Elmer Rice (born Elmer Leopold Reizenstein, September 28, 1892 – May 8, 1967) was an American playwright. He is best known for his plays The Adding Machine (1923) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of New York tenement life, Street Scene (1929).
Contents
Biography
Early years
Rice was born Elmer Leopold Reizenstein at 127 East 90th Street in New York City. His grandfather was a political activist in the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states. After the failure of that political upheaval, he emigrated to the United States where he became a businessman. He spent most of his retirement years living with the Rice family and developed a close relationship with his grandson Elmer, who became a politically motivated writer and shared his grandfather's liberal and pacifist politics.
A staunch atheist, his grandfather may also have influenced Elmer in his feelings about religion, as he refused to attend Hebrew school or to have a bar mitzvah. In contrast, Rice's relationship with his father was very distant. As he wrote in his autobiography, his grandfather and his Uncle Will, both of whom boarded with the family, made up for the affection and attention his father withheld. A child of the tenements, Rice spent much of his youth reading, to his family's consternation, and later observed, "Nothing in my life has been more helpful than the simple act of joining the library."
Because of his need to support his family when his father's epilepsy worsened, Rice did not complete high school, and he took several menial jobs before earning his diploma by preparing for the state examinations on his own and then applying to law school. Though he disliked legal studies and spent a good deal of class time reading plays in class (because they could be finished within a two-hour lecture, he said), Rice graduated from New York Law School in 1912 and began a short-lived legal career. Leaving the profession in 1914, he was always to retain a cynical outlook about lawyers, but his two years in a law office provided him with material for several plays, most notably Counsellor-at-Law (1931). Courtroom dramas became a Rice specialty.
Needing to make a living, he decided to try writing full-time. It was a wise decision. His first play, On Trial (1914), a melodramatic murder mystery, was a great success and ran for 365 performances in New York. George M. Cohan offered to buy the rights for $30,000, a proposition Rice declined largely because he did not believe Cohan could be serious. Co-authored with a friend, Frank Harris (not the famed Oscar Wilde biographer), the play was purportedly the first American drama to employ the technique of reverse-chronology, telling the story from its conclusion to its starting-point. On Trial then went on tour throughout the United States with three separate companies and was produced in Argentina, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Scotland and South Africa. The author ultimately earned $100,000 from his first work for the stage. None of his later plays earned him as much as On Trial. The play was adapted for the cinema three times, in 1917, 1928, and 1939.
Career
After writing four more plays of no special distinction, Rice startled audiences in 1923 with his next contribution to the theatre, the boldly expressionistic The Adding Machine, which he wrote in 17 days. A satire about the growing regimentation of life in the machine age, the play tells the story of the life, death, and bizarre afterlife of a dull bookkeeper, Mr. Zero. When Mr. Zero, a mere cog in the corporate machine, discovers that he is to be replaced at work by an adding machine, he snaps and murders his boss. After his trial and execution, he enters the next life only to confront some of the same issues and, judged to be of minimal use in heaven, is sent back to Earth for recycling. Theatre critic Brooks Atkinson called it "the most original and brilliant play any American had written up to that time ... the harshest and most illuminating play about modern society [Broadway had ever seen]."
Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott were enthusiastic. Other reviewers spoke of him, hyperbolically, as a writer who might become America's Ibsen. Directed with great ingenuity by Philip Moeller, designed by Lee Simonson, and produced by the Theatre Guild, the play starred Dudley Digges (actor) and Edward G. Robinson, then at the start of his acting career. Ironically, it made its author no money at all. (Adapted as an innovatively staged musical in 2007, The Adding Machine enjoyed a successful Off-Broadway run in 2008.)
When Dorothy Parker was at work on her play the following year (loosely based on fellow Algonquin Round Table member Robert Benchley, his marital problems, and the extra-marital temptations he was grappling with) and needed a co-author, she approached Elmer Rice, now acknowledged as the Broadway "boy wonder" of the moment. It was a smooth collaboration and resulted in a brief affair between Parker and the already-married Rice, begun at Rice's insistent urging. The run of the play did not go smoothly; however; despite good reviews, Close Harmony (1924) closed quickly and was forgotten.
Rice was a prolific, even tireless writer. His plays over the next five years included the unproduced The Sidewalks of New York (1925), Is He Guilty? (1927) and The Gay White Way (1928) and two collaborations, Wake Up, Jonathan (1928) with Hatcher Hughes, a dramatist unknown today and Cock Robin (1929) with Philip Barry, a Broadway name equal to Rice's. None of these plays were a success. Rice was a theatre professional by this time: open to collaboration, increasingly interested in producing and directing his own plays. In the 1930s, he even bought a Broadway house, the famed Belasco Theatre.
Personal life
Rice was married in 1915 to Hazel Levy and had two children with her: Margaret and Robert. After his divorce in 1942, he married actress Betty Field with whom he had three children: John Alden, Judy, and Paul. Field and Rice divorced in 1956.
Although born into a working-class family with no interest in the arts and known primarily for his attachment to theater and politics, Rice was passionate about the Old Masters and modern art. His art collection, slowly assembled over the years, included works by Picasso, Braque, Rouault, Leger, Derain, Klee, and Modigliani. He regularly frequented New York's museums, and in his autobiography, wrote of his first trip to Spain and the powerful impact Velazquez had on him and, in Mexico, of enjoying the work of Diego Rivera and the Mexican Muralists, artists who shared his political views. He was close friends with Japanese-American modernist painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi.
Elmer Rice lived for many years on a wooded estate in Stamford, Connecticut until his death in Southampton, England, in 1967 of pneumonia after suffering a heart attack. Obituaries noted a long and respected theater career. Brooks Atkinson described Rice in his history of Broadway as "a plain, rather sober man with a reticent, unyielding personality...But when a social principle was at stake, he was more clear-headed than most people, and he was quietly invincible...He was one of Broadway's most eminent citizens."
Archive
Elmer Rice's papers were placed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 1968, a year after his death. Additions have been made by family members over the years. The collection spans over 100 boxes and includes contracts, correspondence, manuscript drafts, notebooks, photographs, royalty statements, scripts, theater programs, and over seventy-three scrapbooks. The Ransom Center's library division has over 900 books from Rice's personal library, many of which are inscribed to or annotated by Rice.
Film portrayal
Rice was portrayed by the actor Jon Favreau in the 1994 film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.
Stage productions
A Defection from Grace with Frank Harris (1913, unpublished)
The Seventh Commandment with Frank Harris (1913, unpublished)
The Passing of Chow-Chow (1913, one act, published in 1925)
On Trial (1914) with Frank Harris
The Iron Cross (1917)
The Home of the Free (1918)
For the Defense (1919)
It Is the Law (1922)
The Adding Machine (1923)
The Mongrel (1924) from a novel by Hermann Bahr
Close Harmony (with Dorothy Parker, 1924)
The Sidewalks of New York (1925, unpublished in 1925, published in 1934 as Three Plays Without Words)
Is He Guilty? (1927)
Wake Up, Jonathan with Hatcher Hughes (1928)
The Gay White Way (1928)
Cock Robin with Philip Barry (1929)
Street Scene (1929, also directed)
The Subway (1929)
See Naples and Die (1930, also directed)
The Left Bank (1931, also produced and directed)
Novels
On Trial (1915, a novelization of the play)
Papa Looks for Something (unpublished, 1926)
A Voyage to Purilia (1930), serialized in the New Yorker in 1929
Imperial City (1937)
The Show Must Go On (1949)
Non-fiction
"The Playwright as Director," Theatre Arts Monthly 13 (May 1929): pp. 355–360
"Organized Charity Turns Censor," Nation 132 (June 10, 1931) pp. 628–630
"The Joys of Pessimism," Forum 86 (July 1931) pp. 33–35
"Sex in the Modern Theatre," Harper's 164 (May 1932) pp. 665–673
"Theatre Alliance: A Cooperative Repertory Project," Theatre Arts Monthly 19 (June 1935) pp. 427–430
"The Supreme Freedom" (1949) (pamphlet)
"Conformity in the Arts" (1953) (pamphlet)
"Entertainment in the Age of McCarthy," New Republic 176 (April 13, 1953) pp. 14–17
The Living Theatre (1959)
Minority Report (1964)
"Author! Author!" American Heritage 16 (April 1965) pp 46–49, 84–86
Selected filmography (play adaptations)
1917: On Trial
1922: For the Defense
1924: It Is the Law
1928: On Trial
1930: Oh Sailor Behave
1931: Street Scene
1933: Counsellor at Law
1939: On Trial
1948: Dream Girl
1969: The Adding Machine
Other writing
1921: Doubling for Romeo (scenario)
1922: Rent Free (scenario)
1942: Holiday Inn (adaptation)