The Playwrights Company (1938–1960) was an American theatrical production company.
History
Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, Robert E. Sherwood and John F. Wharton established The Playwrights Company in 1938 (incorporated as The Playwrights Producing Company on July 1, 1938) to produce all works of the founding playwrights. Anderson had been frustrated with Broadway producers as well as drama critics, stating the goal of the company would be "to make a center for ourselves within the theatre and possibly rally the theatre as a whole to new levels by setting a high standard of writing and production". The founders had been unhappy with the policies of the Theatre Guild which had previously been their main producer. Initial backers included Governor Averell Harriman, publisher Dorothy Schiff, actor Raymond Massey and CBS President William Paley. Business Manager Victor Samrock, who served, in effect, as the company’s co-producer, was an initial shareholder as was their press representative William Fields. Playwright Robert Anderson (no relation to Maxwell), producer Roger L. Stevens and Kurt Weill joined later. The company was dissolved in 1960 as only two founders were still alive, Behrman (who had already left) and Rice.
The Playwrights' first effort was Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois, about the life of the 16th President. Starring Raymond Massey, it opened on Broadway on October 15, 1938 and was an immediate success, eventually winning Sherwood his second Pulitzer Prize and confirming the promise that The Playwrights Company would become a major force in the American theatre in the coming decades.
Other early successes included Knickerbocker Holiday, a musical by Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill directed by Joshua Logan and starring Walter Huston, who sang the classic ballad "September Song"; Behrman’s No Time for Comedy, starring Katharine Cornell and Laurence Olivier; Anderson’s drama about honor and conscience, Key Largo, starring Paul Muni and Uta Hagen; There Shall Be No Night, Sherwood’s third Pulitzer-prize winner about the Russian invasion of Finland, which starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne and a young Montgomery Clift; Anderson’s The Eve of St. Mark; and The Patriots by Sidney Kingsley, the first play written by someone outside the company.
In 1945, The Playwrights' Company brought Spencer Tracy, at the height of his movie career, to Broadway in Sherwood’s The Rugged Path. Sherwood prevailed upon President Roosevelt, for whom he was serving as speechwriter and Director of the War Information Office, to grant a short leave to Army Captain Garson Kanin so he could direct. The play suffered in out-of-town tryouts, however, and disappointed critics at its November opening on Broadway. Despite early success because of Tracy’s name, it closed after 81 performances.
In December, 1945, Elmer Rice’s comedy Dream Girl opened. It starred Rice’s wife Betty Field (later replaced by June Havoc) and became another Playwrights' success. A 1946 summer stock version with Lucille Ball, the film star and television's future Lucy, played to huge crowds.
Additional notable Playwrights' productions in the 1940s included Joan of Lorraine, which introduced Broadway audiences to Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc; Street Scene, a musical by Elmer Rice, Kurt Weill and poet Langston Hughes based on Rice's 1930s play about America's poor; the historical drama Anne of the Thousand Days starring Rex Harrison as Henry VIII (directed by H. C. Potter); the Rouben Mamoulian-directed Lost in the Stars; Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill’s adaptation of the distinguished South African novel “Cry The Beloved Country” and the first major musical to deal with racism; Sherwood and Irving Berlin’s Miss Liberty (Moss Hart directed), which was a modest financial success, primarily because Berlin purchased the film rights himself in order to keep unblemished the record that his shows never lost money; and Maxwell Anderson’s drama Truckline Cafe, co-produced with Elia Kazan and its director Harold Clurman, which was a failure except for the career-establishing, standout performance by a new young actor, Marlon Brando.