Philip Barry

Barry, Philip [Jerome Quinn] (1896–1949), playwright. Born in Rochester, New York, he was the son of a successful Irish immigrant and a mother who was of old Philadelphia Irish‐Catholic stock. Young Barry was a frail child with defective eyesight, yet despite his myopia he became an avid reader and a precocious wit, entering Yale in 1914 and plunging eagerly into campus literary activities. During World War I he was rejected for military services but served in the Communications Office of the State Department in London where he became a life‐long Anglophile. Returning to Yale after the war, his play Autonomy won a prize offered by the school dramatic society, and, over strident family objections, he enrolled in George Pierce Baker's famed 47 Workshop at Harvard. Barry's play The Jilts, in which a businessman attempts an artistic career, won the Herndon Prize and Richard Herndon himself agreed to produce it in 1923, changing the title to You and I. Its success was the first of many on Broadway for Barry. Underlying the charm and razor‐sharp wit of You and I was a deep‐seated disenchantment with life. This malaise began to seep to the surface in his In a Garden (1925), whose dramatist hero sets up his wife for an affair to test a theory. Barry moved even farther away from traditional high comedy with the semifantasy White Wings (1926) and the curious Biblical piece John (1927), dealing with John the Baptist. Both failed to run, but he had a major hit with Paris Bound (1927), a look at infidelity among the rich. Barry's subsequent plays met with varying degrees of success: the mystery Cock Robin (1928) written with Elmer Rice, the civilized drawing room piece, Holiday (1928), the fantasy Hotel Universe (1930), the domestic drama Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1931), and the domestic comedy The Animal Kingdom (1932). Deeply saddened by the death of his baby daughter, Barry took darker turns in his next plays: The Joyous Season (1934), a somber story of a nun's attempt to rejuvenate her family spiritually; Bright Star (1935), a gloomy tale of misguided ambition and tragic, misdirected love; and Here Come the Clowns (1938), an experimental piece concerning a confrontation between an old stagehand and God. Returning to the sort of play the theatre expected of him, Barry enjoyed his greatest success with the high comedy The Philadelphia Story (1939), but the rest of his career was anticlimactic, filled with lesser works, such as the allegory Liberty Jones (1941), the Katharine Hepburn vehicle Without Love (1942), the Tallulah Bankhead vehicle Foolish Notion (1945), the adaptation of Jean Pierre Aumont's My Name Is Aquilon (1949), and the unfinished Second Threshold (1951), which Robert Sherwood completed with little success. Generally considered our finest creator of high comedy, Barry's strange interplay of wit and despair gives his best works a dramatic tension and meaningfulness unique to our theatre. Biography: Philip Barry, Joseph P. Roppolo, 1965.

Philip Barry, circa 1931.

Philip Jerome Quinn Barry (June 18, 1896 – December 3, 1949) was an American playwright. Though remembered for his comedies about manners, he also wrote serious dramas, often on religious themes. His 1927 play John is about the Baptist, and Barry himself described his 1938 allegory Here Come the Clowns as a study of "the battle with evil," in which his hero, Clancy, "at last finds God in the will of man." Many of Barry's plays were adapted for television in the 1950s.

His best known work is The Philadelphia Story (1939), which was made into a popular 1940 film starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart. Hepburn, a close friend of Barry, had appeared in the play on Broadway, and bought the movie rights (with the help of her ex-boyfriend Howard Hughes), and successfully restarted her previously flagging Hollywood career with the film version.

His play Holiday was filmed twice, and the best known is Holiday by George Cukor.

Philip Barry was born in Rochester, New York and died in New York City, aged 53, of a heart attack.

Plays

• A Punch for Judy, 1921
• You and I, 1923
• The Youngest, 1924
• In a Garden, 1925.
• Paris Bound, 1927, filmed Paris Bound by Edward H. Griffith
• John, 1927
• Holiday, 1928, filmed Holiday by George Cukor
• Cock Robin (with Elmer Rice), 1928
• Hotel Universe, 1930
• Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 1931
• The Animal Kingdom, 1932
• The Joyous Season, 1934
• Bright Star, 1935
• Spring Dance, 1936
• Here Come the Clowns, 1938
• The Philadelphia Story, 1939, filmed The Philadelphia Story by George Cukor
• Liberty Jones, 1941
• Without Love, 1942, filmed Without Love by Harold S. Bucquet
• Foolish Notion, 1945
• Second Threshold, 1951, completed by Robert Sherwood

External links

• "Philip Barry Papers: Collection Description". Georgetown University. http://www.library.georgetown.edu/dept/speccoll/cl128.htm. Retrieved on 2007-02-08. 
• Philip Barry at the Internet Movie Database
• Phillip Barry on the Internet Broadway Database

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