Making It New: 1900–1945 423playwriting a few years later. He scored a huge success with The Front Page (1928),
a smart, satirical, wisecracking comedy about Chicago journalists co-written with
Charles MacArthur (1895–1956), and he and MacArthur then consolidated that
success with another comedy, Twentieth Century (1932). After that, Hecht continued
to write drama and fiction; however, he became better known as a screenwriter. Still
collaborating with MacArthur, he was responsible for the screenplays of such films
as Wuthering Heights (1939). Spellbound (1945), and Notorious (1946). The Front
Page, too, was made into a successful film, as was Twentieth Century. Similarly,
Garson Kanin (1912–1999) scored his first success with a political farce, Born
Yesterday (1946), before going on to Hollywood. And George S. Kaufman (1889–
1961) turned Hollywood into a source of comedy in Once in a Lifetime (1930), co-
written with Moss Hart (1904–1961) – with whom he also wrote such notable plays
as You Can’t Take It With You (1936) and The Man Who Came To Dinner (1939). Not
all dramatists turned to Hollywood as subject or source of income to the extent that
Hecht, MacArthur, and Kanin did. Kaufman, for instance, devoted nearly all his
career to writing plays or musicals on many other subjects, and to collaborations
with others ranging from Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart to short-story writer
Ring Lardner (1885–1933), then, later, the Gershwins. But it did open up new chances,
new material, and a new way of transcribing reality for many of them; quite probably,
it even began to alter the way they saw the task of playwriting, by opening up the
possibility of more cinematic forms.
Certainly, theatrical experiment became more common in this period, sometimes
inspired by the cinema and sometimes by other forces, such as German expressionist
drama. The first play of Elmer Rice (1892–1967), On Trial (1914), for example,
employs the technique of the motion picture “flashback” to present scenes that are
described by trial witnesses. With his works for the Morningside Players, a little
theater group, published in Morningside Plays (1917), Rice then scored a second
success in experimental drama with The Adding Machine (1923). Here, he used the
expressionist techniques of fantasy and symbolism to satirize the reduction of
individuals in the machine age to “waste product.” Rice continued to experiment
with different styles. His other major play, Street Scene (1929), for instance, may be
more geared toward empirical realism in its presentation of slum life. But it still uses
a panoply of sound effects to enhance audience involvement and get its message
across. Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) borrowed from an entirely different theatrical
tradition in Our Town (1938). Born in Wisconsin, but raised in China, Wilder
dispensed with scenery in his most famous play, and used the Chinese theatrical
convention of the property man as narrator to portray life in a small town in
New England. Wilder also achieved fame with his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(1927), about a South American bridge disaster and the ironic way providence
directs disparate lives to one end. And he experimented with several different
dramatic forms, including comedy (The Merchant of Yonkers (1938)), a play inspired
by Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)), and a tragedy inspired by
Euripides’ Alcestis (A Life in the Sun (1955)). The theatrical experiments of Maxwell
Anderson (1888–1959) were similarly various. After achieving success with a bluntlyGGray_c04.indd 423ray_c 04 .indd 423 8 8/1/2011 7:53:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 57 AM