Elmer Rice

Infobox Writer
name = Elmer Rice


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birthdate = birth date|1892|09|28
birthplace = New York City
deathdate = death date and age|1967|05|08|1892|09|28
deathplace = Southampton, Hampshire, England
occupation = Playwright
nationality = American
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Elmer Rice (b. Elmer L. Reizenstein, September 28 1892, New York, New York; d. May 8 1967, Southampton, Hampshire, England, UK) was an early 20th century American playwright. His first marriage, in 1915 to Hazel Levy, ended in divorce in 1942; he then married actress Betty Field. They had three children before their divorce in 1956.

After graduating "cum laude" from New York Law School in 1912, Rice 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. 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, won the Pulitzer Prize 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" (also 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" (also 1934).

When these plays failed their author retired from the theatre, but 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).

Mr. 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.

Works

* "On Trial" (1914)
* "The Home of the Free" (1917)
* "Wake Up, Jonathan" (with Hatcher Hughes, 1921)
* "The Adding Machine" (1923)
* "Close Harmony" (with Dorothy Parker, 1924)
* "Street Scene" (1929) won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
* "The Voyage to Purilia" (1930), a novel.
* "Counselor-At-Law" (1931)
* "We, The People" (1933)
* "A New Life" (1943)
* "Dream Girl" (1945)

External links

*imdb name|id=0723418|name=Elmer Rice
* [http://www.ibdb.com/person.asp?ID=5377 Internet Broadway Database entry]
* [http://www.answers.com/topic/elmer-rice Elmer Rice]