Elmer Rice (1892-1967) was an American playwright and novelist. Often innovative in style, his plays reveal a concern with individual freedom confronted by the tyranny of impersonal institutions and destructive passions.
Elmer Rice was born Elmer Reizenstein on Sept. 28, 1892, in New York City. After 2 years of high school, he began working at the age of 14. He passed the regents' examinations and entered the New York Law School, from which he graduated cum laude in 1912. He passed the bar examinations but decided to try writing instead. His play On Trial (1914) was a resounding success. In 1915 he married Hazel Levy. Although not a member of any political party, Rice inclined toward socialism. After World War I he spent 2 years in Hollywood before moving to East Hampton, Conn.
Following On Trial, he had several plays produced in New York, but it was not until The Adding Machine (1923), an expressionistic tragic-comic portrait of dehydrated man, that he showed his true power. Two more plays, written in collaboration, were produced before he directed his powerful Street Scene (1929), a realistic presentation of environmental influences on character relationships. It won the Pulitzer Prize. The Subway (1929), a rather underrated play much on the order of The Adding Machine, had a short run. In 1930 he published a novel, A Voyage to Purilia, and had an unsuccessful production of See Naples and Die. But in 1931 his The Left Bank, dealing with American expatriates, and Counsellor-at-law enlarged his reputation.
The impact of the Great Depression and Rice's trip to Russia and Europe in 1932 was manifested in the controversial We, the People (1933). After the production of Judgment Day and Between Two Worlds (1934), Rice excoriated New York critics and announced his retirement from the commercial theater. Nonetheless, between 1935 and 1938 he served with the Federal Theater Project, published a novel, helped organize The Playwrights' Company, and had his American Landscape produced.
After his divorce in 1942 Rice married Betty Field. During the war he worked for the U.S. Office of War Information, was active in the American Civil Liberties Union, and was president of the Dramatists' Guild. Dream Girl (1945), a psychoanalytical fantasy, was his final popular success. His novel The Show Must Go On appeared in 1949.
Rice's final work included essays, The Living Theatre (1959); an autobiography, Minority Report (1963); and additional plays. He received an honorary doctor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1961. Divorced again, in 1966 he married Barbara Marshall. He died of a heart attack on May 8, 1967.
Further Reading
Rice's Minority Report (1963) gives autobiographical details and personal accounts of his plays. The major critical work is Robert G. Hogan, The Independence of Elmer Rice (1965). Joseph Mersand, The American Drama since 1930 (1949), and Allan Lewis, American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theatre (1965), provide additional criticism.
Additional Sources
Vanden Heuvel, Michael, Elmer Rice: a research and production sourcebook, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.
On Trial. Rice's first production, a murder mystery, draws on his experiences as a lawyer. It is distinctive for its accurately depicted trial and for use of flashbacks, enacting scenes that are described by witnesses.
The Adding Machine. Rice's expressionistic drama about a repressed bookkeeper, Mr. Zero, driven to murder his employer when he is replaced by an adding machine, establishes Rice as a major American dramatist who popularizes experimental dramatic techniques.
Street Scene. Rice's groundbreaking, realistic depiction of New York tenement life wins the Pulitzer Prize. An operatic version with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Langston Hughes would open in 1947. Two other plays by Rice--the expressionisticThe Subway and See Naples and Die, concerning a romantic heiress--are staged unsuccessfully during the year.
The Voyage to Purilia. Rice's first novel is a satirical fantasy based on his experiences in Hollywood, describing a planet where inhabitants (without reproductive organs) conform to a narrow range of emotional types, to the sounds of a continual sweet soundtrack and under the direction of an all-powerful narrator called The Presence.
We, the People. The first in a series of upbeat message plays trumpeting democratic values under threat would be followed by Judgment Day (1934), Between Two Worlds (1934), and American Landscape (1938). None succeed with critics or at the box office.
American Landscape. Rice continues his series of patriotic works with this drama of a man contemplating selling his estate to a pro-Nazi German American Bund. He is urged to resist by the spirits of Moll Flanders, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a Revolutionary War soldier, and the man's son killed in World War I.
Flight to the West. Rice takes up wartime issues in this debate-filled drama, set aboard the Clipper from Lisbon to New York as a mixed group of passengers discusses current events. Rice also writes Two on an Island, a romantic comedy depicting the difficult times of a playwright and his aspiring actress girlfriend as they try to achieve success on Broadway. To re-create a sense of modern city life, Rice filled the stage with recognizable big-city types.
Dream Girl. Written for his wife, the actress Betty Field, who plays the title character, Rice's uncharacteristic venture into light romantic comedy concerns a woman whose discovery of love leads her to abandon her daydreaming.
Street Scene. The playwright adapts his 1929 drama of realistic city life into a musical, with lyrics by Langston Hughes and music by Kurt Weill. Although unsuccessful on Broadway, this innovative production would subsequently enter the repertory of several opera companies.
Career Highlights: The Adding Machine, Holiday Inn, Doubling for Romeo
First Major Screen Credit: Doubling for Romeo (1921)
Biography
From 1914 until the mid-'40s, Elmer Rice was one of the most prominent playwrights and theatrical directors in America, and made important contributions to motion pictures, both as an author and screenwriter. Born Elmer Reizenstein in New York in 1892, he was a high school dropout who developed an interest in the legal profession and graduated cum laude from New York Law School at age 20. In 1913, the same year that he was admitted to the bar, Reizenstein decided to try his hand at writing plays: The result was On Trial, a courtroom drama that he presented unsolicited to a producer and which proved good enough to get produced on Broadway, where it was a hit, running for a year (considered a very successful run in those days) and earning its author 100,000 dollars. On Trial was also acclaimed as an innovative masterpiece for its pioneering use on-stage of a device that had previously only been utilized onscreen, the "cutback" -- that is, interrupting the action at hand to present prior events to the audience. It was following the completion of the play's run that Reizenstein -- reportedly weary of having his last name misunderstood over the telephone -- decided to shorten it to Rice. On Trial was subsequently adapted into at least three separate film versions, in 1917, 1928, and 1939. Rice, however, considered it nothing more than "a shrewd piece of stage carpentry," and spent the next nine years studying drama intensely, including a period at Columbia University under noted teacher Hatcher Hughes, experimenting with different techniques and ideas. He wrote several student works and one play, Wake Up Jonathan (co-authored with Hughes), that made it to Broadway. After a failure with It Is the Law, he wrote The Adding Machine (1923), a strange, expressionist play about a lifelong office worker, Mr. Zero, who loses his job to the device of the title, murders his boss, is tried and executed, and ends up in heaven operating the very device that cost him his job, until he is returned to earth. The play only ran nine weeks, but The Adding Machine has remained a widely studied and performed piece in drama courses for generations since, right into the 21st century. Rice went out to Hollywood for a time, generating two screenplays, Doubling for Romeo and Rent Free, as well as seeing one of his plays, For the Defense, turned into a film, but he later described that first experience of Hollywood as utterly demeaning. He collaborated in the mid-'20s with Dorothy Parker on Close Harmony, also known as The Woman Next Door, and with Philip Barry on Cock Robin, a murder mystery set backstage at a theater. In 1928, after a string of failures, Rice wrote the play for which he is most famous, Street Scene.
A tragic tale set in a New York tenement, Street Scene spoke in the voice of the people, complete with vicious racial and ethnic slurs and raw hatreds on display, all couched in a hauntingly lyrical theatrical framework. It was a gritty, earthy work, utterly unlike the comedies, musicals, and upper-crust romantic stories that dominated theater in those days (and which Rice abhorred). The play was also rejected by virtually every producer on Broadway until William A. Brady agreed not only to mount it, but also to allow Rice to direct it himself. Rice's most fully realized work, the play as staged by its author used its tenement building set and backdrop as virtually a major character itself, woven into every aspect of the action, a novel element in this startlingly piercing work. Street Scene won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1929, and Samuel Goldwyn subsequently purchased the film rights and assigned it to King Vidor to direct. The 1931 Vidor movie version, based on Rice's own screen adaptation, utilized a huge set the size of a city block that gave the screen drama a subtly enveloping quality (almost disposing of the boundaries of the screen). Several of the stage production's original players (including John Qualen, Matt McHugh, and Beulah Bondi) also appeared in the movie, and it remains one of the best screen adaptations ever done of a theatrical drama, and also one of the most watchable of early talkies. During the two years between Street Scene's original theatrical run and Goldwyn's film version, Rice saw his unsuccessful play See Naples and Die brought to the screen as Oh Sailor, Behave in 1930. That same year, Rice published a novel, A Voyage to Purilia, a savage satire of the movie business in which he seemingly sought to pay back Hollywood for his two unhappy years there in the 1920s. Street Scene started a new trend in theater, paving the way for works such as Sidney Kingsley's Dead End (which was also filmed by Goldwyn) and Clifford Odets' Rocket to the Moon and Golden Boy. The playwright's next major successes were The Left Bank, a barbed look at the self-styled expatriate American bohemians living in Paris, which was written after an extended trip to Europe, and Counsellor-At-Law, a drama about a successful Jewish attorney who finds his personal life and career shattered. Both were also produced and directed by Rice and were hits on-stage, with Counsellor-At-Law proving especially durable in a revival a decade later. The screen rights to the latter were purchased by Universal, and it fared even better than Street Scene. With Rice again providing the screen adaptation, Counsellor-At-Law (1933) was directed by William Wyler, and is one of that filmmaker's best works; the action is fluid yet tense, and held entirely within the confines of a single large set of a law office in a New York skyscraper, yet one never feels "confined" by the film; the use of sound is also as skillful and complex as that in any 1930s drama, and the cast (with the exception of an over-the-top Vincent Sherman as a wild-eyed radical) is superb, led by John Barrymore, giving what was arguably the best performance of his screen career. 63 years later, in 1996, during the run of Christopher Plummer's Barrymore show on Broadway, the film Counsellor-At-Law was presented to nearly full houses during a day-long run at New York's Film Forum, as the best extant specimen of the real Barrymore's art. Rice's subsequent stage efforts, alas, were notably less successful, steeped as they were in fiercely topical and political subject matter (and carrying titles such as We, the People, that hardly evoked entertainment) that Depression-weary audiences sought to forget about. The failure of his play Between Two Worlds led Rice to attack Broadway and, especially, the tastes, respective agendas, and goals of the critics assigned to cover theater, which resulted in his abandoning the New York stage for a time in favor of London. Ironically, it was in England that one of his mid-'30s New York failures, Judgment Day, became a hit. When he returned to America in 1935, Rice was made regional director of the government-sponsored Federal Theater Project in New York. He resigned, however, after running afoul of censors when he sought to present a work called The Living Newspaper, in which current political figures from around the world, including Benito Mussolini, were portrayed on-stage. He returned to writing and producing commercial plays, but Not for Children (1935), American Landscape (1938), and Two on an Island (1939) never achieved the popularity of his earlier work. Rice's biggest success of the late '30s came not as a writer but as the director of Robert Sherwood's play Abe Lincoln in Illinois. In the early '40s, Rice took one more stab at a Hollywood career when he co-wrote the scenario (with Claude Binyon) for Mark Sandrich's Holiday Inn (1942), starring Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, and Marjorie Reynolds, which introduced a brace of great Irving Berlin songs, including "White Christmas." He continued to write and produce plays and saw one more of his plays, the distaff Walter Mitty fantasy-comedy Dream Girl, filmed at Paramount in 1947, with Betty Hutton in the lead. Rice was still active on various theater boards in the 1960s but produced his last play, Love Among the Ruins, in 1963. His major influence had waned by the end of the '40s, apart from the perennial popularity of The Adding Machine (which was filmed two years after his death), Street Scene, and Counsellor-At-Law. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Rice was born Elmer Leopold Reizenstein in New York City, New York. After graduating cum laude from New York Law School in 1912, he began a short-lived legal career. He turned to writing, and his first play, the melodramatic On Trial (1914), was the first American stage production to employ the flashback technique of the screen.
Career
His first major contribution to the theatre, however, was the expressionistic The Adding Machine (1923), which satirized the growing regimentation of man in the machine age through the life and death of the arid book-keeper, Mr. Zero.
Rice's next play, Street Scene (1929), later the subject of an opera by Kurt Weill, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for its realistic chronicle of life in the slums. The Left Bank (1931), described expatriation from America as an ineffectual escape from materialism, and Counsellor-at-Law (1931) drew a realistic picture of the legal profession for which Rice had been trained. The depression of the 1930s inspired We, the People (1933), the Reichstag trial was paralleled in Judgement Day (1934), and conflicting American and Soviet ideologies formed the subject of the conversation-piece Between Two Worlds (1934).
After the failure of these plays, Rice returned to Broadway in 1937 to write and direct for the Playwrights' Producing Company, which he helped to establish. Of his later plays, the most successful was the fantasy Dream Girl (1945), in which an over-imaginative girl encounters unexpected romance in reality. Rice's last play was Cue for Passion (1958), a modern psycho-analytical variation of the Hamlet theme in which Diana Wynyard played the Gertrude-like character, Grace Nicholson. Rice was the author of a controversial book on American drama, The Living Theatre (1960), and of an autobiography, Minority Report (1964).
Rice was the first director of the New York office of the Federal Theatre Project, but resigned in 1936 to protest government censorship of the FTP's "Living Newspaper" Ethiopia, about Mussolini's invasion of that country.
Personal life
Rice was married in 1915 to Hazel Levy. After his divorce in 1942, he married actress Betty Field with whom he had three children before their divorce in 1956.
