Playwrights' Company

Initial backers included Governor Averell Harriman, publisher Dorothy Schiff, actor Raymond Massey and CBS President William Paley.

Business Manager Victor Samrock, who served, in effect, as the company’s co-producer, was an initial shareholder as was their press representative William Fields.

Starring Raymond Massey, it opened on Broadway on October 15, 1938 and was an immediate success, eventually winning Sherwood his second Pulitzer Prize and confirming the promise that The Playwrights Company would become a major force in the American theatre in the coming decades.

Sherwood prevailed upon President Roosevelt, for whom he was serving as speechwriter and Director of the War Information Office, to grant a short leave to Army Captain Garson Kanin so he could direct.

Additional notable Playwrights' productions in the 1940s included Joan of Lorraine, which introduced Broadway audiences to Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc; Street Scene, a musical by Elmer Rice, Kurt Weill and poet Langston Hughes based on Rice's 1930s play about America's poor; the historical drama Anne of the Thousand Days starring Rex Harrison as Henry VIII (directed by H. C. Potter); the Rouben Mamoulian-directed Lost in the Stars; Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill’s adaptation of the distinguished South African novel “Cry The Beloved Country” and the first major musical to deal with racism; Sherwood and Irving Berlin’s Miss Liberty (Moss Hart directed), which was a modest financial success, primarily because Berlin purchased the film rights himself in order to keep unblemished the record that his shows never lost money; and Maxwell Anderson’s drama Truckline Cafe, co-produced with Elia Kazan and its director Harold Clurman, which was a failure except for the career-establishing, standout performance by a new young actor, Marlon Brando.

“The Fourposter,” Jan de Hartog’s two-character comedy about love and marriage starring Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, was one such a production; with 632 performances and a subsequent 42 -week national tour, it was to become a big hit after its opening on Broadway in 1951.

The Company’s last play was Gore Vidal’s contemporary political drama “The Best Man,” starring Melvyn Douglas, Lee Tracy and Frank Lovejoy, which opened in March, 1960.