infidelity; Rose Maurrant, her daughter, who struggles with the demands of her job and boss and her attraction to Jewish neighbor Sam Kaplan; Frank Maurrant, the domineering and sometimes abusive husband and father of Anna and Rose, respectively; Sam, a caring and concerned neighbor in love with Rose; and many other neighbors and passersby.

Street Scene ran 601 performances on Broadway and toured throughout the United States. During the play's six-month run in London, Aldous Huxley became an ardent fan of Erin O'Brien-Moore, and saw her starring performance as Rose Maurrant at least three times. [6]

Reception

"Still unwilling to write a conventional play according to the safe, stereotyped forms, Elmer Rice contents himself with writing an honest one," wrote Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times. "He has observed and transcribed his material perfectly. Never did the phantasmagorira of street episodes seem so lacking in sketchy types and so packed with fully delineated character." [3]

Accolades

Street Scene received the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. [7] It was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1928–29. [8]

Adaptations

Poster for the 1931 film Street Scene Street-scene-1931.jpg
Poster for the 1931 film Street Scene

Elmer Rice adapted his play for Samuel Goldwyn's 1931 motion picture production Street Scene , directed by King Vidor. Starring Sylvia Sidney, William Collier Jr. and Estelle Taylor, the film marked the screen debut of Beulah Bondi, [9] who recreated her Broadway role as the malicious gossip Emma Jones. [3] Others reprising their stage roles were Eleanor Wesselhoeft, Conway Washburne, T. H. Manning, John Qualen, Anna Konstant, George Humbert and Matthew McHugh. [9]

Rice wrote the book for Kurt Weill's 1946 opera Street Scene , adapting his play and writing lyrics with Langston Hughes. It premiered January 9, 1947, at the Adelphi Theater, New York City. [10]

Street Scene has been adapted for television three times:

Revivals

New York's Brave New World Repertory Theater staged a production on a street in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood in late June 2013. [4] Fifth Street in the borough was closed for the two matinée performances. [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Albee</span> American playwright (1928–2016)

Edward Franklin Albee III was an American playwright known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), A Delicate Balance (1966), and Three Tall Women (1994). Some critics have argued that some of his work constitutes an American variant of what Martin Esslin identified and named the Theater of the Absurd. Three of his plays won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and two of his other works won the Tony Award for Best Play.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald Margulies</span> American playwright

Donald Margulies is an American playwright and academic. In 2000, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Dinner with Friends.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elmer Rice</span> American playwright (1892–1967)

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).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Beulah Bondi</span> American actress (1888–1981)

Beulah Bondi was an American character actress; she often played eccentric mothers and later grandmothers and wives, although she was known for numerous other roles. She began her acting career as a young child in theater, and after establishing herself as a Broadway stage actress in 1925, she reprised her role in Street Scene for the 1931 film version.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jefferson Mays</span> American actor

Lewis Jefferson Mays is an American actor. He is the recipient of numerous accolades, including a Tony Award, a Helen Hayes Award, a Lucille Lortel Award, two Drama Desk Awards, two Outer Critics Circle Awards and three Obie Awards.

Eugene V. Frankel was an American actor, theater director, and acting teacher especially notable in the founding of the off-Broadway scene. Frankel served in the Army during World War II in entertainment and as a member of an aerial crew.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alfred Uhry</span> American playwright and screenwriter (born 1936)

Alfred Fox Uhry is an American playwright and screenwriter. He has received an Academy Award, two Tony Awards and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for dramatic writing for Driving Miss Daisy. He is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

<i>Street Scene</i> (opera) 1946 American opera by Kurt Weill (music), Langston Hughes (lyrics), and Elmer Rice (book)

Street Scene is an American opera by Kurt Weill (music), Langston Hughes (lyrics), and Elmer Rice (book). Written in 1946 and premiered in Philadelphia that year, Street Scene is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1929 play of the same name by Rice.

<i>Street Scene</i> (film) 1931 American pre-Code drama film by King Vidor

Street Scene is a 1931 American pre-Code drama film produced by Samuel Goldwyn and directed by King Vidor. With a screenplay by Elmer Rice adapted from his Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name, Street Scene takes place on a New York City street from one evening until the following afternoon. Except for one scene which takes place inside a taxi, Vidor shot the entire film on a single set depicting half a city block of house fronts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William A. Brady</span> American actor

William Aloysius Brady was an American theater actor, producer, and sports promoter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erin Davie</span> American actress and singer

Erin Davie is an American actress and singer, best known for her performance as the young Edith Bouvier Beale in the Broadway production of the musical Grey Gardens, taking the part on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre in 2006, after its initial run Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quiara Alegría Hudes</span> American playwright and composer (born 1977)

Quiara Alegría Hudes is an American playwright, producer, lyricist and essayist. She is best known for writing the book for the musical In the Heights (2007), and screenplay for its film adaptation. Hudes' first play in her Elliot Trilogy, Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. She received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Water by the Spoonful, her second play in that trilogy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erin O'Brien-Moore</span> American actress (1902-1979)

Erin O'Brien-Moore was an American actress. She created the role of Rose in the original Broadway production of Elmer Rice's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Street Scene (1929), and was put under contract in Hollywood and made a number of films in the 1930s. Her promising career on the stage and screen was interrupted by severe injuries she sustained in a 1939 fire. Following her recovery and extensive plastic surgery, she returned to the stage and character roles in films and television, including four seasons of the primetime serial drama Peyton Place (1965–1968).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matt McHugh</span> American actor

Matthew O. McHugh was an American film actor who appeared in more than 200 films between 1931 and 1955, primarily in small cameo parts.

<i>Beyond the Horizon</i> (play)

Beyond the Horizon is a play written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. Although he first copyrighted the text in June 1918, O'Neill continued to revise the play throughout the rehearsals for its 1920 premiere. His first full-length work to be staged, Beyond the Horizon won the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erin Mackey</span> American stage actress and singer (born 1986)

Erin Ashley Mackey is an American stage actress and singer, known for playing the role of Glinda in the Chicago, Los Angeles, Broadway, and Second National Tour productions of the musical Wicked. She was also a double in 1998's The Parent Trap.

Lila Rose Kaplan is a 21st-century American playwright. She currently lives in Somerville, MA, where she was a Huntington Playwriting Fellow with the Huntington Theatre Company (2012-2014) as well as a Next Voices Playwriting Fellow with New Repertory Theatre (2015-2016).

The Playhouse Theatre was a Broadway theater at 137 West 48th Street in midtown Manhattan, New York City. Charles A. Rich was the architect. It was built in 1911 for producer William A. Brady who also owned the nearby 48th Street Theatre. After Brady died in 1944, it was sold to the Shubert Organization. From 1949 to 1952, it was an ABC Radio studio.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucas Hnath</span> American playwright

Lucas Hnath is an American playwright. He won the 2016 Obie Award for excellence in playwriting for his plays Red Speedo and The Christians. He also won a Whiting Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures</span>

Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures is the live show, stageplay and musical production arm of Warner Bros. Discovery. The company forms a part of Warner Bros., one of the major business segments of Warner Bros. Discovery. Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures is led by Mark Kaufman.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Rice, Elmer (February 24, 1929). "A Short History of Street Scene". The New York Times . Retrieved 2016-09-27.
  2. ↑ Pasles, Chris (April 24, 2001). "Staging a Slice of Life". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 2016-09-27.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 Atkinson, J. Brooks (January 11, 1929). "The Play: On a Sidewalk in New York". The New York Times.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Dwyer, Jim. (2013, June 21). "With the Street as a Stage, a Fictional Murder Plays Out in Brooklyn". The New York Times, p. A16.
  5. ↑ "Street Scene". Samuel French. Retrieved 2016-09-27.
  6. ↑ Goodman, George Jr. (May 5, 1979). "Erin O'Brien-Moore, 77, Is Dead; Actress of Stage, Screen and TV". The New York Times . Retrieved 2016-09-27.
  7. ↑ "1929 Pulitzer Prizes". The Pulitzer Prizes. Columbia University . Retrieved 2016-09-27.
  8. ↑ Mantle, Burns, ed. (1929). The Best Plays of 1928–29. New York: Dodd, Mead. OCLC   9695298.
  9. 1 2 "Street Scene". AFI Catalog of Feature Films . American Film Institute . Retrieved 2016-09-27.
  10. ↑ "Street Scene (1946)". The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music. Retrieved 2016-09-27.
  11. ↑ "Philco Television Playhouse". Classic TV Archive. Retrieved 2016-09-27.
  12. ↑ "Celenese Theatre". Classic TV Archive. Retrieved 2016-09-27.
  13. ↑ "Street Scene (1959)". BFI Film & TV Database . British Film Institute. Archived from the original on October 3, 2016. Retrieved 2016-09-27.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.