Playwrights, Inc.

To many playwrights, producers seem a kind of necessary evil. Not only because they may blow hot & cold; not only because they may meddle. Also because, as the playwrights see it, they hog too much of the profits, impose too much of a capital-&-labor relationship.

Last week Broadway producers got their worst smack in the face in years. Five major playwrights--Maxwell Anderson, Robert E. Sherwood, S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice--curtly announced that they were going into business for themselves, as a group.

Although the announcement was made before the new group had even chosen a name, its working plans were fairly definite. Each man has promised a new play for next season. (First production will be a play about Abraham Lincoln by Sherwood.) Each is pledged to put $10,000 into a common fund. Each will get regulation stage and movie royalties, share the general profit & loss of production.

The announced reason for the venture is that the theatre needs a permanent organization, which playwrights can best create. But another reason, at least as important, could be safely hazarded: the possibility of larger earnings. The group stands to lose nothing as playwrights if they only break even as producers.

Most newsworthy of the five playwrights is Elmer Rice who, by coming into the group, re-enters the theatre after dramatically forswearing it when two of his plays were panned in the fall of 1934. At that time Rice called first-night audiences "the scum of the earth," characterized a Manhattan critic as "a senile alcoholic." Before his sputtering exit, Elmer Rice, Inc. had produced six plays, one of which (Counsellor-at-Law) was successful enough to give him a huge profit.

The new group may also recall that in 1923 six prominent playwrights, among them Owen Davis and Edward Childs Carpenter, set up in business for themselves, as Dramatists' Theatre, Inc. Two-and-a-half years later Dramatists' Theatre, Inc. quietly folded.

The five playwrights stand almost at the top of the U. S. theatre; only Eugene O'Neill in drama and George S. Kaufman in comedy rate higher. Four of the five have won the Pulitzer Prize: Howard for They Knew What They Wanted (1925), Rice for Street Scene (1929), Anderson for Both Your Houses (1933), Sherwood for Idiot's Delight (1936).

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