Steet Scene in a Contemporary Context

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When Elmer Rice’s Street Scene was first produced in 1929, it was unlike most other plays of the day. The play featured numerous, realistic characters, and many, sometimes intersecting, story lines, and neither of these aspects was developed in depth. Rice was discouraged from even producing Street Scene at all by his colleagues. Yet the drama was produced and was somewhat successful. To emphasize its realism, Rice insisted that the original production feature prerecorded street noise and other natural sounds to underscore that this tenement was really in the heart of New York City. Furthermore, Rice also added an element of contemporary social criticism to Street Scene. In one subplot, Mrs. Hildebrand and her two children are about to be removed from their home because they are without funds after Mr. Hildebrand abandoned them. They are ‘‘aided’’ by a social worker, Miss Alice Simpson, who seems only interested in controlling the poor family.

This kind of realism and social criticism is no longer so unusual in mainstream theater. Street Scene uses other techniques that are also common, not with socially oriented drama but with the daytime soap operas that have been found on television since the 1950s. The kind of events that occur in Street Scene are stock-in-trade of this kind of episodic television. More importantly, Rice’s way of writing the play makes it seem like an episode in a longer drama. None of the stories in the tenement has a beginning that starts only after the curtain rises, and only a few story lines have a clear ending, though there is more to explore in these subplots. In other words, the interrelated stories of Street Scene could have had plays/episodes before them and continue after this point, not unlike a soap opera. This essay looks at two primary elements of Street Scene—themes and structure—and how they resemble a modern day soap opera.

In his essay ‘‘A Social Scientist’s View of Daytime Serial Drama,’’ George Comstock defines a soap opera as ‘‘the continuing saga of a group of people involved with each other through lineage, passion, ambition, hostility, and chance.’’ This defi- nition could well be applied to Street Scene. The characters in the play are grouped into small families who live in different apartments in the tenement. Their decision to live in this building is, at least in part, by chance. They may not have much money, but there are many other tenements in the city of New York. There is also hostility among them. Abraham Kaplan’s constant stream of Marxist rhetoric, for example, is not appreciated by most of his neighbors. The Joneses are depicted as vicious bullies. The son, Vincent Jones, takes pleasure in harassing Sam Kaplan, who in turn is in love with Rose Maurrant. Sam is willing to give up his future to be with Rose, though his sister, Shirley, does everything in her power to discourage the romance. Ambition is hard to come by in the tenement: mostly characters hope to survive. Only the Kaplans seem to have much of a chance to escape, through education.

Admittedly, most modern day soaps do not focus on lower-middle to lower-class characters living in one tenement house. A majority of characters in soap operas are middle- to upper-class, with many professionals, both men and women. But almost every soap focuses on one community, and a number of families that live in it. James Thurber, in his essay ‘‘Ivorytown, Rinsoville, Anacinburg and Crisco Corners,’’ provides another definition. He writes, ‘‘A soap opera deals with the plights and problems brought about in the lives of its...

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permanent principal characters by the advent and interference of one group of individuals after another.’’ This statement can be applied toStreet Scene. If the families who live in the tenement are taken as the principal characters, then people like Miss Simpson, Steve Sankey (the milk company collector who has the affair with Mrs. Maurrant), or Happy Easter (Rose Maurrant’s married boss, whose desire to have an affair with Rose and complicates Rose’s life) can be seen as those who interfere.

No matter what class the principal characters are in, however, both soaps and Street Scene share thematic concerns. Mary Cassata and Thomas Skill in their essay ‘‘Television Soap Operas: What’s Been Going on Anyway?—Revisited’’ define four kinds of stories in soap operas. They are ‘‘(1) Criminal and Undesirable Activity; (2) Social Problems; (3) Medical Developments; and (4) Romantic and Marital Affairs.’’ All four of these elements can be found in Street Scene. The murder of Mrs. Maurrant and her lover falls under the category of criminal and undesirable activity. One medical development is the birth of Mrs. Buchanan’s baby. There are at least two affairs in Street Scene: the illicit one between Mrs. Maurrant and Steve Sankey, and the more innocent, if one-sided, one between Sam Kaplan and Rose Maurrant. (Social problems are discussed below.)

Other scholars add more specific situations to the list of soap opera themes. In the Comstock essay quoted earlier, the author argues that in soaps, ‘‘the kinds of tribulations are real enough for everyone— money, sex, health, mates, social competition, mental disorder, drugs, alcohol.’’ Nearly all characteristics are also found in Street Scene, some of which already have been discussed. Money problems force the Hildebrands out of the tenement. Characters like Lippo try to be generous despite the general lack of funds, as when he buys a number of ice cream cones for his neighbor or when he gives the Hildebrand children a nickel each. His wife notes that this kind of behavior accounts for their economic problems. Marital problems have driven Mrs. Maurrant to have an affair. Indeed, many couples argue in Street Scene. There is much social competition, especially between the Jones and others. Alcohol plays a role in the murder of Mrs. Maurrant by her husband. These are but a few of the relevant situations in Street Scene.

Critical social elements are one of the most important themes of Street Scene. In the essay ‘‘The More Things Change, The More They Are the Same: An Analysis of Soap Operas from Radio to Television,’’ Mary Cassata argues that ‘‘soap operas have dealt with issues and themes that have constituted the social concerns of their times.’’ Among other things, Street Scene shows the diversity of people in New York City and how that creates some social squabbling. The different ethnicities get along but do not always live in harmony. Rice also touches on the problems of the working woman, as Rose tries to fend off Happy Easter.

The best example of a social theme, one that was extremely controversial in Rice’s time, is the charity subplot involving the Hildebrands. In the way the story is depicted, Rice seems to question how helpful such charities really are. Miss Alice Simpson fails the Hildebrands in some ways because she tries to control them. She berates Mrs. Hildebrand for taking her children to the movies when they are about to lose their apartment. Simpson also becomes disgusted when Lippo gives the children money. While there may not be an outspoken Marxist like Abraham Kaplan on most soap operas, such shows, like this play, use the audience’s sympathies, guiding them towards an emotional connection with what the creator considers wrong and right about societal attitudes.

Structural qualities are also common to both soap operas and Street Scene. In the play, the plot jumps between stories rather quickly and in short spurts. Though there is an overall flow, Rice weaves in bits about different story lines constantly. The plot is not linear but pieces of stories that develop over time. Soap operas use a similar technique in their use of multiple story lines. And as Laura Arliss, Mary Cassata, and Thomas Skill argue in their essay ‘‘Dyadic Interaction on the Daytime Serials: How Men and Women Vie for Power,’’ ‘‘the action on daytime serial drama consists, for the most part, of talk.’’ The same is basically true of Street Scene: a lot of talk and little actual action.

Though Street Scene has an ending, only a few of the stories are resolved with any finality: Mrs. Maurrant and her lover are murdered, Mrs. Buchanan has her baby, and the Hildebrands are removed. The rest of the story lines are left open-ended. Even those with endings are not particularly final. There is a baby to raise and different homes for both the Hildebrands and the Maurrant children. New families will be moving into the tenement, living different lives. As Horace Newcomb says in his essay ‘‘A Humanist’s View of Serial Drama,’’ ‘‘the triumph of the soap opera form is that it engages us in the sense of progressive unfolding, emergence, growth and change.’’ None of the characters are static at the end of Street Scene. There is potential for yet more plays and episodes and more multiple crossing story lines. Rice was ahead of his time when he wrote Street Scene, anticipating the power of these innovations.

Source: Annette Petrusso, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale Group, 2001.

Realism Questioned

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Elmer Rice’s success and most-remembered works peaked during the second decade of the twentieth century. John Gassner claims in Twenty-Five Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre, ‘‘So far as the theatre is concerned, the American century was born in 1919.’’ American theater addressed the social conditions of the times via two main influences in dramatic style.

One influence arose out of the break from the idyllic and romantic plays of the late nineteenth century, with their moralizing and their admonitions of the less than morally pure audiences, to the desire to present the world in an authentic way. This style was known as realism. The second influence was the introduction, primarily through German plays, of the then-European technique called expressionism. Expressionism went beyond mere representation to exploring symbolically the inner life—the psyche—of characters. It was a technique that, as Louis Broussard says in American Drama: Contemporary Allegory from Eugene O’Neill to Tennessee Williams, ‘‘abandoned the photography of realism, the dramatic sequence of events, for a stream of consciousness in terms of stage symbols whereby the surface of life becomes disjointed, scattered, as in a dream . . .’’

On the surface, Rice’s Street Scene (1929) seems like a play straight in the realism mode, but on further examination, it is filled with expressionistic elements. ‘‘It was not to be simply a realistic play,’’ states C. W. E. Bigsby in A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. It would be a stretch to say that the play is a type of expressionist realism, but one can still discern the experimental feel of the play and the themes that echo those found in expressionistic plays of the time.

The expressionistic play uses short disconnected scenes, sometimes out of sequence, to reflect the disorder of the human mind that it seeks to expose. It focuses on internal action. Because one cannot replicate these internal workings on the stage, symbols are used to represent emotional struggles and conflicts. Often characters exist as both individuals and types, which allows the playwright to tell a story involving individuals but also to allude to social or political trends via a type of dramatic shorthand. Expressionistic plays tend to address the theme of alienation. In stark contrast to the turn-of-the-century plays, which incorporated ills that fate or God willed on mankind, the experimental plays, as Jordan Miller and Winifred Frazer indicate in American Drama Between the Wars: A Critical History, addressed instead ‘‘what man has done to himself.’’ The outsiders of the 1920s experienced rampant discrimination, and they as well as natives toiled away at repetitive, strenuous, and low-paying factory jobs—conditions that could be considered man-made. As a result, they began to experience a profound disconnection from each other.

In Street Scene, as in an expressionistic play, the characters are both individuals and types. Rice throws together a host of ethnic groups. These groups certainly represent the probable mix of a 1920s New York tenement building, but the divisions— an Italian man, a Russian-Jewish family, a Swedish couple, a German woman, and an Irish- American stagehand, among others—are almost forced. The mix is too accurate. The dialects and accents are so precisely reproduced that the individuals are types that border on being caricatures. Each character in Street Scene must embody the voice, culture, value systems, and expectations of his or her respective ethnic group, country, and religion. Of course, America, as a social experiment, is the great homogenizer, and being American is the common denominator of all these early twentieth- century ethnic groups. So we have a boisterous, happy-go-lucky Italian music instructor; a pondering Jewish student; and native New Yorkers who resent outsiders taking what rightly belongs to them and who believe that instilling ‘‘the fear of God’’ will somehow make the world and their lives better. Although each character is unique because of his or her ethnicity, this uniqueness ironically becomes the element that makes each character a representative type.

If being American is the common denominator of New York’s inhabitants, then the tenement building is the common denominator of Rice’s characters. Street Scene, like an expressionistic play, uses the gloomy brownstone as a symbol. The tenement building, the play’s only backdrop, is an expressionistic symbol of urban life as a prison from which to escape. The oppressive heat, the characters lingering on the front steps, the cramped quarters—all reek of immobility and inertia. ‘‘Rice resisted the idea of simply copying an existing tenement building in order to create the set. It was a conscious effort to raise that setting to the level of symbol,’’ Bigsby says. The characters’ incessant climbing of the stairs can be viewed as another symbol—this time as the long economic climb of the middle class and its desire for material goods and a way of life that most of them agree is better.

Brief scenes and fragmented storylines characterize expressionism. Despite having a couple of traceable story lines, Street Scene mostly uses fragments and snippets of people’s lives; these snippets, which all exist in real time rather than in an expressionistic heaven or hell or individual mind, are cleverly spliced together to form a cohesive whole. As Rice explains in A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, ‘‘instead of unity of action, there was a multitude of varied and seemingly irrelevant incidents.’’

There are only two main storylines in Street Scene: the story of a woman and her jealous husband who shoots her and her lover in a jealous drunken rage; and the story of that woman’s daughter, who now is the primary caretaker of the young son and who itches to escape the tenement and live on her own terms—even if that means rejecting several men. These storylines are not overly detailed or complicated but provide a hook on which to hang the rest if the action. For example, Mrs. Buchanan, whom we never see, endures a painful and complicated birth while Rose and Sam discuss their futures; Sam and Vincent Jones get into a couple of scuffles; and the Hildebrands get evicted. Bums shuffle by. Two schoolgirls discuss concavity. The Old-Clothes Man appears and disappears. Vendors hawk their wares. Crippled people hobble past. The central characters spend a good portion of stage time talking about the heat and gossiping.

But gossip is local color, and what Rice succeeds in doing is using expressionistic fragmentation as a tool for revelation. The seemingly insignificant drunken encounter between Mrs. Jones’ daughter and her boyfriend reveal further the nature of Mrs. Jones’ hypocrisy: her children’s behavior is nowhere near the level she would have us believe. Her daughter is sexually easy, and her son is an obnoxious brute. Kaplan’s rantings, particularly his hostility for Alice Simpson, reveals the contemporary collective fear of Socialism. Shirley’s ‘‘Everybody has a right to his own opinion,’’ spoken softly reveals the fragile democracy America espouses. How the characters react to seemingly unrelated and random occurrences—Mrs. Buchanan’s labor cries, the Hildebrand eviction, and the affair everyone knows is going on between Mrs. Maurraut and Sankey, for example—allows Rice to address, through the expressionistic technique of story line fragmentation, the social mores of the times.

In addition, Street Scene’s themes are similar to those found in a typical expressionistic play. Mardi Valgemae, in Accelerated Grimace, writes that August Strindberg, the ‘‘father of German expressionism,’’ addressed the ‘‘stifling effect of social conformity on personal happiness’’ in Ghost Sonata. In that play, Strindberg’s student asks, ‘‘What do we find that truly lives up to what it promises?’’ In Street Scene, Mrs. Maurraut, Rose, and Sam invoke similar questions. Sam says, ‘‘Everywhere you look, oppression and cruelty! . . . It’s too high a price to pay for life—life isn’t worth it!’’

These seemingly innocuous complaints in Street Scene actually belie a Strindbergian/expressionistic concern with alienation. Bigsby discusses the importance of experimental theater in America, claiming that ‘‘it [took] as its primary subject the loss of an organic relationship with the natural world, with one’s fellow man, and with oneself.’’ In Street Scene the two most prominent forms of alienation are alienation from one’s fellow man and alienation from oneself.

Mrs. Maurrant, always wondering why people can’t be nicer to each other, is the spokeswoman for how people have lost touch with their fellow man. None of the characters in Street Scene really communicate with each other. It seems that they are either gossiping amongst themselves or arguing with each other. What passes for neighborly relations continues, but everyone seems to be watching and waiting, poised to criticize and pass judgement. Even an innocent round of ice cream leads to an argument about who discovered America—an argument that arouses nothing less than nationalist sentiments and quickly brings out the worst in everyone. Some of the characters lament the Hildebrands eviction, for example, but no one does anything about it. No one lends a hand or gives a kind word. The last few moments at the end of act 2 are telling: the shooting has just occurred, and a man, who is removing the personal items of the Hildebrands, pauses on the steps to look. How can the Hildebrands sympathize with the Maurrants and vice-versa? How can any of the characters, living in fear and distrust of each other, depending as they do on gossipy second-hand information and rumors, even begin to understand the real circumstances surrounding an event? Mrs. Maurrant is arguably the hero of this play: she is the only one who cares enough to actually lift a finger for another character— in this case making soup for a very ill Mrs. Buchanan—only to find herself bitterly rejected and criticized by her neighbors and severely wounded by a shot fired from her own husband’s gun.

If Mrs. Maurrant embodies alienation with one’s fellow man, then her daughter, Rose, is the voice for how people have lost touch with themselves. Rose says, ‘‘I don’t think people ought to belong to anybody but themselves,’’ and rightly supposes that the terrible shooting that serves as the dramatic underpinning of the play would never have happened if, say, her parents had been truer to themselves. The moment she learns this lesson she applies it to her own life: at the end of act 3 she shuns Sam’s offer to take her away from the tenement, wisely doubting that his optimism and hope, his promise of living happily ever after, and his insistence that love can conquer all can be their salvation.

In Street Scene, we don’t really enter the minds of the characters in a true expressionistic way, nor are the characters totally reduced to mechanical automatons as they typically are in a true expressionistic play. Nevertheless, the use of caricature and symbolism, as well as the theme of alienation due to social conformity, give this realistic play a distinct expressionistic feel.

Source: Tara L. Mantel, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale Group, 2001.

Struggling to Survive

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The positive public response to Rice’s play was due to its authentic depiction of lower-class men and women struggling to survive the crushing reality of urban life. As Fred Behringer notes in his article on Rice for The Dictionary of Literary Biography, ‘‘the power of the play lies not in the surface reality, but rather in the intense struggles beneath.’’ Rice illuminates these struggles through the play’s creative structure. As he juxtaposes brief glimpses of his characters, he explores the various ways human beings find to cope with the harsh reality of everyday life.

In his stage directions, Rice sets the tone and establishes the fragmented structure characteristic of the entire play. He writes, ‘‘Throughout the act and, indeed, throughout the play, there is constant noise. . . . The noises are subdued and in the background, but they never wholly cease.’’

These noises represent a myriad of separate personal stories being played out simultaneously, creating a mosaic of lower middle class urban life. Behringer explains that in an interview, Rice claimed, ‘‘the intended total effect [of the play] was a panoramic impression of New York,’’ one that included ‘‘shopkeepers, clerks, artisans, students, a schoolteacher, a taxi driver, a musician, janitors, policemen.’’

What all these characters have in common is their desire to overcome the hardships of their daily life. Rice’s fragmented structure illustrates the various mechanisms humans employ during this diffi- cult process.

In the first act, Rice introduces all the major characters and suggests some of the frustrations they face. As several of them sit on the front stoop of their ‘‘walk-up’’ apartment house ‘‘in a mean quarter of New York,’’ their immediate concern is the oppressive and inescapable heat, which results in sweat-soaked clothes and crying babies. The audience soon discovers other problems caused by the urban environment. The play’s cacophony of voices illustrates how life on these ‘‘mean’’ streets exacerbates family relationships. Parents fret about the negative influences on their children who stay out too late. Glimpses into their lives reveal how their marriages strain under the pressure of economic hardships coupled with concerns for the children. Some suffer as a result of prejudice while others must face the biological realities of childbirth and death.

Mrs. Jones never specifically identifies the problems her family experiences, but Rice suggests their source when he presents vignettes that focus on her daughter’s and husband’s alcoholism. Mrs. Jones illustrates the consequences of the tense relationship she has with her family when she insists, ‘‘Men are all alike. They’re all easy to get along with so long as everythin’s goin’ the way they want it to. But once it don’t—good night!’’ Mrs. Maurrant’s more egalitarian response nevertheless confirms Mrs. Jones’ point of view: ‘‘I guess it’s just the same with the women. . . . People ought to be able to live together in peace and quiet, without making each other miserable.’’

Most of the characters cope with the stresses in their lives through affiliation. Sharing their problems helps alleviate them to a degree, especially when others offer sympathy. As each neighbor laments the consequences of the overwhelming heat and delineates their family problems, the others respond with understanding nods and their own similar stories.

This camaraderie inevitably leads to another form of release for the characters—gossip, and in the opening scene, they feel that they have much to gossip about. As soon as Mrs. Maurrant comes into view, those on the stoop begin to chatter about her affair with Steve Sankey as they try to forget the heat and their own personal problems. All condemn the two for their actions, but some are more sympathetic than others to what they see as the couple’s inevitable fate when Mr. Maurrant finds out.

Mrs. Jones shifts the focus of the conversation to the affair after Mrs. Fiorentino sympathizes with Willie Maurrant’s treatment of his mother. Mrs. Jones notes, ‘‘I guess it don’t bother her much. She’s got her mind on other things.’’ Her critical tone reveals another coping mechanism she employs— devaluation. Throughout the play, Mrs. Jones deals with stress by attributing exaggerated negative qualities to others. This becomes most evident in her racist remarks about her neighbors. For example, when Mrs. Olsen fails to comfort her baby, Mrs. Jones insists, ‘‘What them foreigners don’t know about bringin’ up babies would fill a book.’’ After Mrs. Fiorentino takes offense at her words, Mrs. Jones makes a feeble attempt at tact: ‘‘Well, I’m not sayin’ anythin’ about the Joimans. The Joimans is different—more like the Irish. What I’m talkin’ about is all them squareheads an’ Polacks—an’ Jews.’’

Others take their minds off of their problems through altruism. As the neighbors gossip about the Maurrants, Filippo Fiorentino buys them ice cream cones to help ease the heat. He also shows his generosity when he gives money to a woman about to be dispossessed. When the worker from the charity office chastises him, insisting, ‘‘you’d be doing her a much more neighborly act, if you helped her to realize the value of money instead of encouraging her to throw it away, Filippo replies, ‘‘Ah, lady, no! I give ’er coupla dollar, make ’er feel good, maka me feel good—dat don’ ’urt nobody.’’

Some of the other neighbors also reveal generous spirits. Filippo’s wife Greta offers soup for Mrs. Buchanan who will soon deliver her baby. Mrs. Maurrant prepares food for Mrs. Buchanan and stays with her throughout her difficult labor. Mr. Buchanan tells the others that Mrs. Maurrant was up with his wife nearly all night and admits, ‘‘I don’t know what we’d have done without her.’’ Mrs. Maurrant, though, has found an additional way to ease her troubles, but this coping mechanism will result in her murder.

Pieces of dialogue from several of the characters reveal that Mr. Maurrant treats his wife harshly and continually complains about their children. Mrs. Maurrant expresses her need for comfort and suggests the reason why she enters into an affair with another man when she explains, ‘‘I think the trouble is people don’t make allowances. They don’t realize that everybody wants a kind word, now and then.’’ In a moment of desperation, she tries to justify her actions when she insists to Rose, ‘‘What’s the good of being alive, if you can’t get a little something out of life? You might just as well be dead.’’

Kaplan deals with the stresses of his environment through intellectualization, the excessive use of generalizations to complain about a situation. He blames all the neighbors’ problems on the country’s economic system, insisting, ‘‘As long as de institution of private property exeests, de verkers will be at de moicy of de property owning klesses. . . .’’ Kaplan believes that if the country adopts a socialist system, poverty, along with their troubles, will be eliminated.

Mr. Maurrant also employs this tactic, which allows him to vent his frustrations over his suspicions about his wife. He decides, ‘‘what we need in this country is a little more respect for law an’ order’’ and cites examples of what he sees to be the decline of the American family. Homes, he claims are being broken up by divorce and the relaxation of sexual taboos. As a result, he determines, ‘‘it’s time somethin’ was done to put the fear o’ God into people!’’

His intellectualism quickly turns threatening, however, as his humiliation over his wife’s affair surfaces. When Kaplan suggests that if private property is abolished, ‘‘the femily will no longer hev eny reason to excest,’’ Maurrant explodes. He insists the family will survive, with ‘‘children respectin’ their parents an’ doin’ what they’re told . . . An’ husbands an’ wives, lovin’ and’ honorin’ each other, like they said they would, when they was spliced.’’ He ends his tirade with a devaluation of Kaplan, warning him, ‘‘any dirty sheeny that says different is li’able to get his head busted open.’’ Soon, his inability to cope with his wife’s infidelity will push him over the edge, causing him to take her life and that of her lover when he finds them together.

Sam, Kaplan’s extremely sensitive son, is another character who has not developed effective ways to cope with the reality of his life. He tries to escape into books, but they do not help him block out the cruelty and despair he finds everywhere. When he comes across the neighbors gossiping about Mrs. Maurrant, he tries to defend her, yelling ‘‘stop it! Stop it! Can’t you let her alone? Have you no hearts? Why do you tear her to pieces, like a pack of wolves?’’ But he cannot face them and so escapes, dashing abruptly into the house, choking back a sob.

When he tries to defend Rose against Vincent Jones’ advances, Vincent knocks him to the ground, where he remains, cowering in fear. After Vincent leaves, Sam crumbles. Rice notes, ‘‘he throws himself on the stoop and, burying his head in his arms, sobs hysterically.’’ Rose tries to comfort him, but he resists, exclaiming

That’s all there is in life—nothing but pain. From before we’re born, until we die! . . . The whole world is nothing but a blood stained arena, filled with misery and suffering. It’s too high a price to pay for life. . . . life isn’t worth it!

Rice’s focus on short exchanges between Sam and Rose highlights diametrically opposed responses to the harsh reality of life. Sam suggests that he and Rose kill themselves and so end their suffering. Rose refuses, exclaiming that there is a lot to appreciate in life, ‘‘just being alive—breathing and walking around. Just looking at the faces of people you like and hearing them laugh. And . . . listening to a good band, and dancing.’’ Out of all the characters in the play, Rose finds the most effective ways of coping with her life.

She refuses to adopt Sam’s pessimistic attitude. While he sees nothing but cruelty and misery, she suppresses her problems during a walk through the park. There, she admits, ‘‘everything looked so green and fresh, that I got a kind of feeling of, well, maybe it’s not so bad, after all.’’ Her optimism later emerges in a discussion of religion with Sam. She asks him, ‘‘don’t you think it’s better to believe in something that makes you a little happy, than not to believe in anything and be miserable all the time?

At a moment of weakness, she accepts the attentions of Harry Easter, her married supervisor. Influenced by his offer to help her launch a career on the stage, she considers becoming his mistress. Eventually, though, after coming to terms with her family’s tragedy, she finds the strength to survive through her determination to move out of the city and to live an independent life. Admitting that she does not love either Harry or Sam, and refusing to become dependent on either of them, she tells Sam, ‘‘I don’t think people ought to belong to anybody but themselves.’’

Behringer concludes, ‘‘In spite of the violence, oppressiveness, and loss in the play, the central idea is one of affirmation. . . . Rice emphasizes the notion that not only is happiness possible, but that it is, in large part, a matter of personal choice.’’ R. Dana Skinner, writing in Commonweal, suggests, ‘‘it is perhaps hard to believe that from incidents as varied and scattered as these, Mr. Rice could create an enthrallingly vivid sense of reality, poignancy, cowardice, despair and courage. But he has succeeded in an overflowing measure.’’ He succeeds in large part because his arrangement of the short glimpses into the lives of his characters underscores the play’s theme. As Street Scene catalogues the various ways we cope with the often harsh reality of existence, it ultimately affirms the resilience of the human spirit.

Source: Wendy Perkins, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale Group, 2001. Perkins, an Associate Professor of English at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland, has published several articles on several twentiethcentury authors.

The Realist

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Street Scene was produced in 1929, ran for 602 performances, won the Pulitzer Prize, and is one of the great plays of the American theatre. It had the longest Broadway run of any of Rice’s plays, and, with the exception of the London production of Judgment Day, it gave him probably the greatest satisfaction. The tragicomic history of the play is fascinatingly told in Chapter XIX of The Living Theatre and Chapter XIII of Minority Report. Of special interest is the difficulty that Rice had in marketing the script.

The responses of the producers were emphatically and unanimously negative. I remember some of them. The Theatre Guild, which had produced my play The Adding Machine, said that Street Scene had ‘‘no content.’’ Winthrop Ames, a man for whose judgment I had great respect, said that it was not a play. Arthur Hopkins, who had scored a great success with my first play, On Trial, told me that he found Street Scene unreadable. Others found it dull, depressing, sordid, confusing, undramatic. One producer opened the script, looked at the list of characters and read no further.

It seems astonishing that so many astute authorities could have been so wrong; still, a book could be filled with similar cases. If any generalization is to be drawn from such facts, it might be that the commercial theatre imposes its own standards upon those who work in it. When money is the first consideration, safety is the second and quality is the last. Of the play itself, Rice once wrote:

The background and subject matter had been in my mind for many years: a multiple dwelling, housing numerous families of varying origins; and a melodramatic story arising partly from the interrelationships of the characters and partly from their environmental conditioning. The setting was the façade of a ‘‘brownstone front’’—a type of dwelling of which there are still thousands of examples in New York—and the sidewalk before it. . . . The house was conceived as the central fact of the play: a dominant structural element that unified the sprawling and diversified lives of the inhabitants. This concept was derived partly from the Greek drama, which is almost always set against the face of a palace or a temple. But mainly I was influenced, I think, by the paintings of Claude Lorrain, a French artist of the seventeenth century. In his landscapes, which I had gazed at admiringly in the Louvre and other galleries, there is nearly always a group of figures in the foreground, which is composed and made significant by an impressive architectural pile of some sort in the background. In fact, the original title of my play was Landscape with Figures; but I felt that this was a little too special, so I borrowed again from the terminology of painting and called the play Street Scene . . .

There is a central love story: a sort of Romeo and Juliet romance between the stagehand’s daughter and the radical’s son; and a main dramatic thread of murder, committed by the girl’s father when he comes home unexpectedly and finds his wife with her lover. But there are numerous subplots and an intricate pattern of crisscrossing and interweaving relationships. The house is ever present and ever dominant, and the entire action of the play takes place on the sidewalk, on the stoop or in the windows. I give these details in order to make it clear that, whatever the play’s merits or defects, it is an unconventional drama, in setting, in technique and in size of cast.

The problem of discussing this large and unconventional play is that, in one sense, it is too large to discuss. So much happens and there are so many characters, that one scarcely knows where or how to begin. On the other hand, if one stands further back for a broader view, there seems curiously little to discuss. From the welter of incidents, ultimately emerges one simple story, and the rest is scene painting. So viewed, the whole conception seems simplicity itself.

Although the play is realistic, its realism has seldom been seen on the stage since the days of such sprawling Elizabethan plays as Bartholomew Fair. It is a realism that suddenly makes one understand with a sort of shock that experiments in realism are still possible. The realism bequeathed by Ibsen was the portrayal of a middle-class drawing room, a front parlor inhabited by half a dozen people. A play like Rice’s takes the theatre out of that parlor and sets it down in the middle of a busy metropolitan street. The effect is as if a slab of reality had been hurled at the audience, as if realism itself were abruptly revitalized and its true possibilities beginning at last to be explored.

Compared with Street Scene, the front parlor drama seems unreal, contrived, and artificial. It is as if the front parlor dramatists had been using the delicately honed scalpel of realism to extract the meat from nuts rather than the pith from life. Perhaps it is wrong to forget a lesson from Ibsen’s own front parlor drama, A Doll’s House. At the end of that play, its heroine stormed from the house and into the street. And, indeed, most of Ibsen’s later plays—Rosmersholm, John Gabriel Borkman, The Master Builder, The Lady From the Sea and When We Dead Awaken—all finally escape from the parlor, into the sea, the mountains, and the air. The man who wrote Brand and Peer Gynt did not regard realism as a confinement, but as the quickest way to freedom. The free realism of Street Scene seems to prove the vitality of that realistic form from which so many lesser playwrights have found ‘‘No Exit.’’

I am not suggesting a return to the mere spectacle for spectacle’s sake so dear to the heart of Boucicault, but merely suggesting that the modern stage rarely uses its full resources, and that the large cast and the small spectacle performed by real people may be one realization of the theatre at its most vital. Street Scene is as pertinent a reminder as Endgame or The Chairs of what the theatre can do if it will but extend itself. Really, Street Scene, with its cast of eighty, may even beat the movies at their own game of spectacle. The eighty-odd characters of Street Scene are there, immediate, palpable, tangible; and the elect of real people over colored shadows (no matter how clearly one can see the cleavages in their Brobdingnagian bosoms) is so much more vivid, that eighty real people may dwarf thousands of celluloid shadows.

In the nineteenth-century theatre, actors were accustomed to play types, character types and national types. In our post-Stanislavskian stress upon individual characterization, we may have forgotten a value of the older practice which was, after all, effective, economical, and based upon legitimate observation. Street Scene has many national types in its cast—Jews, Italians, Scandinavians, Irish, and so on, and much of the play’s effect comes from the delineation and juxtaposition of these types. The jangling cacophony of their dialects, fusing with the diverse street noises, creates a convincing harmony of reality. Such roles not only provide valuable exercises for actors caught in a morass of subtlety, but also allow individual characters to be built up with an economy of effort. Consider, for instance, the effect that Rice gets from a mere stage movement in this exchange between the extroverted Italian Lippo and his German wife.

MRS. FIORENTINO: Lippo, what do you think? Mr. Buchanan has a little girl.

LIPPO: Ah, dotsa fine! Margherita, why you don’ have da baby, ha?

MRS. FIORENTINO: [abruptly ] I must go and make the coffee.

With similar economy, Rice builds up the characterizations of his large cast, so that his play requires both considerable excellence from each actor and an ensemble playing difficult to achieve.

One character who benefits greatly from this economy and rings particularly true is the Irish father, Maurrant. His black savagery is clearly caught by the simple repetitions which Rice allows him.

Who’s been sayin’ things to you?

Shut up your swearin’, do you hear?—or I’ll give you somethin’ to bawl for. What did he say to you, huh?

What did he say to you?

Nobody’s askin’ you? . . . What did he say? . . .

G’wan up to bed now, an’ don’t let me hear no more out o’ you. [Raising his hand] G’wan now. Beat it.

The theme is expressed with similar economy in several dialogues between Rose Maurrant and Sam Kaplan, the young Jewish student. It is probably, however, the part of the play that suffers most by blunt and economical statement. Most bluntly, it is stated in this interchange from Act I.

SAM: That’s all there is in life—nothing but pain. From before we’re born, until we die! Everywhere you look, oppression and cruelty! If it doesn’t come from Nature, it comes from humanity—humanity trampling on itself and tearing at its own throat. The whole world is nothing but a blood-stained arena, filled with misery and suffering. It’s too high a price to pay for life—life isn’t worth it!

ROSE: Oh, I don’t know, Sam. I feel blue and discouraged sometimes, too. And I get a sort of feeling of, oh, what’s the use. Like last night. I hardly slept all night, on account of the heat and on account of thinking about—well, all sorts of things. And this morning, when I got up, I felt so miserable. Well, all of a sudden, I decided I’d walk to the office. And when I got to the Park, everything looked so green and fresh, that I got a feeling of, well, maybe it’s not so bad, after all.

The events of the whole play can be seen in these terms, as examples of unfeeling brutality or of sympathy and compassion. Or, to put it another way, as examples of worthlessness and worth, or even of comedy and tragedy. The inhabitants of the tenement help each other, but they also tear at each other. For example, here are the last two speeches of the play, the first compassionate and the second callous.

MISS CUSHING: The poor little thing! MRS. JONES: Well, you never can tell with them quiet ones. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she turned out the same way as her mother. She’s got a gentleman friend that I guess ain’t hangin’ around for nothin’. I seen him, late last night, and this afternoon, when I come home from the police.

This dramatization of compassion and brutality is more effective than the overt statement in the interchange between Sam and Rose. Further, just as Mrs. Jones’s speech is much longer than Miss Cushing’s, so do the brutal events come to outweigh the compassionate ones. There is more of geniality and humor in the first act than in the second, and the last act is relieved only sporadically from grimness. In this increasing darkness of tone, the play resembles the tragicomedies of Gorky and O’Casey and perhaps of Chekhov.

The compassion in the play establishes the worth and humanity of the characters. The brutality does not erase that worth, but makes the plight of these people even more poignant. Rice is not laying the blame on a narrow social basis. He is not condemning a particular society or a certain system of economics for the lives of his people. One of his characters, Abraham Kaplan, does make such a condemnation, but Rice makes it clear that Kaplan is not his raisonneur. Rice is not expounding socialism, but human nature; and his play seems to prove that people inevitably destroy themselves, that they carry in themselves the seeds of their own brutality. Without wishing to, they cannot avoid hurting each other. Even Maurrant, who is driven to kill his wife, cries out in agony that he had not meant to. There is no character, except perhaps one outsider, the social worker, who is basically unsympathetic—not even the bullying Irishman Vincent Jones, not even Rose’s boss Harry Easter, who is trying to seduce her. Even the savage Maurrant is a basically sympathetic man driven by his own human nature. He is a mixture of brutality and compassion, and the brutality overwhelms the good. This triumph of brutality over compassion is probably the basic theme of the play—a generalization about the human condition, about the nature of man.

Many critics called the play, or at least the story of Maurrant, a melodrama. In the usual sense of the term, melodrama seems inappropriate. One way in which tragedy is usually distinguished from melodrama is by the thickness of characterization. While Maurrant is not a memorable character, as are Hamlet and Othello, he is certainly more valid than the Scarlet Pimpernel or even Sydney Carton. Further, one may plausibly argue that the thinness of his character is filled out by the other characterizations in the play. None is fully drawn, but none is false, and the group to which Maurrant belongs is memorable in the same way that the hero of a tragedy is memorable. Also, the theme of Maurrant’s story is acted out in other forms by most of the other characters. Ultimately we get a group as hero, rather as we do in Hauptmann’s The Weavers or Toller’s Man and the Masses. The greatest difference is that Rice’s group hero is considerably more individualized than Toller’s and even more than Hauptmann’s.

The importance of the theme, however, is the strongest reason why one may not dismiss Street Scene as melodrama. The essence of melodrama is that the theme be unimportant, or at least stated in such heroic or sentimental or platitudinous terms that we do not have to take it seriously, and may therefore concentrate upon an exciting series of events. The theme of Street Scene is emphasized by its plot, and is in itself valid and moving. Really, the theme is the same as that of great tragedy and tragicomedy, and this fact seems established by the extent to which the play deeply moved its audiences.

If this notion is true, then the play is one further refutation of Krutch’s theory that tragedy is impossible in the modern world. All that is necessary for tragedy is the affirmation of human value. By the compassion of its statement, Street Scene establishes that value. Actually, one might take this argument further without unduly stretching it: if one were to judge the play by the classic values of tragedy, it would stand up well. If we take the story of the Maurrant family to be the main story of the play, then the other characters provide an enormous chorus. If we apply the scale of beauty of language, we could even make a case, although some of the dialogue may at first seem flat and bald. The quotations above from Sam and Rose seem naïve and awkward, if compared to any purple passage from Sophocles or Shakespeare. Rice is admittedly not a poet, but the flatness of the Sam-Rose dialogue arises not so much from a limitation of Rice’s talent, as from a limitation of realistic dialogue. Of this fact, he himself is quite conscious, as we shall see in Not for Children, where he satirizes the attempt of the realistic writer to rise above flat statement to beauty or poetry.

We must consider also that speech in a play is more than words and their meanings and overtones; it is also the sound of words. One of Shaw’s most valid criticisms of the Shakespearean productions of the 1890’s was that they extracted the meaning from Shakespeare while butchering the ‘‘word music.’’ Even the Sam-Rose dialogue, when spoken with the right tone, expression, and dialects, provides beauty as well as realism. There is no way to prove this on paper. It can only be proved by speech, by actual production, but that fact is no reason for the assertion not to be made.

I have been emphasizing the tragic value of the play, but it has much comic value also. I do not merely refer to the many laughs which Rice’s accurate observation will evoke, but also to the audience’s satisfying realization that this observation truly reveals man’s state with its faults, foibles, and poignance. Street Scene may not have the deft ironies of Chekhov’s tragicomedies or the lyrical language of O’Casey’s, but Rice’s combination of tragedy and comedy, of brutality and compassion, does provide an effect of ineffable poignance at the tragicomic waste of humanity. It is a large play and a great play. The technical brilliance of putting so much together—so much action, so many characters— in a coherent and moving manner, I have scarcely touched upon, but the theme could never have emerged so lucidly and movingly had the play not been so superlatively wrought. Street Scene is one of those plays which affirm that the value of drama is that it asserts the value of man. Indeed, the way in which Street Scene pushes back the boundaries of the drama may almost itself negate the triumphant brutality of the play’s theme. There can be no higher praise, I think, than that.

Source: Robert Hogan, ‘‘The Realist,’’ in The Independence of Elmer Rice, Southern Illinois University Press, 1965, pp. 46–54.

From Romance to Reality

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Rice presented his audience, not with a single family living under carefully controlled conditions, but with a cross section of city life as experienced by a large group of people who live in or are somehow connected with a huge brownstone tenement. They are varied in racial background, in philosophy, in occupation, in social status and intellectual stature: Italians, Jews, Swedes, Irish, musicians, electricians, milkmen, teachers, radicals, conservatives, poets and peasants. Yet the audience is not conscious that a cross section has been selected and presented to it; what is more natural in the melting pot of New York than that such a mixture occupy one tenement and animate one plot?

The plot, what there is of it, is hackneyed. Street Scene is really a conversation piece centering on a love triangle. But adultery and murder are not the exclusive interests of the play. More important is the play’s attempt to present a generalized picture of middle-class urban living, an attempt so successful on the whole that the playwright was called a ‘‘mere journalist,’’ and other terms suggesting critical disapproval.

Street Scene is anything but journalism. It is actually a kind of domestic symphony, taking the details of life, each as accurately rendered as possible, and arranging them within a frame (or perhaps better, against a background) that is itself a familiar commonplace, to yield an interpretation of what this crowded communal life means in terms of the individual and the group. Unlike Awake and Sing! the play seems to have no propagandistic purpose, unless it is expressed by Mrs. Maurant:

I often think it’s a shame that people don’t get along better, together. People ought to be able to live together in peace and quiet; without making each other miserable.

Feeble as the sentiment is, it is characteristic of the speaker and pertains to every situation in the play. Street Scene is selective realism at its best.

Source: Alan S. Downer, ‘‘From Romance to Reality,’’ in Fifty Years of American Drama, Henry Regnery Company, 1951, pp. 63–65.

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