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.