Street Scene (play)

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.

History

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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."<ref name="Short History">Template:Cite news</ref>

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.<ref name="Short History"/>

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.<ref name="Short History"/> When director George Cukor walked out in the first days of rehearsal,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Brady agreed to Rice directing the play himself.<ref name="Short History"/>

Production

File: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.<ref name="NYT Review">Template:Cite news</ref> 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."<ref name="NYT 13"/> Rice was thinking of a building on West 65th Street in Manhattan while writing the play.<ref name="NYT 13"/>

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.

• Leo Bulgakov as Abraham Kaplan<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Eleanor Wesselhoeft as Greta Fiorentino<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Beulah Bondi as Emma Jones<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Hilda Bruce as Olga Olsen<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Russell Griffin as Willie Maurrant<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Mary Servoss as Anna Maurrant<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Conway Washburne as Daniel Buchanan<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Robert Kelly as Frank Maurrant<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• T.H. Manning as George Jones<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Joseph Baird as Steve Sankey<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Jane Corcoran as Agnes Cushing<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• John Qualen as Carl Olsen<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Anna Konstant as Shirley Kaplan<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• George Humbert as Filippo Fiorentino<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Emily Hamill as Alice Simpson<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Frederica Going as Laura Hildebrand<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Eileen Smith as Mary Hildebrand<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Alexander Lewis as Charlie Hildebrand<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Horace Braham as Samuel Kaplan<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Erin O'Brien-Moore as Rose Maurrant<ref name="NYT Review"/><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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• Glenn Coulter as Harry Easter<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Millicent Green as Mae Jones<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Joseph Lee as Dick McGann<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Matthew McHugh as Vincent Jones<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• John Crump as Dr. John Wilson<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Edward Downes as Officer Harry Murphy<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Ralph Willard as a Milkman<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Herbert Lindholm as a Letter-Carrier<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Samuel S. Bonnell as an Iceman and An Interne<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Mary Emerson as a Music Student<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Ellsworth Jones as Marshall James Henry<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Jean Sidney as Fred Cullen<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Joe Cogert as an Old-Clothes Man<ref name="NYT Review"/>
• Anthony Pawley as an Ambulance Driver<ref name="NYT Review"/>

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.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

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."<ref name="NYT Review"/>

Accolades

Street Scene received the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> It was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1928–29.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Adaptations

File: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,<ref name="AFI"/> who recreated her Broadway role as the malicious gossip Emma Jones.<ref name="NYT Review"/> Others reprising their stage roles were Eleanor Wesselhoeft, Conway Washburne, T. H. Manning, John Qualen, Anna Konstant, George Humbert and Matthew McHugh.<ref name="AFI">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Street Scene has been adapted for television three times:

• In a presentation by The Philco Television Playhouse on October 31, 1948, Erin O'Brien-Moore performed the role of Rose's mother Anna. The role of Rose, which O'Brien-Moore had performed on Broadway, was played by Betty Field.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

• Celanese Theatre presented a 30-minute adaption on April 2, 1952, starring Colleen Gray, Paul Kelly, Ann Dvorak and Michael Wager.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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• BBC Television presented an adaptation on November 15, 1959.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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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.<ref name="NYT 13">Dwyer, Jim. (2013, June 21). "With the Street as a Stage, a Fictional Murder Plays Out in Brooklyn". The New York Times, p. A16.</ref> Fifth Street in the borough was closed for the two matinée performances.<ref name="NYT 13"/>

External links

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• 1949 Theatre Guild on the Air radio adaptation of play at Internet Archive