Kingsley Comments

Introduction:

A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, activist, and Group Theatre contributor, Sidney Kingsley was a notable figure in American theatre. Along with providing the Group Theatre its first successful production, Kingsley’s achievements as a playwright worked to spark a genre of Medical Drama whose modern counterparts (such as ER) persist to today.

Achievements:

Born in New York City on October 22nd, 1906, Kingsley received a full-paid scholarship to Cornell University where, in 1924, he began writing one-act plays for his University drama club. Upon graduation, Kingsley soon gravitated to the Group Theatre, a left-wing theatre company just budding at the time, where he established himself as a playwright. His first notable play, titled Men in White, took place inside a hospital and dealt with the morality of abortion. The play, launched during the Group Theatre’s second season, was a box-office smash that won Kingsley the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1934. A year after his first award he embarked on writing Dead End, a play about slum life and crime which, like its predecessor, ran for two seasons. Keeping political issues as his primary theme, his next play, Ten Million Ghosts (1936) centered on munitions profiteering and war-merchants. Referred to as being unpopular with critics, the show went on for a short run of eleven performances before folding under. Kingsley’s next play, The World We Make (1939) was also relatively unsuccessful and, once the Group Theatre fell apart finally in 1940, his play The Patriots wasn’t staged until 1943. Around this time Sidney met Madge Evans, a Broadway actress known for her performance in Send in the Clowns. In 1939 they were wed and remained together for forty-two years before her death in 1981. Kingsley went on writing for the stage, resulting in four plays that would run on Broadway: Detective Story (1949), Darkness at Noon (1950), which won him a New York Drama Critics Circle Award, his comedy Lunatics and Lovers (1954), and Night Life (1962). He also wrote film scripts for Hollywood productions of three of his plays: Men in White (1934), Dead End (1937), and Detective Story (1951). Sidney Kingsley died on October 18th, 1995.

Biography:

From early on Kingsley, born Sidney S. Kirshner, appears destined for a successful career. His achievements in middle school won him admission to the prestigious Townsend Harris Hall, a public high school famous for admitting only the most promising students. Inspired in part by encouragement from his father, a New York physician, Kingsley accepted a scholarship to Cornell University where from 1924 to 1928 he distinguished himself in forensic and dramatic arts. After graduation Sidney found work acting in a Bronx stock company before joining the Group Theatre upon its formation in 1930. Serving as a launching point for his career as a playwright, this new theatre company offered a full production value of acting and design talent for his plays. Other members of the Group Theatre include Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Stella Adler, John Garfield, Joseph Bromberg, Michael Gordon, Clifford Odets, Paul Green, Howard Da Silva, Franchot Tone, John Randolph, and Lee J. Cobb.

For his work produced there and elsewhere, Kingsley won for his plays a number of awards, including: the Theatre Club medal in 1934, 1936, and 1943; the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1943 and 1951, and the Pulitzer Price Award in Drama in 1934. Including his accomplishments for the stage, Kingsley was sought by Hollywood on three occasions to write adaptations of his plays for the screen. This lasted up until he was blacklisted by the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), an investigation committee who, following the Second World War, interrogated known members of the Group Theatre. Members such as Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, and Lee J. Cobb testified, naming other members of socialist and left-wing groups. However a number of members, such as Stella Adler, Joseph Bromberg, John Randolph, Howard Da Silva, John Garfield, and Kingsley refused and were blacklisted. While all of his plays on some level dealt with important social issues, Kingsley experimented with a variety of genres before his death in October, 1995. His 1943 piece, The Patriots was a historical play whose plot centered on the rivalry between Jefferson and Hamilton during the early years of the Republic. Both The World We Make (1939) and Darkness at Noon (1950) were adaptations of novels, the former by Millen Brand and the latter by Arthur Koestler. Also, in 1954, his distinctly secondary effort Lunatics and Lovers opened with considerable success as Kingsley’s only comedy.

His Plays:

Sidney Kingsley’s first play of box-office status, Men in White also established him as an authoritative realist. Calling for very descriptive scenery within his text, often stretching two pages or more, Kingsley collaborated with the gifted scenic designer Mordecai Gorelik for a realistic yet expressive set. Directed by Lee Strasberg, the play’s run is remembered as “our most finished production” by Harold Clurman in his book The Fervent Years. With a cast of twenty-eight actors, the play takes on controversial moral topics such as abortion and the consequences of non-state-sanctioned, and therefore possibly infective, operations. The film adaptation written in 1934, only a year after the stage play premiere, was criticized by many for its dismissal of the abortion scene. It is very possible that without this play, whose subject came naturally to Kingsley as a forensics student, the Group Theatre would have folded up early in its career.

His next piece, Dead Man, ran for two seasons in 1935. A political commentary on slum life in New York City and how it relates to crime, the play influenced the implementation of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, a program towards eradicating slums after the Great Depression. The play, involving a whopping thirty-two characters, tells the story of a celebrated gangster and a street urchin: the former ending up in a gutter when discovered by Federal agents, and the latter developing into a gangster who preys on others. Like his earlier stage play success, Kingsley demands in his text a setting of staggering realism offering a slice of a New York City street. Norman Bel Geddes, another gifted designer of the Group Theatre, designed the set referred to by New York Times reporter Brooks Atkinson as “super-realistic”. Utilizing an emptied orchestra pit, the players constructed a net that six young actors would leap into while the stage manager threw a geyser of water in the air. While appearing to be submerged in the sewage, it’s recorded that an assistant stage manager would rub them down with oil, making them emerge glistening as if they were wet. According to Kingsley in an interview with playwright John Guare, “Actually the oil protected them from the chill. We also fed them daily with vitamins.” These six actors went to perform the same roles in the film adaptation of the play released in 1937, and later formed the comedy troupe known as the Dead End Kids. Dead End the film, starring Humphrey Bogart and adapted by Samuel Goldwyn, was considered to be technically faulted in its rigid adherence to the physical form of the play, reported as “a much too frugal use of so mobile an instrument as the camera” by John Mc Manus.

Kingsley’s next piece, Ten Million Ghosts was performed for a short run of eleven performances in 1936 and, largely due to its commentary on war profiteers, was considered to have stepped too far by a number of critics and therefore nearly impossible to find. Unpublished and left out of his collection Sidney Kingsley: Five Award Winning Plays, finding a copy of the play is tantamount to hunting a ghost. Due to his flop with that production, Sidney found only moderate support for his 1939 work The World We Make. The play, a moving dramatization of author Millen Brand’s novel, was also considerably less successful than his first two plays and only ran for a short time.

It wasn’t until his 1943 play The Patriots that Kingsley returned to repute, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. A historical play, the plot centered on the rivalry of founding fathers Jefferson and Hamilton during the early years of the Republic. His next play, Detective Story (1949), starred Ralph Bellamy performing the role of a victim of self-righteousness. Less successful, but more remarkable was his 1950-51 adaptation of Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon, winning him a second Drama Critics Award. His distinctly secondary effort, the comedy Lunatics and Lovers opened with considerable success in December of 1954, with Dennis King in the leading role.

Productions:

Men in White: September 26th, 1933- July 1934

-Written by Sidney Kingsley

Dead End: October 28th, 1935- June 12, 1937

-Written by Sidney Kingsley

-Directed by Sidney Kingsley

Ten Million Ghosts: October 23rd, 1936- November 1936

-Written by Sidney Kingsley

-Staged by Sidney Kingsley

-Produced by Sidney Kingsley

The World We Make: November 20th, 1939- January 27th, 1940

-Written by Sidney Kingsley

-Staged by Sidney Kingsley

-Produced by Sidney Kingsley

The Patriots: January 29th, 1943- June 26th, 1943

-Written by Sidney Kingsley

Detective Story: March 23rd, 1949- August 12th, 1950

-Written by Sidney Kingsley

-Staged by Sidney Kingsley

Darkness at Noon: January 13th, 1951- June 23rd, 1951

-Written by Sidney Kingsley

-Directed by Sidney Kingsley

-Staged by Sidney Kingsley

Lunatics and Lovers: December 13, 1954- October 1, 1955

-Written by Sidney Kingsley

-Staged by Sidney Kingsley

Night Life: October 23rd, 1962- December 15th, 1962

-Written by Sidney Kingsley

-Staged by Sidney Kingsley

-Produced by Sidney Kingsley

Books:

Kingsley, Sidney. Sixteen Famous American Plays. Ed. Bennet A. Cerf and Van H. Cartmell. New York: Random House, Inc., 1941.

Electronic Sources:

Answers. Com Article on Sidney Kingsley

http://www.answers.com/topic/sidney-kingsley

Internet Broadway Database on Sidney Kingsley

http://www.ibdb.com/person.asp?ID=15321

NY Times Review of Kingsley’s Dead End

http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=FC77E7DF173FE462BC4151DFB667838E629EDE

NY Times Review of Kingsley’s Technical Elements

http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=9D06E5D91F38F935A35752C0A963948260

NY Times Review of Kingsley’s Career

http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=9903E4D91438F936A25754C0A961958260

Sidney Kingsley Biography

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAkingsley.htm

Wikipedia Article on Sidney Kingsley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Kingsley