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All the Drama: “Street Scene”, 1929 Winner, Pulitzer Prize for Drama
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All The Drama is hosted by Jan Simpson. It is a series of deep dives into the plays that have won The Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Pulitzer Prize for Drama: “Street Scene”1929 Pulitzer winner “Street Scene”,
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The year is 1929. Herbert Hoover is inaugurated as the nation's 31st president. Congress passes the Undesirable Aliens act, which makes it a crime to enter the US Illegally, even though immigration into the country had dropped dramatically since the 1924 Immigration act established a quota system that severely limited immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the decade long stock market boom starts to show signs of instability that will result in a major crash before the end of the year. And in that year of 1929, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama went to Elmer Rice's Street Scene, a drama that centers around 24 hours in the lives of the immigrant families who live in a shabby Manhattan tenement building where they struggle to figure out what part of the American dream they can claim for themselves. My name is Jan Simpson. Welcome to all the Drama, a podcast about the plays and musicals that have won American theater's highest accolade, the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Street Scene takes place entirely on the sidewalk in front of a building on a very, very hot summer day that will include a birth in the building, a death, lots of petty gossiping, a few political debates, some acts of kindness, and several different kinds of romantic encounters. The three man Pulitzer jury was divided in their assessment of the play. Two of them were knocked out by its portrayal of what they called humble city life. The third felt it leaned a little too heavily into melodrama. But all three were united in the opinion that there had been no better play that season and that the award should go to Street Scene or that it should just not be given at all that year. There were other possibilities, including Mackinaw, Sophie Treadwell's expressionistic interpretation of the real life story of a woman who was executed in the electric chair for murdering her husband just eight months before Treadwell's play opened. And there was the Front Page, Ben hecht and Charles MacArthur's comedy about Chicago reporters jockeying to cover a murder, and Philip Barry's romantic comedy Holiday, which would later become a movie starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn had been the understudy for the female lead when Holiday played on Broadway. But the Pulitzer board, which has the final say on all Pulitzer awards, agreed with the jury and gave the prize to street scenes playwright Elmer Rice. Rice was born on September 28, 1892, as Elmer Leopold Reisenstein. He grew up in a series of Manhattan buildings very similar to the one in Street Scene. He lived with his parents, an uncle and his paternal grandfather, who had been a political activist in Germany before he emigrated to the US where he remained a socialist. Elmer was the only child in the household. A younger brother had died from diphtheria when Elmer was three. As I researched Rice's life, I discovered that he went to the same public elementary school that I did years later, shout out to PS10, and that we both spent hours in the same library just a couple of blocks away. Rice went on to the High School of Commerce, where the courses were business, math, accounting and stenography, preparation for the kinds of jobs its graduates were expected to get. Rice dreamed of going to a more academic oriented school, but when he was 15, his parents told him he needed to go to work to help support the family. His uncle had been the family's financial mainstay, but several of his business ventures had failed and Elmer's sickly father was barely scraping together enough money to pay the rent on his own. Elmer eventually got a job as a clerk at a law office, and he was good at it. As his responsibilities increased, he decided that he might as well get a law degree. He couldn't afford to go to a law school affiliated with a university, so he applied to the independent New York Law School, which leaned hard on the nuts and bolts of the law, like how to write a contract and less on the moral arguments associated with the law. Bored in law school, Elmer began borrowing books that had nothing to do with the law from the library and reading them in class. Most of the books he chose were plays because he could finish them within the two hours that his classes usually lasted. One day he came across a collection of works by George Bernard Shaw, and he was so taken with the way that Shaw incorporated his socialist views into his plays that he began to read everything of Shaw's he could find. He then moved on to Ibsen and Strindberg, impressed by the serious subjects they tackled and paying particular attention to how those writers structured their plays. Rice graduated from law School in 1912 at the age of just 20. He was too young to be admitted to the bar, even though he had passed the exam, so his firm made him head clerk and raised his salary by 50%, most of which he contributed to the family household. But now, as bored by the job as he had been in law school, Rice began writing to fill his time and to stimulate his mind. A short story he wrote about an actor won a contest and earned him $20. When he discovered that a couple of his friends were writing plays for fun, he decided to try his hand at that, too. His first co written with a friend, won second place in a contest held by the Century Theater Club, and it convinced him that he might have a future as a full time writer. So after working as a lawyer for two years and saving up $300 which would allow him to continue helping his family out, Rice quit his job at the firm and set to writing a play. Adhering to the rule of writing what you know, he wrote a courtroom drama, and still intrigued by how plays were structured, he decided to tell the story in flashbacks. He called his play according to the Evidence. When he finished it, he took copies around to the offices of producers whose names he'd seen in the programs for the shows he'd attended. Whenever he could afford to go to the theater. To his surprise, he got two offers to do the play within the same week. One of them was from the high powered team of George M. Cohan and Sam Harris. They changed his play's title to on trial. And on August 19, 1914, just eight months after Rice had quit his legal job, his legal play opened on Broadway. He attended in a borrowed tuxedo. It ran for 360 performances and then toured around the world, earning RICE an estimated $100,000, a little over 3 million today and more than enough to support his family. But by then the young playwright had shortened his name from Reisenstein to Rice, in part to avoid any anti Semitic discrimination and in part because he thought it would look better on a marquee. Rice turned out eight plays after on trial, including the Adding Machine, a somewhat surreal satire about the dangers of an increasingly corporate world as seen through the life and afterlife of a bookkeeper named Mr. Zero, who kills his boss when he's replaced by the Machine in the title. Most of those plays only ran for a couple of months, although a brilliant adaptation of the Adding Machine that was directed by David Cromer ran at the Minetta lane Theater for five months in 2008. But then came Street Scene. It began as a series of vignettes about New York City life that Rice said he wrote for his own amusement. He said he hadn't really planned to do anything with them, but one, set in the front of a tenement building stuck with him, and in the fall of 1927 he began to flesh it out. He kept adding characters as he worked, and he loved the challenge of figuring out how to get what eventually would be some 30 of them on and off the stage in a way that believably captured the real life of a New York City street. The result was a melting pot mix of Jewish, Irish, Italian and Swedish residents whose hopes, dreams and fears bump up against and mingle with one another. The most dramatic event is when a husband suspects that his wife is sleeping with another man and fatally surprises the lovers when they're together. Rice said the play almost wrote itself and that he finished it in just three months. He clearly borrowed from his own life, modeling an old socialist after his grandfather, a young law school student after himself and others after the neighbors from his childhood. But the play also made me think of my own childhood when working class people in the pre gentrified New York where I grew up gathered on stoops in the summer, got all up in one another's business, but also helped out when someone on our block was in need. And Rice not only populated the play with true to life characters, he wanted his show to look right too. He and the set designer Joe Milzinger walked the city streets looking for the exact building they wanted to recreate on stage. They finally found it at 25 West 65th street, but a high rise now stands there today. Rice even wanted the show to sound authentic, so he wrote stage directions that intentionally called for the sounds of sirens, kids playing, babies crying, we radios blaring. It wasn't easy to find a producer to pay for all of that. Street Scene was turned down by at least a dozen of them, including the Theater Guild, which, Rice recalled still somewhat bitterly in his memoir, returned the script to him without any comment. Rice finally persuaded William A. Brady a once powerful producer who hadn't had much recent luck to take a chance on Street Scene. But the problems of getting the show on didn't end there. A young George Cooper was hired to direct the play, but a few days after rehearsals began, he walked out and never returned. Coker would only direct two more plays on Broadway after that, but he fared better in Hollywood, where he would earn Oscar nominations for directing such now classics as the Philadelphia Story, Born Yesterday and My Fair Lady. Of course, all of that was in the future, and none of it helped Street Scene at the time. A few more experienced directors were approached and asked to take over, but they begged off. So although he'd never directed professionally before, Rice stepped in and took over the job himself. According to his memoir, he started by firing most of the actors Cooger had hired. Luckily for Rice, none of them had yet signed contracts. Because the cast was so large and the budget so limited, Rice had to go largely with unknown actors. With a few exceptions. The terrific character actress Eula Bondi, who had been cast to play the main neighborhood busybody, was wooed with the promise of a percentage of the gross if the play proved successful. Street Scene finally opened on January 10, 1929, at the Playhouse Theater, where it ran for 601 performances before touring around the country, running in London for six months and being produced throughout Europe. And the movie producer King Viter turned it into a critically and commercially successful film in 1931. Meanwhile, Rice had done such a good job directing the stage version that he continued directing over the next two decades. He also ended up writing more than two dozen plays. And in the late 1930s, he joined with four other leading playwrights of the day, including Robert E. Sherwood and Sidney Howard, to form the Playwrights Company, which produced over 30 shows, including the original productions of Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Pat On a Hot Tin Roof, and the Best Man. On top of all that, for a while, Rice owned the Belasco Theater. He died on May 8, 1967, after suffering a heart attack. He was 74. I don't know why Rice is not more revered or remembered today, but if people know Street Scene at all, it's probably because of its musical adaptation. Kurt Weill saw the play in Berlin, and he later saw the movie, too. And when he finally met rice in 1936, he told him that he wanted to do a musical version of Street Scene. Rice declined the offer, but Weill didn't give up, and when he asked again in 1945, Rice said yes, although he would claim in his memoir that it was his idea to turn the play into a musical. Weyl had wanted Maxwell Anderson, with whom he'd successfully worked on Knickerbocker Holiday, to help him adapt Street Scene, but Rice insisted on doing the libretto himself. He turned out to be a difficult collaborator. He was unwilling to change almost anything in his original script. Rice also insisted on having Joe Meielsinger reproduce his original set from the 1929 play. And he overruled Weill's suggestion that the director, Reuben Mamoulian, stage the musical, although that might have been because Mamoulian was one of the directors who had turned down the offer to direct the original stage version. After Coker walked out, Rice and Weill compromised on Charles Friedman, who had recently directed Carmen Jones, Oscar Hammerstein's reworking of the Georges Bizet opera. Surprisingly, Weill and Rice both liked the idea of recruiting the African American poet Langston Hughes, an old friend of Rice's, to do the lyrics for the show. The musical's three week tryout in Philadelphia in December of 1946 bombed with both the press and the public. But when the Show Opened at Broadway's Adelphi Theater on January 9, 1947, it drew enthusiastic reviews from the New York critics. Not since Oklahoma. Has a stage play yielded so fine a musical, wrote the New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson. The public wasn't as impressed and the show ran only 148 performances. But the migrant story remains relevant and the musical continues to be done. A 2001 production of the musical featured black and Asian families, and just last year alone there were productions of the Street Scene musical in Colorado, Miami and Paris. However, the original version of Street Scene has never been revived on Broadway. But In June of 2013, the New York site specific company, Brave New World Repertory Theater, staged a production on a street in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood. It was directed by the company's co founder, Claire Beckman, and I am delighted that she agreed to talk with me about that production and about the legacy of Street Scene. Hello, Claire Beckman. Welcome to all the drama.
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Thank you for having me.
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How did you first encounter Street Scene? It's not a show that gets done a lot. Did you see it? Did you see the movie? Did you read about it in school? How did you first discover this play?
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C
Well, I had produced and directed a production of To Kill a Mockingbird, which was sort of our seminal production on my street in 2005, 20 years ago. And that was really our breakout production and it got a lot of press. It was, you Know, hugely attended thousands of people. They had to turn people away. It was one night only. And it was kind of an extraordinary event. And after that production, someone, and I wish I could remember who, asked me if I knew the place, Street Scene. And I had heard of it, you know, because I'd heard of Elmer Rice, but I'd never read it. So I immediately went out and got a copy and read it. And then I googled it. I read all about it. I knew there was a film. I saw the film. And this was way back in like 2006. So I kind of stuck that in the back of my mind. We didn't have the budget to do something that grand. It's an enormous cast. That's part of what makes it so special. But it was always in my mind. And then I spent about three years from like 2010 to 2013, trying to figure out how to do it, where to do it, speaking to all sorts of neighbors. There was one building very close to me on Cortelieu Road that I really wanted to use for the longest time. I thought it was perfect, but I couldn't get the neighbors to cooperate. And so everything came together on fifth street in Park Slope. After I had actually produced a little film. Worked with a woman who let me have access to her whole alleyway and asked her, gee, do you happen to have a building or two buildings for this project? And she was very cooperative. And then I gave a little stipend to every resident whose window we used and invited them and gave them front row seats. And, you know, that's kind of the way I've always worked, is by involving the community and having access to property where we produce our site specific work.
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D
Was that the major challenge in staging it? Finding a locale?
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C
Yes, that was definitely the major challenge. This is, you know, probably the production that's closest to my heart, which is why I was really honored to talk about it. But think it was Mockingbird. And in many ways that is. My daughter played Scout. I played Scout as an adult. My husband was in that. It was our first big production. But it's set in Alabama and Street Scene is set in New York. And it was an opportunity to. To bring a New York street to life. And that was just really thrilling. But getting the right venue was very challenging for several reasons. You can't really have a tree in front of the house cause that would block the audience. So I had to look at a lot of spaces, a lot of places, and finally found these. What I ended up doing is using two Buildings with front doors next to each other and two stoops instead of one. But it worked extremely well.
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Was it the fact that it was a New York City street? Is that what attracted you and made you want to do the play? Or was there something else about the play itself?
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C
Well, for one thing, what I do is literally street scenes. I make scenes on streets. So the name. The name was a metaphor for the mission of our theater company. But then I also was really struck by the fact that this was the first play on Broadway about the working class. And that's, I believe, why it won the Pulitzer. And it was full of immigrants. It's a working class hill opera, and it's the first of its kind. It's filled with dozen bit players with great dialogue, gossip, intrigue, murder. There's Italian, German, Jewish, Swedish immigrants. And then I changed the leading characters from Irish immigrants to African Americans. Not immigrants, but migrants from the great migration and set it in the Harlem Renaissance a few blocks uptown, because it was originally intended to be sort of in Upper Hell's Kitchen. But we've always had a mission of diversity, long before it was trendy. And I had actors I wanted to use. But also, I know that that is the truth of the way things were in Harlem at that time. It was a mixed community, and I wanted to show the way people really lived in New York. I've done research there. There were Jewish and. And Italian immigrants, Eastern European immigrants, Italian immigrants up there in Harlem. And African Americans had come up from the south, and they were all living together in harmony. It wasn't really until later that it became a sort of exclusively black community.
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Were you daunted at all by the size of the cast?
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C
Oh, yes. Oh, yes, very much so. But then I realized that it's a series of vignettes and very much like a soap opera. And I've had a little experience with that. I am an actor first and foremost, and I was actually on a couple of sorts of soaps back in the 80s. So I understand the way that works and why it works. It's a series of little scenes that are just pasted together. And actually, when you have an enormous cast and everybody only has to learn a couple of scenes, you're not asking as much of the actors. For example, I just directed a Eugene o' Neill play with four actors that was incredibly long, and that's a lot of lines for them to learn. But these actors really didn't have to learn a lot of lines, except for maybe the leads. But most of the bit players and there are many of them had one or two little scenes like the nannies who are my favorite characters, these two nannies who are pushing baby strollers. And after the murder, they look up into the top window and there's a cop sticking his head out. And they say, officer, can we come up and look around? And in this like sort of classic New York glib Irish humor, he says, yeah, sure, bring the babies up with you too. You know, are you crazy? That was just so much fun. And it was just also a thrill having done a lot of site specific that was sort of on a horizontal plane, like To Kill a Mockingbird. We were all outside, people came out of stoops, but I'd never done anything vertical before. So this was horizontal and vertical. Oh, that's right. You know, going four floors up. And I used four windows. The window where the murder takes place, the window where the husband's wife is having a baby, and then the two downstairs bay windows and. And the stoops. And so we had cops rushing up and down the streets. We had cops running up and down the stairs. And so I basically just worked individually on every vignette and then just sort of pasted them together.
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D
Some plays that were written in the twenties are a bit creaky today. How did this one play, how relevant is it?
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C
Well, that's why it won the Pulitzer Prize. The dialogue is so fresh. You know, some of the language is still a little bit archaic, but in a way that. That everybody really loves. I think, like, there's a lot of, where are you going? Says I. He said, you know, that sort of. That kind of old fashioned vernacular. But it's fun, and there's so much gossip in it. It's delicious. It starts out as this delicious comedy with lots of neighborhood gossip and intrigue, and it ends as a heartbreaking domestic tragedy. And it's. It's like the first of its kind. You know, everything. Everything on Broadway up until then was vaudeville or it was, you know, Coward or. I mean, it was either very upper class comedies or vaudeville. There was no great American drama.
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D
What was your audience's response to the play?
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C
Oh, God, they loved it. They loved it. And I had so much fun doing research for it because I love the 1920s. I mean, if I can go back to any era, that would be the one. And I love the Harlem Renaissance. I mean, I. I feel like if I lived back then, I would have wanted to go uptown and, you know, dance. And this play opened in January of 1929. So what, 10 months before the crash, and, you know, it was a working class story. There was still poverty, there was still strife, and that was brewing. And that was part of. I think what led to the crash was that there was this terrible inequity in society, the very rich and the very poor and, you know, and that it wasn't sustainable, but people could live and they supported each other. And this is on the hottest day of the year, and there was no air conditioning, so everybody had to be out on the stoops because there. There's no relief. So community in a way that we just don't even have anymore. And long before television and the Internet and all the other things that have separated us, not to mention pandemics, the people were forced to be out together in community and dependent on one another for everything. In fact, when the pregnant woman is having her baby, the husband sticks his head out the window when he asks anybody he can find, please run to the corner, call the doctor, because no one has phones. They really depend on one another in a very touching and beautiful way. And so I loved it for all of those reasons, and so did the audience. And in my research, I'd learned that tableaux vivant was an art form that was very popular right up until about this time in the. In the twenties. And before these tableaux would be created to celebrate a particular event or something that people would dress up in costumes and they would create a living painting. So I began the play with the tableau vivant. Had everybody, because there are so many, 30 actors in it, had everybody come out to this Bessie Smith music, come out of their apartments onto the stoop. And then we created a tableau where everybody is in character, chatting with a neighbor. Held it for about three or four seconds. And then there was. They all had a signal that was the sign for everybody to go to their first positions to begin the play where they would make their first entrance. Because, as I said, after that, it's really just a series of vignettes. And I was also really inspired by Spike Lee's Crooklyn. He has this phenomenal opening of that film with a really long shot that follows the children in Bed Stuy racing through the streets. So I paid a little bit of an homage to Spike Lee, too, by bringing it back into a black community.
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D
You have mentioned a couple of times why you think the Pulitzer jury recommended Street Scene for the prize. But there were some other plays that season, including the Front Page and Mackinaw, and both of them have, particularly the Front Page, have been produced a lot More than Street Scene. And so I'm wondering if you think the judges made the right decision.
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C
I do. I definitely do. I know the Front Page and Mackinaw. I. I think this is a play about immigrants and about working class people. And I suspect that on the sort of cusp of the Great Depression, became, first of all, just very expensive to produce again because of the numbers of people in it. And then also maybe just a little bit too close to home, I don't know. And then I'm not sure you needed Street Scene again in the same way. I mean, I think that the genre of this sort of intrigue and gossip and these vignettes of. Of different kinds of people all talking about the intrigue or whatever, I think that was replaced first with the radio soap opera, then the television soap opera, and then finally films. But for its time, I think it absolutely deserved the prize.
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D
Elmer Rice was a really big deal in the theater for several decades, from twenties into the beginning, maybe of the sixties. And as you say, he helped to create a certain kind of play that broke with what was traditionally being done on Broadway at the time. But so also did Eugene o'. Neill. And Eugene o' Neill's name is known today. Elmer Rice's not as much. And I wondered if you had any thoughts about why that might be so.
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C
Well, I can't really speak for all of his other plays, but as far as Street Scene is concerned, you know, and I say this with a certain amount of regret because I wasn't able to pay the wonderful actors, and I want to shout out to the wonderful actors who are in my production, I wasn't able to pay them enough because it was such an enormous cast. And I know that every single one of them was a part of it because they loved it and they loved the idea of it, and they wanted to give something back to our community in the spirit of our mission. And they did all get paid, but not nearly what they deserve. And I think that that economically has been probably the biggest challenge with this play, because you can't really do it with double casting the way you can with, you know, some plays, because the murder brings everybody out and you need a big crowd. It's always going to be as expensive as a big musical. Because the thrill of the show is the sheer numbers of people out on the street. That's the thrill of it. And you need those people. So I think it might be done in colleges or struggling little companies like ours who are able to quite honestly take advantage of the kindness of the many Great actors that we work with who were all gracious and generous with their time and talent and. And Eugene o' Neill has four or five people in his plays. That's a lot easier for a theater to produce. And I really do think that that that is the reason. I mean, I have thought about doing Street Scene again many, many times, but after 2016 or 17, I made a vow to start to pay actors what they deserved. And then. And so the problem with that is that then you have to do plays with smaller casts. If you're going to pay actors what they deserve, you have to use less people. It's a hard decision to make.
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D
Well, I want to thank you, though, for taking your time and being gracious about it to look back at your production and look back at Street Scene in general, even if we may not be able to get it on some of the larger stages, perhaps we can get it back in the conversation.
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C
That would be great. One thing that we didn't talk about, not that it's a big deal, but you know the original name of Street Scene was the Sidewalks of New York.
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D
Huh?
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C
Did you know that?
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D
I did not.
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C
It was originally called the Sidewalks of New York, and I'm sure that that came from this old 1894 song. Boys and girls together, me and Mamie O' Rourke trips the light fantastic on the Sidewalks of New York.
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D
I had not really known about Street Scene until starting to work on this episode, and I have to say, it's emerged as one of my favorites.
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C
Oh, that's so nice. Me too.
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D
Again, thank you so much for talking to us about it.
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C
It's really been an honor. Thank you so much, Jan.
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D
And thank you for listening. I hope you'll come back next time. And if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please send them to me@janbrodroidradio.com.
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E
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