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Take no heed of all the words that they speak, lest you hear your servant curse you. Kohelet 7:21 |
Elmer Rice (28 September 1892 – 8 May 1967) was an American playwright. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1929 play, Street Scene.
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Rice was born Elmer Leopold Reizenstein at 127 East Ninetieth Street in New York City, New York. A few months later, in 1893, his parents moved to a large new flat on Madison Avenue. He was named (somewhat altered) after his two grandfathers, as was the custom at the time, but he disliked the name Elmer and the facetious comments it provoked. His younger brother, Lester, died when Elmer was about three, making him, in effect, an only child. Both he and his mother felt the loss deeply and he always missed his companion and playmate. His grandfather was a political activist in the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states. After the failure of that revolution, he was given the choice of imprisonment or exile. He chose to emigrate to the United States where he became a successful businessman. He spent most of his retirement years living with the Rice family and developed a close relationship with his grandson Elmer. He was a staunch atheist and this may have influenced Rice himself, who refused to attend Hebrew school or to have a Bar Mitzvah. A pacifist, he also decided that he would refuse to serve in the First World War if drafted but was not. Rice's father was an epileptic and as a result, Elmer seldom invited friends home for fear that his father might have a seizure in their presence. The family always worried when he was late getting home, for fear that he had had an epileptic fit on the street and been taken to hospital, a not uncommon occurrence. Although he knew that his father loved him, he disliked his quarrelsome personality. He found him physically unappealing and disliked displays of affection from him, "for children are repelled by ugliness, and I found him ugly." His grandfather and his Uncle Will, both of whom boarded with the family, made up for what his father lacked. He spent much of his childhood reading and wrote, "Nothing in my life has been more helpful than the simple act of joining the library." He became an avid reader of plays and a keen theatregoer.
He did not complete high school due to his family's financial situation, brought on by his father's ill health, and he took a number of jobs before deciding to go to law school. This required first obtaining a high-school diploma which he did by taking the necessary examinations given by the New York State Board of Regents.
In spite of finding law school extremely boring and reading plays in class because they could be finished within two hours, he graduated from New York Law School in 1912 and began a short-lived legal career. He was cynical about the legal profession and resigned in 1914. He was alarmed by the fact that when asked, all the attorneys in his office said that they would strive to have a client acquitted in a murder case, even if they knew he was guilty.
He turned to writing, and his first play, the melodramatic On Trial (1914), was the first American stage production to employ the flashback technique of the screen. On Trial, a murder mystery, was a tremendous success and ran for 365 performances in its first run in New York. It then went on tour throughout the United States with three separate companies and was produced in Argentina, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Scotland and South Africa. At the age of twenty-one, it earned its author $100,000. Few of his later plays received as much acclaim. The play was adapted for the cinema three times - in 1917, 1928 and 1939.
His next major contribution to the theatre was the expressionistic The Adding Machine (1923), which satirized the growing regimentation of man in the machine age through the life and death of the dull book-keeper, Mr. Zero.
Rice's next play, Street Scene (1929), later the subject of an opera by Kurt Weill, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for its realistic chronicle of life in the slums. The Left Bank (1931), described expatriation from America as an ineffectual escape from materialism, and Counsellor-at-Law (1931) drew a realistic picture of the legal profession for which Rice had been trained.
In April 1932, Rice and his son Robert took a trip to Europe, where they visited both Germany and the Soviet Union. While in Germany, Rice heard both Goebbels and Hitler give speeches, informing him first-hand about National Socialism. He later used some of this information in his writing. The depression of the 1930s inspired We, the People (1933), which Rice described as, "the misfortunes of a typical skilled workman and his family, helplessly engulfed in the tide of national adversity." The Reichstag fire trial was paralleled in Judgement Day (1934), and conflicting American and Soviet ideologies formed the subject of the conversation-piece Between Two Worlds (1934).
After the failure of these plays, Rice returned to Broadway in 1937 to write and direct for the Playwrights' Producing Company, which he helped to establish. Of his later plays, the most successful was the fantasy Dream Girl (1945), in which an over-imaginative girl encounters unexpected romance in reality. Rice's last play was Cue for Passion (1958), a modern psycho-analytical variation of the Hamlet theme in which Diana Wynyard played the Gertrude-like character, Grace Nicholson. Rice was the author of a controversial book on American drama, The Living Theatre (1960), and of an autobiography, Minority Report (1964).
Rice was the first director of the New York office of the Federal Theatre Project, but resigned in 1936 to protest government censorship of the FTP's "Living Newspaper", Ethiopia, about Mussolini's invasion of that country.
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, Judy and Paul, before their divorce in 1956. John was a brilliant student and lawyer who died in a swimming accident at age 40.
Elmer Rice lived for many years on a wooded estate on Long Ridge Road in Stamford, Connecticut, until his death in Southampton, England, in 1967 while on a trip with third wife, Barbara. He had five children - Robert, Peggy, John, Judy and Paul.
Rice was portrayed by the actor Jon Favreau in the 1994 film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.
Elmer Rice
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