Street Scene

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Street Scene (1929), a play by Elmer Rice. [Playhouse, 601 perf.; Pulitzer Prize.] A row of old New York brownstones has become a street of tenements housing a wide variety of people. Among them are an Irish couple, Frank ( Robert Kelly) and Anna Maurrant ( Mary Servoss), their daughter, Rose ( Erin O'Brien‐Moore), and younger son, Willie ( Russell Griffin). Rose is attractive and is courted by two men, the flashy, prosperous Harry Easter ( Glenn Coulter) and her serious but affectionate Jewish neighbor, Sam Kaplan ( Horace Braham). When Frank discovers his wife having an affair with the milkman Steve Sankey ( Joseph Baird), he kills them both. Left alone with a brother to raise, Rose rejects proposals from Harry and from Sam (whom she prefers). She is determined to bring up Willie so that he can be freed from the life she and her parents have known. John Anderson of the Evening Journal wrote, “It is a play which builds engrossing trivialities into a drama that is rich and compelling and catches in the wide reaches of its curbside panorama the comedy and heartbreak that lie a few steps up from the sidewalks of New York.” In 1947 Rice adapted his play into a superb opera version of the same title with music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by the poet Langston Hughes, and a cast headed by Anne Jeffreys, Brian Sullivan, and Polyna Stoska. The musical version only ran 148 performances in the Adelphi Theatre but later became part of several opera companies' repertories. Notable songs: What Good Would the Moon Be?; Somehow I Never Could Believe; Moon‐Faced, Starry‐Eyed; Remember That I Care.

Street Scene, play by Elmer Rice, produced and published in 1929 and awarded a Pulitzer Prize. A musical version was written with Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes in 1947 and titled Street Scenes.

Against the background of life in a New York tenement are presented the lives of the Kaplan and Maurrant families: Samuel Kaplan, a Jewish youth, falls in love with Rose Maurrant, an Irish girl, whose browbeaten mother, Anna, has taken as her lover the milk driver Steve Sankey. Her father, Frank, in a drunken rage kills Anna and Sankey. Rose, meanwhile, having refused a prosperous married man who wants to take her “away from all this,” tells Sam that though she loves him she can never belong to anyone, for she must care for her brother and save him from an environment that leaves no life unblighted.