A fast-emerging, award-winning young playwright's debut collection of plays explores a journey through the south, a genius's rise and fall, and the cost of science and credit.
The book includes:

LEAP— A delightful, moving synthesis of science, history, and magic with a young Isaac Newton and two mysterious sisters. “LEAP features splendid language and easy confidence with heady material. Think Tom Stoppard,” - Creative Loafing

BACKGROUND—a time-twisting, science-drama about the inspirational study of cosmology and the devastating effects of denied credit. Based on a true story of Dr. Ralph Alpher.

PARTS THEY CALL DEEP—A hilarious southern drama with three generations of women in a Winnebego. “PARTS THEY CALL DEEP is a little gem,”—New York Times

A good friend of mine, knowing my love of books and all things pertaining to the theatre, recently gave me a first edition of “The Best Plays of 1929-1930” by Burns Mantle.  I read with great interest, the yearbook of “The Drama in America” noting two things immediately – nothing was said directly about the crash of the stock market and subsequent depression and no women playwrights appear in Mantle’s list of top ten plays.  

The harsh times for many in the decade of the 30’s was just beginning at the time this anthology was published.  It seems that some theatre people where in fact thriving as Burns Mantle talks extensively about how playwrights, actors and producers associated with theatre are working more than ever and making unheard of sums of money as they infiltrate the “menace of the talkies”. 

But the commercial theatre “has suffered a year of curtailed production and reduced profits [which escalated in the years to come and continues today].  Mantle notes, “While the percentage of failures has been no greater than in former years, they have been quicker failures and less creditable to the profession.  Box office receipts have been notably reduced, save in the case of the usual six or seven outstanding hits.  Salaries have been reduced.  Rentals have been reduced.  More theatres have gone dark and

remained dark in New York than in any other one season that I can recall.”

The combination of the depression and “the talkies” conspired to weaken New York theatre, and Mantle just did not attribute to them, the decline he speaks about. 

He goes on to say “yet, curiously, in both quality and character, the better plays have attained, I believe, a worthier and sounder average in intelligence than usual.

There is still wailing in the theatre.  Many men advance many reasons as to why there should be.  And yet, closing this eleventh volume of the theatre’s history, I am confronted with proof that, so far as those most intimately associated with the drama’s production are concerned, many of them appear to be doing extremely well.

For the time, at least, the frightening menace that was the talkies has been met and handled with profit.  New dramas have been resold to Hollywood at extravagant figures.  Old plays have been dug out of trunks, vaults, closets, and the estates of deceased dramatists, and sold again for almost as much as their scripts brought originally.

Playwrights who have been unable to dispose of their output for some time, and many who have suffered quick failure when they did negotiate a production, have been given assignments to write dialogue for the new medium or to pour old stories into the new forms. 

For these assignments the dramatists have been paid such unheard of sums that many of them become flushed of face and embarrassed when they repeat the figures to you – figures, oddly enough, that are mostly true.

Actors who have for years been making the dreary rounds of agents’ and producers’ offices, without substantial encouragement, have found themselves suddenly again in demand.  Hundreds have been given work in the sound studios, which has meant far more to them than the work itself.  To realize that they do know more of the art of acting, of characterization, and of reading, than the children of the screen have had either the time or the wit to learn, has been soul stimulating to the players.

In these unexpected benefits, the producers, of legitimate drama have shared.  In addition to which they have found sources of financial backing of which they had not dreamed.  Practically every large producer of talking pictures has, of necessity, been forced into the producing of plays and musical shows for his stockholders’ protection.  For, even though the silent screen has had twenty yers in which to attract and organize its creative talent, the moment the talkies came in the picture producers were forced to turn again to the theatre and buy up all the successful plays they could find.”

Mantle’s top ten plays of the season are listed below.  Interestingly, every play listed became a movie, many of them multiple times.   Writing for the “talkies” provided more money and larger audiences than writing for the theatre. 

A new era in the long history of theatre had begun.

**This play won the Pulitzer Prize in a storm of controversy over the fact that Roark Bradford’s book “Ol’ Man Adam an’ His Chillun” was the source of much of the dialogue and most of the ideas for the plays scenes.  Yet Mr. Bradford’s contribution was given only a program note in the play’s handbill and the committee awarding the Pulitzer prize entirely overlooked mention of him. 

Amidst the storm of controversy Mantle hits on the essence of an argument that continues to this day.  “I feel, too, that the Bradford contribution should have been more generously noted.  But the fact is also patent that a related story, or a series of character sketches, is far from being an actable play.  If any would prove this to himself let him take any one of a thousand successfully written stories and try with every help he can gain from the original, to put it in play form.  Even the most practiced and skillful of dramatists have failed repeatedly In this task. 

By his arrangement of scenes, by his use of a Negro choir for the singing of the related spirituals, by his sympathetic selection and rearrangement of the dialogue, and, finally, because of his fine feeling for the theatre and the best uses to which the stage can be put, Mr. Connelly has created a cohesive and beautifully effective stage play from a series of splendidly conceived but detached sketches.”