Rice, Elmer (Elmer Reizenstein)

Rice, Elmer (Elmer Reizenstein) (1892–1967), New York dramatist, producer, and novelist, graduated from the New York Law School (1912), but soon abandoned this profession for writing. His first play, On Trial (1914), was a murder mystery employing the technique of the motion‐picture “cutback” to present scenes that are described by the trial witnesses. His works for the Morningside Players, a little‐theater group, were published in Morningside Plays (1917). In 1923 he obtained his second success with The Adding Machine, a satirical, Expressionistic fantasy. His interest in the social aspects of life is further exhibited in the realistic play Street Scene (1929, Pulitzer Prize); We, the People (1933); Judgment Day (1934), dealing with the ideologies involved in the trials for the burning of the Reichstag building; Between Two Worlds (1934); American Landscape (1938); Two on an Island (1940); Flight to the West (1941); and A New Life (1943). His other plays, mainly farces and melodramas, include Wake Up, Jonathan (1921), with Hatcher Hughes; Cock Robin (1928), with Philip Barry; Close Harmony (1929), with Dorothy Parker; The Subway (1929); See Naples and Die (1929); The Left Bank (1931); Counsellor‐at‐Law (1931); Black Sheep (1932); and Dream Girl (1945). His novels include A Voyage to Purilia (1930); Imperial City (1937), on New York; and The Show Must Go On (1949). The Living Theatre (1959) collects essays, originally lectures, on the theater as a social institution. Minority Report (1963) is an autobiography from his beginnings as a lawyer through his theatrical career, which included regional directorship of the New York Federal Theatre Project and helping to found the Playwright's Producing Company and to direct some of its plays.