The Theatre: New Play in Manhattan: Dec. 12, 1938

American Landscape (by Elmer Rice; produced by The Playwrights' Company). In the fall of 1934, after two of his plays (Judgment Day, Between Two Worlds) had been panned, Elmer Rice, calling first-night audiences "the scum of the earth," savagely forswore the theatre. But when The Playwrights' Company was formed last spring, Rice quietly chucked away his vow. Last week his American Landscape followed the Company's Knickerbocker Holiday and Abe Lincoln in Illinois to Broadway.

No play to make first-night audiences shrive themselves for past sins is American Landscape. Four years of sulking in...

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