Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Missouri Legend (by Elizabeth B. Ginty; produced by Guthrie McClintic in association with Max Gordon), half a clowning comic strip, half a romantic daguerreotype, is based on the life of Jesse James. Playwright Ginty, with some support from history, has made James (Dean Jagger) into a droll sort of Jekyll & Hyde who, when not "riding out," is Thomas Howard of St. Joe, Mo., a sober family man with a mousy wife (Dorothy Gish), and a pillar of the local Baptist church...
...high-and averaged 80 standees a performance. This week, road-show rehearsals start on I'd Rather Be Right after its summer holiday. A week or two hence rehearsals will start on a third Rodgers & Hart show, The Boys from Syracuse, which they are doing with Playwright-Producer George Abbott. Their tunes are whistled in the street, clunked out by hurdy-gurdies on the curb. The press, fumbling for a phrase to describe them, invariably ends with one that is glib but nevertheless significant: the U. S. Gilbert & Sullivan...
Manhattan's only free theatre, which a Broadway wisecracker once termed "the flophouse of the drama," came billowing out of the imagination of a frankly stage-struck playwright named Butler Davenport, who looks like Edwin Booth (see cut). Taking over the building in 1915 left Davenport $3.17. But $3.17 floated plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Molière and Butler Davenport, with unpaid casts made up of starry-eyed young amateurs, sad-faced old professionals, milliners' assistants, postmen, stenographers, clerks. Now & then there might be a familiar Broadway name like Mary Shaw in the cast, or future Broadway names...
...Davenport Theatre was last week performing Zunguru by an African playwright-composer, Asadata Dafora Horton, whose Kykunkor got rave notices from Broadway critics in 1934. Primitive in plot, Zunguru was a kind of savage vaudeville, with three blacks pounding African drums, brown girls strutting their stuff, a witch doctor gabbling and shrieking, a fire-eater munching lighted torches-all of it "background" for Boy Meets Girl in Senegal...
...King by William Butler Yeats, Euripides' Alcestis by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. Otherwise, their handsome and handy collection presents all of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in about the best light available. More interesting to most readers will be ten "anonymous" translations of Aristophanes in which that playwright's obscenity is done full justice for the first time in contemporary English. Though "anonymous." these versions apparently owe much of their modern flavor to revision by young (28), untrammeled Editor O'Neill, an instructor in classics at Yale...