Historical Context
In 1929, the United States was poised to shift from the Jazz Age to the Great Depression. The 1920s were a complex period in American history, marked by an illusion of economic prosperity. Large corporations expanded during this economic boom, making many individuals wealthy and powerful, while also fostering the belief that others could achieve similar wealth. The stock market, which steadily grew throughout the decade, was seen as the source of this affluence. By 1929, the frenzy surrounding the stock market reached its zenith, and those managing it struggled to cope with the rapid fluctuations. Warnings about the artificially inflated bull market were disregarded. On October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday, the stock market crashed, ushering in the Great Depression. Within a month, unemployment rates had increased fourfold.
Before the crash, cities were viewed as hubs of opportunity. Urbanization increased across the United States, leading to the rapid construction of office buildings, industrial complexes, hotels, and apartment buildings. The Empire State Building began construction in 1929 and was completed in 1931. New York City symbolized endless possibilities and attracted many new immigrants and rural Americans seeking their fortunes. However, the city also suffered from widespread pollution and overcrowding. As individuals found success, they moved to newly developed suburbs. Initially, the upper classes relocated to the suburbs, followed by the growth of middle-class suburban areas.
Not everyone reaped the benefits of the 1920s economic boom. The working and lower-middle classes, including teachers, did not, although they maintained steady employment and relatively high wages. Unions, while present, lacked significant power and respect during this time. Unskilled factory work was monotonous, and job stability was uncertain. Many city residents lived in cramped apartments, with only seventy-one percent having access to running water and eighty percent having electricity. Conditions were even worse in rural America, where small towns were declining, and farmers faced significant economic challenges. Only ten percent of farm families had electricity, and just thirty-three percent had running water.
Throughout the 1920s, tensions existed between rural and urban America, as well as between native-born citizens and immigrants. Concerns arose about accommodating the needs of new Americans, more than a quarter of whom were illiterate. While various groups emerged to assimilate immigrants into American society, a nativist movement feared the changes immigrants might bring. There was apprehension about communism, socialism, and other radical ideologies. Many harbored animosity toward Germans (due to World War I), Jews, and Catholics, with anti-Semitism being widespread. The Ku Klux Klan gained influence, although the number of lynchings decreased in 1929. These pressures led to the enactment of the National Origins Act in 1924, which imposed restrictions on the number and type of European immigrants. Despite this, immigrants continued to arrive, even after the stock market crash marked the end of an optimistic decade and the onset of a challenging one.
Literary Style
Setting
Street Scene is a drama set in New York City during the late 1920s. The events unfold on a sweltering June day, confined to a single location: the exterior of a roughly thirty-year-old brownstone tenement. The building, though slightly worn, has a stoop where residents gather to escape the heat and engage in conversation. Visible are the front windows of several apartments, where residents can be seen or heard. The building is situated on a street that includes warehouses and other residential properties. By focusing the play on this familiar setting, Rice highlights the themes of Street Scene, emphasizing the characters' social conditions and the dehumanizing aspects of life in New York City for the lower-middle class.
Realism
Street Scene is crafted as a realistic play, aiming to portray life truthfully. Rice...
(This entire section contains 540 words.)
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seeks to depict what life was genuinely like for a specific societal class in New York City during the late 1920s. To achieve this, he situates his play in a realistic environment: the tenement. Many characters are immigrants who speak English with accents. Characters like Mr. Kaplan maintain strong ties to their heritage, as seen when he reads a Hebrew newspaper. Rice illustrates how these characters interact with those who see themselves as American, such as the Joneses and the Maurrants. Their concerns are straightforward and relate to daily life: Mrs. Maurrant's affair, keeping cool on a hot summer day, and the budding romance between Rose Maurrant and Sam Kaplan.
Numerous minor characters contribute to the play's realism. Throughout the play, a variety of people pass by the building, from children to policemen to onlookers at the murder scene in act 3. Many do not have speaking parts, but those who do discuss everyday topics like playing Red Rover. To underscore Rice's social message, he includes some more developed minor characters. Miss Simpson, a spinster charity worker, looks down on many tenement residents. Although she ostensibly helps Mrs. Hildebrand and her children, who are left destitute after Mr. Hildebrand's abandonment, Miss Simpson cannot resist imposing her beliefs on others. Such characters enhance the play's realism by reflecting the types of people one might encounter in such a setting in real life.
Sound Effects
Rice places significant emphasis on sound in the play's directions to enhance the realism of Street Scene. Throughout the performance, Rice insists that the audience should hear steam whistles, traffic, and various street noises. In the original production, which he directed, Rice designed the stage so that the sound of footsteps would mimic those heard on a street. Additionally, he created recordings of street sounds he deemed essential for the play's authenticity.
Multiple Plots
In Street Scene, Rice departs from a conventional linear plot structure. Instead, he intricately weaves numerous plots, both major and minor, throughout the narrative. The central storyline revolves around the Maurrant family, highlighting Mrs. Maurrant's affair, her husband's awareness or ignorance of it, Rose's romantic life, and Willie's lively behavior. Although many subplots in Street Scene connect to the Maurrant family, numerous others do not, such as Mrs. Hildebrand's eviction. By presenting such a diverse array of stories, Rice enhances the play's realism and impact, reflecting that life comprises not just a single central story but many interconnected and independent ones.
Compare and Contrast
1929: Radio is the main source of entertainment at home. By 1929, over ten million households, nearly half of the country, own radios, a significant increase from 1921 when few did.
Today: Television and technology related to computers have far exceeded radio as the leading forms of home entertainment.
1929: Following a period of unprecedented prosperity, the stock market collapses in October, plunging the American economy into chaos. Warning signs about economic instability were ignored.
Today: The United States experiences significant prosperity, although there are concerns about potentially overvalued Internet stocks. Measures are in place to prevent a crash similar to the one in 1929.
1929: Unions generally lack strength and respect, but they are starting to grow somewhat in manufacturing. Public sentiment is mostly unfavorable. A strike at a Tennessee textile mill results in a defeat for labor.
Today: After enjoying decades of influence, unions are experiencing a decline. While some retain power in specific sectors, overall respect for unions is waning.
1929: Due to the frequent absence of refrigeration in homes, milk and ice are delivered daily to households.
Today: Refrigerators are standard in homes, and consumers purchase dairy products at stores. The notion of daily delivery is unfamiliar.
Setting
Manhattan Apartment Building
The Manhattan apartment building, a nondescript brownstone tenement, stands as a microcosm of life in New York City. Housing roughly a dozen families, this structure is set amidst the bustling activity of Manhattan, in what playwright Elmer Rice vaguely described as "a mean quarter of New York." However, Rice later divulged in his autobiography that the building, designed in collaboration with Jo Mielziner, was modeled after a real brownstone on Sixty-fifth Street. This ordinary building, although typical, serves as a canvas for social realism, capturing the essence of urban life.
Built in the 1890s, the brownstone is characterized as "ugly," a descriptor that highlights its utilitarian purpose rather than any architectural grace. The building is flanked by a storage warehouse on one side and bordered by a site of demolition on the other, painting a stark picture of the urban environment. A defining feature is the "stoop"—a set of four shallow stone steps flanked by curved stone balustrades—that leads to an always-open front door. This entryway opens into a vestibule, revealing the janitor’s basement apartment windows and the six narrow windows of the first-floor apartments, allowing glimpses into the lives of its inhabitants. The upper floors remain visually obscure, their windows hidden from view.
Street Scene employs these detailed stage directions to create a vivid setting that is both visually and aurally alive, integral to its narrative of everyday urban existence. The constant hum of city life is essential to the scene—distant roars of elevated trains and the rattling of trucks fill the air, interspersed with the barking of dogs and the collective murmurs of New Yorkers as they go about their daily routines. This auditory backdrop spans a full twenty-four-hour cycle, encapsulating the relentless pace of city life on a stifling June day.
Media Adaptations
Street Scene was turned into a film by Rice, who crafted the screenplay. King Vidor directed the movie, featuring Sylvia Sidney in the role of Rose Maurrant. United Artists released it in 1931.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Sources
Arliss, Laurie, Mary Cassata, and Thomas Skill, ‘‘Dyadic Interaction on the Daytime Serials: ‘‘How Men and Women Vie for Power,’’ in Life on Daytime Television: Tuning-In American Serial Drama, Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1983, p. 147.
Atkinson, J. Brooks, Review in New York Times, January 19, 1947, Sect. 2, p. 1.
———, ‘‘Affairs on the West Side,’’ New York Times, January 20, 1929, Sect. 8, p. 1.
———, ‘‘Honor Where Honor Is Due,’’ New York Times, May 19, 1929, Sect. 9, p. 1.
———, Review in New York Times, January 11, 1929, p. 20.
Behringer, Fred, ‘‘Elmer Rice,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, Gale, 1981, pp. 179–92.
Bigsby, C. W. E., A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, Vol. 1, 1900–1940, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. vi, vii, 126, 130.
Broussard, Louis, American Drama: Contemporary Allegory from Eugene O’Neill to Tennessee Williams, University of Oklahoma Press, 1962, pp. 3, 7.
Bruckner, D. J. R., Review in New York Times, November 6, 1996, p. C14.
Cassata, Mary, ‘‘The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: An Analysis of Soap Operas Radio to Television’’ in Life on Daytime Television: Tuning-In American Serial Drama, Ablex Publishing Corp., 1983, p. 85.
———, and Thomas Skill, ‘‘‘Television Soap Operas: What’s Been Going On Anyway:’—Revisited’’ in Life on Daytime Television: Tuning-In American Serial Drama, Ablex Publishing Corp., 1983, p. 157.
Review in Catholic World, March 1929, pp. 720–22.
Comstock, George, ‘‘A Social Scientist’s View of Daytime Serial Drama,’’ in Life on Daytime Television: Tuning-In American Serial Drama, Ablex Publishing Corp., 1983, p. xxiii.
Gassner, John, Twenty-Five Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre, Crown Publishers, 1949, pp. xvi, xxviii.
Krutch, Joseph Wood, ‘‘Cross Section,’’ in Nation, January 30, 1929, p. 142.
Lyons, Donald, Review in Wall Street Journal, November 4, 1996, p. A20.
Miller, Jordan Y., and Winifred L. Frazer, American Drama between the Wars: A Critical History, in Twayne’s Critical History of American Drama, G. K. Hall & Co., 1991, pp. vii, xii, 158, 168.
Morgan, Charles, Review in New York Times, September 28, 1930, Sect. 8, p. 2.
Newcomb, Horace, ‘‘A Humanist’s View of Daytime Serial Drama,’’ in Life on Daytime Television: Tuning-In American Serial Drama, Ablex Publishing Corp., 1983, p. xxix.
Rice, Elmer L., Street Scene, Samuel French, 1928, 1956.
———, Street Scene, in Seven Plays by Elmer Rice, Viking Press, 1950, pp. 111–90.
Skinner, R. Dana, Review in Commonweal, Vol. IX, No. 12, January 23, 1929, pp. 48–49.
Thurber, James, ‘‘Ivorytown, Rinsoville, Anacinburg, and Crisco Corners,’’ in Worlds Without End: The Art and History of the Soap Operas, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997, p. 51.
Valgemae, Mardi, Accelerated Grimace: Expressionism in American Drama of the 1920s, in Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques series, edited by Harry Moore, Southern Illinois University Press, 1972, pp. xi, xiv, 14.
Young, Stark, Review in New Republic, January 30, 1929, pp. 296–98.
Further Reading
Dunham, Frank, Elmer Rice, Twayne, 1970. This critical study of Rice’s life and work includes commentary on Street Scene.
Hogan, Robert, The Independence of Elmer Rice, Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. This book discusses Rice’s plays, including Street Scene, in social and cultural context.
Palmieri, Anthony F. R., Elmer Rice: A Playwright’s Vision of America, Farleigh Dickinson, 1980. This book considers Street Scene and other Rice plays in terms of his development as a playwright and his reaction to the world around him.
Elmer Rice's autobiography, Minority Report: An Autobiography, published by Simon and Schuster in 1963, explores his entire life and career in theater, with a focus on works such as Street Scene.
