Elmer Rice

Elmer Rice (1892-1967) was an American playwright and novelist. Often innovative in style, his plays reveal a concern with individual freedom confronted by the tyranny of impersonal institutions and destructive passions.

Elmer Rice was born Elmer Reizenstein on Sept. 28, 1892, in New York City. After 2 years of high school, he began working at the age of 14. He passed the regents' examinations and entered the New York Law School, from which he graduated cum laude in 1912. He passed the bar examinations but decided to try writing instead. His play On Trial (1914) was a resounding success. In 1915 he married Hazel Levy. Although not a member of any political party, Rice inclined toward socialism. After World War I he spent 2 years in Hollywood before moving to East Hampton, Conn.

Following On Trial, he had several plays produced in New York, but it was not until The Adding Machine (1923), an expressionistic tragic-comic portrait of dehydrated man, that he showed his true power. Two more plays, written in collaboration, were produced before he directed his powerful Street Scene (1929), a realistic presentation of environmental influences on character relationships. It won the Pulitzer Prize. The Subway (1929), a rather underrated play much on the order of The Adding Machine, had a short run. In 1930 he published a novel, A Voyage to Purilia, and had an unsuccessful production of See Naples and Die. But in 1931 his The Left Bank, dealing with American expatriates, and Counsellor-at-law enlarged his reputation.

The impact of the Great Depression and Rice's trip to Russia and Europe in 1932 was manifested in the controversial We, the People (1933). After the production of Judgment Day and Between Two Worlds (1934), Rice excoriated New York critics and announced his retirement from the commercial theater. Nonetheless, between 1935 and 1938 he served with the Federal Theater Project, published a novel, helped organize The Playwrights' Company, and had his American Landscape produced.

After his divorce in 1942 Rice married Betty Field. During the war he worked for the U.S. Office of War Information, was active in the American Civil Liberties Union, and was president of the Dramatists' Guild. Dream Girl (1945), a psychoanalytical fantasy, was his final popular success. His novel The Show Must Go On appeared in 1949.

Rice's final work included essays, The Living Theatre (1959); an autobiography, Minority Report (1963); and additional plays. He received an honorary doctor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1961. Divorced again, in 1966 he married Barbara Marshall. He died of a heart attack on May 8, 1967.

Further Reading

Rice's Minority Report (1963) gives autobiographical details and personal accounts of his plays. The major critical work is Robert G. Hogan, The Independence of Elmer Rice (1965). Joseph Mersand, The American Drama since 1930 (1949), and Allan Lewis, American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theatre (1965), provide additional criticism.

Additional Sources

Vanden Heuvel, Michael, Elmer Rice: a research and production sourcebook, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. □

Rice, Elmer [Leopold] [né Reizenstein] (1892–1967), playwright. The native New Yorker studied law and began to practice before switching to the theatre. In a career that lasted more than forty years, he had more than twenty plays produced on Broadway, ranging from starkly realistic drama to comic fantasy. His earliest work leaned heavily on his experience as a lawyer, and his first drama, On Trial (1914), provided one of the most sensational first nights in theatre history. For the Defense (1919) and It Is the Law (1922) followed, as did a vehicle for Mrs. Fiske written with Hatcher Hughes, Wake Up, Jonathan! (1921). The Adding Machine (1923) was a landmark expressionistic fantasy. Close Harmony (1924), written with Dorothy Parker, was well received but failed, while his mystery Cock Robin (1928), written with Philip Barry, enjoyed a modest run. He earned a Pulitzer Prize for his unflinching slice of New York life, Street Scene (1929), but two other plays the same year, The Subway and See Naples and Die, were unsuccessful. Rice deftly probed American expatriates in Paris in The Left Bank (1931), then a month later returned to the legal world with the powerful drama Counsellor‐at‐Law. For the rest of the 1930s he wrote largely well‐intentioned propaganda pieces, which failed to please critics and playgoers: We, the People (1932), Judgment Day (1934), Between Two Worlds (1934), and American Landscape (1938). Of his later works, such as Two on an Island (1940), Flight to the West (1940), A New Life (1943), The Grand Tour (1951), Not for Children (1951), The Winner (1954), and Cue for Passion (1958), his most interesting play was Dream Girl (1945), written for his wife, Betty Field. Rice directed most of his own plays, as well as those by others, including Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938). He served as a regional director of the Federal Theatre Project and was a founder of the Playwrights' Company. Autobiography: Minority Report, 1963.

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.

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.

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.