Street Scene (play)
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- This article is about Street Scene, a play by Elmer Rice; for other meanings, see Street Scene (disambiguation).
Street Scene is a play by Elmer Rice, which opened at the Playhouse Theatre in New York City on January 10, 1929 and ran for a total of 601 performances. The action of this ambitious, groundbreaking play takes place entirely on the front stoops of a New York City brownstone and in the adjacent street, in the early part of the 20th century, and studies the daily and complex lives of the people living in the building and the surrounding neighborhood and their sad, often tragic interactions.
It won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.[1]
The main characters are Anna Maurrant, dealing with issues of infidelity; Rose Maurrant, her daughter, who struggles with the demands of her job and boss and her attraction to a Jewish neighbor, Sam Kaplan; Frank Maurrant, the domimering and sometimes abusive husband and father of Anna and Rose; Sam, a caring and concerned neighbor in love with Rose; and many other neighbors and passersby.
The movie: The 1931 movie of the same name starred Sylvia Sidney, Estelle Taylor, Beulah Bondi (reprising her Broadway role, and her film debut) and William Collier, Jr.
The opera: For the adaptation of this play into a Broadway musical or, more precisely, an "American opera" by Kurt Weill, please see Street Scene (opera).
