Elmer Rice

Elmer Rice 1892-1967, American dramatist, b. New York City, LL.B. New York Law School, 1912. After the success of his first play, On Trial (1914), he turned his interests to the theater. Rice's first major contribution to the American stage was The Adding Machine (1923), an expressionistic play satirizing man in the machine age. Street Scene (1929; operatic version by Kurt Weill , 1947), one of his most compassionate works, is a realistic drama of tenement life in New York. His plays of the 1930s—including Counsellor-at-Law (1931), We, the People (1933), and Between Two Worlds (1934)—continued to express his social and political views. Although Dream Girl (1945), a romantic comedy, was a huge success, his later plays for the most part lack the power of his early works. He was also the author of novels and of essays, some of which were published as The Living Theatre (1959). During the 1930s Rice was regional director of the N.Y. Federal Theater project.

Bibliography: See his autobiography Minority Report (1963); A. F. Palmieri, Elmer Rice: A Playwright's Vision of America (1980).

Rice, Elmer (1892–1967), American dramatist. His first major play was the expressionist drama The Adding Machine (1923). His plays of the 1930s (We, the People, 1933; Judgment Day, 1934; Between Two Worlds, 1934) are a response to the Depression and international ideological conflict. Rice was a campaigner for social justice and an outspoken critic of censorship.

Rice, Elmer [ Elmer Reizenstein] (1892–1967), American lawyer and dramatist, whose On Trial (1914) was the first American play to employ the flashback technique of the cinema. Rice's first major contribution to the theatre was the expressionistic fantasy The Adding Machine (1923), which satirized the growing regimentation of modern man in the machine age through the life and death of the arid bookkeeper Mr Zero. Street Scene (1929), which followed, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its realistic chronicle of life in the slums. The author later adapted it as the libretto of an opera with music by Kurt Weill, first performed in 1947. Counsellor-at-Law (1931) drew an equally realistic picture of the legal profession. The depression of the 1930s inspired We, the People (1933), the Reichstag trial was paralleled in Judgement Day, and conflicting American and Soviet ideologies formed the subject of Between Two Worlds (both 1934). When these plays failed on Broadway Rice retired from the theatre, but returned two years later to help found and run the Playwrights' Producing Company. His later plays included American Landscape (1938), Two on an Island, Flight to the West (both 1940), the last a fervent denunciation of Nazism, and A New Life (1942). He recaptured some of the success of his early plays with the fantasy Dream Girl (1945) and presented a modern psychoanalytical variation on the Hamlet theme in Cue for Passion (1958), in which Diana Wynyard played the Gertrude-like character Grace Nicholson.