Theatre Guild

Theatre Guild, New York, theatre production company, evolved out of the work of the Washington Square Players for the presentation of non-commercial plays, American and foreign, to a subscription audience. It occupied the Garrick Theatre, where its first production, in 1919, was Benavente's The Bonds of Interest. Among the plays which followed were Molnár's Liliom (1921), Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped, and Ccaron;apek's RUR (both 1922). The first new American play to be staged was Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1923), but on the whole productions of foreign plays predominated, with Shaw's works very much to the fore. As early as 1920 Heartbreak House was seen, followed by Saint Joan in 1923, and in 1925 Caesar and Cleopatra was chosen as the first play presented by the Guild in its own Guild Theatre (see VIRGINIA THEATRE). Later Shaw productions included Arms and the Man (1925), Pygmalion (1926), The Doctor's Dilemma (1927), Major Barbara (1928), and The Apple Cart (1930). There were also productions of several of O'Neill's plays including Strange Interlude (1928) and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), the Gershwins' folk opera Porgy and Bess (1935), and Sherwood's Idiot's Delight (1936). Much of its work was mounted at theatres other than the Guild. The enterprise became vulnerable during the financial recession of the 1930s and early 1940s, but was rescued by the success of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, presented under the Guild's auspices at the St James Theatre in 1943. It staged the same team's Carousel (1945) and such notable later productions as O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (1946); but it never regained its former eminence. The Guild Theatre was taken over by the American National Theatre and Academy in 1950; the Guild itself continued for a time to mount new plays, revivals, and musicals within a commercial framework.

Two important breakaway organizations were the Group Theatre and the Playwrights' Company. The latter, founded in 1938, included playwrights such as Maxwell Anderson, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, and Robert E. Sherwood, all of whom had had plays staged by the Theatre Guild but were unhappy with it. Many of the Playwrights' Company's productions were written by its members, and it survived until 1960.