Word: anderson
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Joyce Redman plays at the level of the script, in tragedy-queen style with plenty of pedal; and whether right or not for Anne, is completely right for Anderson...
Though less tasseled and pentameter'd than Anderson's early history plays, Anne is still a thing of words-high speeches, soliloquies, numerous occasions where phrases that seem hot off the typewriter jostle others that seem worthy of black letter. At moments the language has energy, but in general whenever the poet in Anderson stirs, the playwright distinctly suffers...
...office outlook for Anne of the Thousand Days yanks the ten-year-old Playwrights' Company out of a slump that had threatened to end a unique Broadway team. Last season, for the first time since it was formed by Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice and Robert E. Sherwood, the partners could not dig up a play among them; Broadway wondered loudly whether the old hands had lost their grip. Now the Playwrights plan to follow Anne with four more in the current season...
When the Playwrights first teamed up, they pooled cash ($10,000 apiece) and experience so that each could get, in Anderson's words, "a better chance to say his independent say than we had as lone travelers in the pretty desperate profit jungle [around] Times Square." Of the cynics who gave the project six months, Rice demanded: "What the hell does a producer do that...
Nothing, it seemed. The first season they rang up three hits: Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Anderson's Knickerbocker Holiday, Behrman's No Time for Comedy. When things looked dark in 1945, Rice's Dream Girl kept the group going...