Theater Guild Reference library
The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre
... Guild New York theatre company known in the 1920s for productions of innovative European dramas and new American plays. An outgrowth of the Washington Square Players , the Guild was founded in 1919 by Lawrence Langner , Philip Moeller and actress Helen Westley . This trio was quickly joined by Therese Helburn , who would become the organization's executive director, banker Maurice Wertheim , and Lee Simonson . Despite the inherent problems in operating ‘by committee’, the Guild remained loyal to its concept of rule by a governing board. The Guild...
Theatre Guild Reference library
The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre (2 ed.)
...'s Oklahoma! , presented under the Guild's auspices at the St James Theatre in 1943 . It staged the same team's Carousel ( 1945 ) and such notable later productions as O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh ( 1946 ); but it never regained its former eminence. The Guild Theatre was taken over by the American National Theatre and Academy in 1950 ; the Guild itself continued for a time to mount new plays, revivals, and musicals within a commercial framework. Two important breakaway organizations were the Group Theatre and the Playwrights' Company. The...
Theatre Guild Reference library
Mark Fearnow
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance
... Guild American art theatre that emerged from the Washington Square Players in 1918 . The Players were reconstituted as the Guild through the efforts of Lawrence Langner (who maintained his day job as a patent attorney) and so began life with a clean financial slate. Benefiting from the Players' experience the Theatre Guild chose to become fully professional. It made other significant decisions: to produce only full-evening plays ‘which should be great plays’, to lease or build a theatre building accommodating 500–600 persons and thus ‘larger than...
Theatre Guild Reference library
The Companion to Theatre and Performance
... Guild American art theatre that emerged from the *Washington Square Players in 1918 , reconstituted as fully professional through the efforts of Lawrence Langner (who maintained his job as a patent attorney). The Guild choose to produce only important full-evening plays, to lease or build a theatre accommodating 500–600 persons and thus ‘larger than the usual *Little Theatre’, to organize on a subscription basis, and to produce no plays written by its board members. These principles propelled the Guild during the years 1919–1939 to succeed as an...
Theatre Guild, The Reference library
The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (3 ed.)
...Guild existed only on paper, its productions so infrequent that most thought the group was gone. Its last official offering was as co‐producer of the unsuccessful musical State Fair ( 1996 ). In its heyday the Guild was the principal producer of such playwrights as George Bernard Shaw , Eugene O'Neill , Maxwell Anderson , and Robert Sherwood and greatly advanced the careers of such players as Lunt and Fontanne . Its pioneering subscription plan guaranteed audiences in New York and elsewhere the best in modern theatre, and in turn assured the Guild a...
Little Theatre Guild of Great Britain Reference library
The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre
...Theatre Guild of Great Britain In the mid-1930s the Crescent Theatre, Birmingham (founded 1923 ), attempted to form an Association of little theatres (that is, non-commercial groups controlling their own buildings). The scheme was aborted by the difficulty of administration. The next attempt was to create a special section within the membership of the British Drama League ( see British Theatre Association ), an idea not altogether welcomed although adopted at a BDL conference in 1938 . The BDL was not well equipped to deal with the specialist problems...
Theatre Guild
Little Theatre Guild of Great Britain
Dramatists Guild
Theatre Arts
Sanford Meisner
Vladimir Kirshon
People's National Theatre
League of American Theatres and Producers
Second Man
Valley Forge
Gabriel Dell
Elizabeth the Queen
End of Summer
