Word: kingsley
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Detective Story is much the same brand of documentary melodrama as Kingsley's Dead End and Men in White. Wherever it can, the play lets truth walk side by side with good theater, but in a pinch it is always theater that has right of way. Among other things, Detective Story pleads that mercy should season justice. But too often it lets hokum season realism, and raises salient questions only to provide inconclusive answers...
...life, it is a nice fat slice of liveliness-one that recalls the era and atmosphere of The Front Page. It is paced for excitement and punctuated with humor, and it offers a small army of well-etched and well-acted minor characters. Like a certain style of pianist, Kingsley keeps hitting wrong notes and is much too fond of pedal; but he bangs out a spirited tune...
Stocky, easygoing Playwright-Director Sidney Kingsley, 42, is a slow worker. He tears up nine-tenths of what he writes, and writes nothing until he has documented it with a sociologist's researching zeal...
...Story, his sixth play and the first since 1943, he worked for two years, haunting a Manhattan detective squad room, the District Attorney's office, judges' chambers. For a month he was on 24-hour-call with the Homicide Squad. The research finally got so rich that Kingsley went off to the country and wrote the play without looking at his notes. But, at a rehearsal, some 60 detectives seemed pleased with the results...
...Yorker Kingsley, who married Actress Madge Evans in 1939, set out to write plays while still at Cornell. He spent three years, much of it living with interns, on his first play, Men in White ("That was a longie"). It won the 1933 Pulitzer Prize. Then, in the same blend of melodrama and social conscience, came Dead End (1935), Ten Million Ghosts (1936), The World We Make...