The Playwrights'Company

Playwrights' Company, The (New York). A producing company, it was founded in 1938 by Maxwell Anderson,S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, and Robert E. Sherwood. Although Anderson suggested the organization was begun “to make a center for ourselves within the theatre, and possibly rally the theatre as a whole to new levels by setting a high standard of writing and production,” the founders were all established writers who had long since set high standards and whose real reason for embarking on their own was their displeasure with the policies of the Theatre Guild, which had been their principal producer. In later years Kurt Weill, Robert Anderson, lawyer John Wharton, and producer Roger L. Stevens became members. Among the company's memorable productions were Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938), Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), No Time for Comedy (1939), Key Largo (1939), There Shall Be No Night (1940), The Eve of St. Mark (1942), The Pirate (1942), The Patriots (1943), Dream Girl (1945), Anne of the Thousand Days (1948), Tea and Sympathy (1953), Sabrina Fair (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), The Pleasure of His Company (1958), and The Best Man (1960). By 1960 the only founders still alive were Behrman, who had left the group, and Rice, and with few new playwrights on the horizon promising a constant and worthy output, the organization was dissolved. Wharton's Life among the Playwrights (1974) provides an interesting insider's view of the group.