Sidney Kingsley

• Born: October 22, 1906
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: March 20, 1995
• Place of death: Oakland, New Jersey

Other Literary Forms

Sidney Kingsley is known exclusively for his plays.

Achievements

Sidney Kingsley is generally regarded as a social dramatist, one who made the social and political problems of his age the subject matter of his plays. Because his early work was done in the 1930’s, a time of economic depression and of a crisis for capitalism, there are strong liberal (at times leftist) perspectives in his dramas. Invariably his characters struggle with a fate not simply personal but, in a very explicit sense, social as well. George Ferguson in Men in White, Thomas Jefferson in The Patriots, Nicolai Rubashov in Darkness at Noon, and Will Kazar in Night Life are very different as characters, yet all of them, in Kingsley’s plays, must weigh their personal desires and private dreams against their social responsibilities and public ambitions.

Kingsley’s plays demonstrate his interaction with the world of his day: its politics, its institutions, its social issues, and its technologies. The movies inspired by three of his plays—Men in White (1934), Dead End (1937), and Detective Story (1951)—expanded his already strong influence on the popular culture of his day.

By concentrating on the interaction between the idealist and the community in which he functions, Kingsley was able to project the tensions and dynamics of society in the midst of industrial transformation. Although the actions in Kingsley’s plays are often melodramatic, they serve to illuminate the struggle between materialism and idealism, between the structures of a society and the people trying to adjust to their social institutions. Few twentieth century writers were more thorough in examining the dedicated professional and the meaning of work to those whose work is the property of others.

Kingsley is also significant because he interacted with many of the major talents of his age. The varied list of prominent theatrical people associated with his productions is impressive in itself: Luther Adler, Morris Carnovsky, Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, Lee Strasberg, Norman Bel Geddes, the Dead End Kids, Lee Grant, Ralph Bellamy, Orson Welles, Howard Lindsay, Russel Crouse, Claude Rains, Jack Palance, Kim Hunter, Buddy Hackett, and Kingsley’s wife, Madge Evans. In addition to pursuing his own active career as a creative artist, Kingsley attempted to encourage the creativity of others, particularly in his work with the Dramatists Guild. Playing many different roles, Kingsley became a major figure in American theatrical history.

Kingsley received extensive recognition for his accomplishments. He received a Pulitzer Prize for Men in White as well as New York Theatre Club Medals for it, for Dead End, and for The Patriots. Kingsley also received New York Drama Critics Circle Awards for The Patriots and for Darkness at Noon. The Patriots also earned for him the New York Newspaper Guild Front Page Award, and for Detective Story, he earned a Newspaper Guild Page One Citation and an Edgar Allan Poe Award. Darkness at Noon also won a Donaldson Award for Outstanding Achievement and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit Medal. Finally, Kingsley received a Yeshiva University Award for Achievement in the Theatre (1965), a doctor of letters degree from Monmouth College (1978), and an induction into the Theatre Hall of Fame (1983).

Biography

Sidney Kingsley was born Sidney Kirshner on October 22, 1906, in New York City. He spent most of his life in the New York area. Involved in the theater from an early age, he was already writing, directing, and acting in one-act plays at Townsend Harris Hall in New York City while a teenager. After he was graduated from high school in 1924, Kingsley attended Cornell University, where he was a member of the Dramatic Club and acted with Franchot Tone. At Cornell, he continued to write plays: His play “Wonder-Dark Epilogue” won a prize for the best one-act play written by a student. After receiving his bachelor of arts degree in 1928, Kingsley did some acting with the Tremont Stock Company in the Bronx. Although he had a role in the 1929 Broadway production Subway Express, he decided at that time that acting was not the career for him.

That year, Kingsley went to California, where he worked for Columbia Pictures as a play reader and scenario writer, but he soon returned to New York. At this time, he was working on his own play, originally entitled Crisis, later to be Men in White. During the writing he began to research the subject matter systematically, a procedure he would employ during the composition of several other plays. Because his play was to be about doctors, he visited various hospitals in the New York City area—Bellevue, Beth Israel, and Lebanon—to gather material and to render as accurate a social picture as he could. (One story has it that he once masqueraded as an intern.) Although several would-be producers had options on the play, it was finally presented by the soon-to-be-famous Group Theatre. It was their first major success, and the play established Kingsley as a prominent American playwright, winning for him the Pulitzer Prize (in a controversial decision) and the Theatre Club Award. It was also a financial success; Kingsley reportedly received forty-six thousand dollars for the motion-picture rights. Kingsley had become a principal figure in the theatrical community of New York.

Kingsley directed all of his plays except The Patriots. Perhaps because he himself was an amateur painter and sculptor, he showed great concern throughout his career for the physical appearance of his plays onstage. His second drama, Dead End, owed its immediate impact in no small part to a spectacular New York setting created by Bel Geddes. Animated by the energetic argot of his New York boys, the Dead End Kids, Kingsley’s second play was even more popular and critically acclaimed than his first effort. Although the next two plays, Ten Million Ghosts and The World We Make, were not the popular hits his first two had been, they also featured memorable visual effects. By this time, Kingsley was regarded as a dramatist of social realism and spectacular staging effects, one whose plots inclined to melodrama and whose sympathies were clearly with the less fortunate.

In July, 1939, Kingsley married actress Madge Evans, a marriage that would last until her death in 1981. She retired from her film career soon after the marriage and assisted Kingsley in the historical research for his new play, tentatively entitled Thomas Jefferson. She later appeared in the 1943 production version, The Patriots. Kingsley found himself inducted into the United States Army in March, 1941, about the time he finished the first version. He spent his free time polishing the play and was rewarded by largely favorable notices, most of which found Sergeant Kingsley’s dramatization of the precarious nature of freedom in the early republic pertinent to the contemporary struggle of the United States in World War II. Later in 1943, Kingsley was promoted to lieutenant.

After his discharge from the army, Kingsley spent some time working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on the movie scripts for Cass Timberlane (1947) and Homecoming (1946). Much of the time in the late 1940’s, however, he was back in New York, haunting detective squad rooms to gather material for his new production, Detective Story. Even though it did not win the great awards some of his earlier efforts received, Detective Story, with its harsh, intense drama and convincing factual setting, is considered by many critics to be Kingsley’s best play. Like Men in White and Dead End, it was made into a successful motion picture.

Kingsley’s next drama, Darkness at Noon, was based on Arthur Koestler’s 1941 novel of the same title. The production, featuring Claude Rains, Jack Palance, and Kim Hunter, was successful enough to win for Kingsley the Donaldson Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Kingsley and Koestler, however, quarreled publicly about the play; indeed, Koestler threatened to take Kingsley to court for what he thought were distortions of his text. In addition, Brooks Atkinson, the reviewer for The New York Times, raised similar unfavorable comparisons between the novel and the play. Produced in 1951, a time of strong anticommunist feeling (and of reaction against that feeling), the play may have been a victim of its era. In spite of inspiring some harsh criticism, the play ran for almost two hundred performances.

For his next effort, Lunatics and Lovers, Kingsley shifted to totally different dramatic material, presenting the mid-1950’s in a farce complete with lots of noise, various con games, and a plethora of sexual comedy. Although most critics were not fond of the play, it had a respectable run of more than three hundred performances. Night Life, presented in 1962, focuses on a labor racketeer, but in its frenzied surreal quality, it reflects an era’s growing emphasis on style rather than on social or political issues, an emphasis not suited to Kingsley’s talents.

After Night Life, much of Kingsley’s creative energy went into the writing of a dramatic trilogy, The Art Scene, which was to examine the phenomenon of radical change in the contemporary world as reflected in graphic arts, modern dance, and the theater. Kingsley finished the first part, Man with a Corpse on His Back, in the early 1970’s, but it was never published or produced.

When not involved with his own work, Kingsley was concerned with encouraging and improving the artistic endeavors of others. Convinced that television was going to set the intellectual and spiritual climate of the age, he was briefly in the 1950’s a television consultant to the Columbia Broadcasting System. As president of the Dramatists Guild from 1961 to 1969, he was active in efforts to help young playwrights and to preserve Off-Broadway theater. In the late 1970’s, as chairman of New Jersey’s Motion Picture and TV Authority, he was able to encourage film companies to shoot movies in the New Jersey area.

In recognition of his many contributions to the cultural scene, Kingsley was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in May, 1983. He was awarded the Gold Medal for Drama by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1986 and won the William Inge Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1988. Kingsley died in 1995, in Oakland, New Jersey.

Analysis

As a dramatist, Sidney Kingsley is noted for being a theater technician—not a surprising reputation, since he spent all of his life in the theater and directed all of his plays except The Patriots. Typically, the characters in his plays represent a social spectrum and dramatize sharp, overt ideological differences. Within this pattern, there are also more subtly contrasting pairs of individuals: Gimpty and “Baby-Face,” former members of the same youth gang in Dead End; the two proletarian brothers in The World We Make; the two women who love George Ferguson in Men in White; and Rubashov and his inquisitor in Darkness at Noon.

Few dramatists have more consistently articulated in their works the liberal political philosophy than has Kingsley. Keenly attentive to the social and political events of his day, Kingsley’s plays demonstrate his faith in the essential goodness of people, his suspicion of authority and power, his belief in progress, and his admiration for the life of reason. Jefferson, the hero of The Patriots, is Kingsley’s ideal intellectual. Those people who work with dedication and integrity are the cornerstones of his hope for the future. At times, Kingsley tended to be sentimental about the working class, and frequently his idealism and his belief in the value of work for its own sake led him into melodramatic conflicts and facile resolutions. At his best, however, he powerfully embodied the virtues of liberal humanism.

Kingsley’s plays have invariably displayed his fondness for spectacle. His settings are obviously the result of studied decisions, and they appear in virtually every production to be an indispensable element in the play. Bel Geddes’s stunning set for Dead End articulated the social contrasts at the heart of the play as much as did its plot. The prison set in Darkness at Noon, with its spectacular tapping out of communication from one cell to another, starkly defined Soviet Russia for Kingsley’s audience. The operating room in Men in White and the squad room of Detective Story anticipated in their powerful immediacy the television series of a later era. Indeed, Kingsley’s sets have sometimes been disproportionately powerful: The expressionistic set of Ten Million Ghosts may in fact have been too heavy for the play, and the first two settings in The World We Make convey such a sharp, deterministic insistence that the rest of the play, set in John’s room, seems too sequestered.

The World We Make

Dr. Schiller’s statement in The World We Make, that no normal human being lives alone in the world, is a basic truth for Kingsley’s plays, which stress the working out of the necessary difficulties in social existence. His characters tend to be types, figures who seem vibrantly alive only when struggling with the idea of their social duties. In this respect, it is society that animates them. Like other social realists, Kingsley has the gift of evoking a sense of community, the feeling that his characters are bound, for better or worse, by a system of deeply felt values. When this system breaks down, as it does in Kingsley’s later work, the basic unity of the plays begins to fragment.

Men in White

The title of Kingsley’s first play, Men in White, indicates the play’s focus on the profession of medicine itself. Throughout, Kingsley is concerned with what a doctor’s life is and what it should be, examining the ethics, economics, and dedication of the medical community. The entire play is confined to various parts of St. George’s Hospital, and in one of the most crucial scenes, Kingsley takes the audience into the operating room, where the real and the melodramatic mingle. As Laura prepares to witness her fiancé operating, she suddenly discovers that the case, a botched abortion, is the result of her fiancé’s affair. As this is happening, the visual dimension of the play emphasizes the ritual, the impersonal element, of medicine, so much so that the scene becomes an ironic comment on the plot and the action, a measure of the personal frustrations of the characters. The efficiency and sterility of the operating room convey an atmosphere of professional mystery: The putting on of the gloves, the scrubbing, and the masks all blend to suggest the distinct, new nature of this community and the people in it, and the scientific impersonality of its activities.

Two doctors, one mature and one at the beginning of his career, are at the center of the action. The older man, Dr. Hochberg, is a model for those around him. Although he seems casual in his initial appearance, it is soon apparent that he is a very disciplined, confident practitioner, the expert to whom everyone turns for advice and direction. He is a man of principle, informing the rich Mr. Hudson that doctors are more interested in working and learning than in making money, yet he is practical enough at board meetings to realize that the hospital’s economy requires wealthy friends. In explaining his profession, he states that success in medicine is essentially a kind of glory, that one lifetime is not long enough to get at all the problems that confront medicine.

The younger man, Dr. George Ferguson, is more dynamically involved in the plot. At a position in life where he must make many crucial career decisions, George finds himself torn between Hochberg’s demand for dedication—ten more years of hard work—and the insistence of Laura that he devote more time to her and to his personal life. Despite George’s genuine respect for the master professional, Hochberg, his fiancé’s request does not seem unreasonable. The conflict here defined, between the responsibilities and ambitions inherent in public life and the demands of private life, is a recurrent situation in Kingsley’s drama.

George seems to acquiesce to Laura’s wishes, though he wants to compromise with Hochberg rather than reject him. At this point, the plot is complicated by the botched abortion, a problem, the play suggests, resulting from a thoughtless moment between George and a sympathetic nurse. When Laura discovers the situation, she rejects George, saying that there is no excuse for what he did. Hochberg is much more tolerant and objective, noting that human bodies are human bodies and that the pregnancy was an accident. George seems about to marry the nurse, but she conveniently dies. In the conclusion, George explains to a more forgiving Laura that the hospital is where he belongs and where she ought to leave him. In terms of what the play has presented, he seems to be right.

Dead End

Kingsley’s most popular play, Dead End, owed its success to its theatrical boldness and to its projection of the mood of the 1930’s. The spectacular set by Bel Geddes emphasized the contrasts of a New York neighborhood by placing a tenement house opposite the exclusive East River Terrace Apartment. For the river, a play area for the boys of the neighborhood, Bel Geddes flooded the orchestra pit. To give the flavor of the working city, a huge, red sand hopper stood prominently in the right center of the stage and a Caterpillar steam shovel stood farther back, up the street.

The boys of the neighborhood—later to be known in motion pictures as the Dead End Kids—carry much of the action of the play. Eager and energetic, they project vividly the communal intimacy of the neighborhood and define the kind of life that is nurtured by such surroundings. Kingsley’s transcription of the lower-class New York dialect (“Howza wawda?”—“How’s the water?”) and his ethnic mixing add local color to his cultural portrait.

Insistent in its emphasis on economic desperation, Dead End is one of the representative literary documents of the 1930’s. Like other literary works that examine the social problems of the era, it romanticizes the inner goodness of the poor and treats the rich with contempt. The play is a grim speculation about the power of social conditions to define the fate of the individual.

Two former residents of the neighborhood, Gimpty and “Baby-Face” Martin, have been marked by growing up in this environment, each in his own way. Gimpty, a lame but resourceful slum boy who has become an architect but cannot find work in the barren economy of the day, suggests the inability of his generation to build a new world, having been deprived of the chance to make its own future. His physical disability symbolizes his socially disadvantaged state. Gimpty is in love with Kay, who has overcome poverty by becoming a rich man’s mistress.

Martin, a criminal on the run, serves to trace a more disastrous path for a tenement boy, from the ranks of the underprivileged to the criminal class. He advises the kids to become more violent in their gang wars, to forget about fighting fair. His corruption is certified when even his mother rejects him. Gimpty turns Martin in just when he seems on the verge of hatching a kidnapping scheme, and the G-men kill Martin. In one sense, Gimpty’s action is a betrayal of a neighborhood code—indeed, he is filled with anguish over his part in Martin’s death, but by this time Martin can be seen as one who has gone too far to be saved. In the end, Kay declares her love for Gimpty but will not give up her luxurious life for him.

In the subplot, a Dead End Kid, Tommy, gets into trouble when he plays a trick on a rich boy and then stabs the boy’s father in a struggle. This situation opens the possibility that he will go Martin’s way. The boys enthusiastically point out that he can pick up all kinds of criminal know-how in reform school. In contrast, his sister Drina is horrified by what seems an inevitable direction for his life. Her plea for the forgiveness of Tommy proves not a strong argument with the rich, but because Gimpty now has the reward money he got from turning in Baby-Face, the two can hire a good lawyer and work to make the social system operate for their benefit.

The conclusion of the play moves back, appropriately, to focus on the rest of the Dead End Kids and their innocent (and ignorant) energy. As they play around with the song “If I Had the Wings of an Angel,” the audience is reminded that the boys must fly over the walls of a social prison if they are to have a chance in life.

The Patriots

As a play, The Patriots is a skillfully crafted historical drama centered on the conflict in early American history between Jeffersonian democracy and Hamiltonian conservatism. It is also Kingsley’s warning about the precarious nature of freedom, a warning that prompted many reviewers to call attention to the play’s relevance to World War II and the struggle to preserve democratic institutions. The action begins with Thomas Jefferson’s return from France to accept, albeit reluctantly, President George Washington’s offer to make him his secretary of state and concludes with Jefferson’s election as president. Throughout the play, three historical giants—Washington, Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton—dominate the stage. Kingsley did extensive research for the play, and he succeeded in introducing much material from original documents, but the strength of The Patriots lies in Kingsley’s talent for endowing these historical characters with believable personalities.

Throughout the conflict between Jefferson and Hamilton, Washington represents a middle ground, the understanding of two American political extremes. In his concise portrait of the first president, Kingsley brings out a struggle between Washington’s weariness with politics and his sense of public responsibility. It is this conflict treated on a larger dramatic scale that animates, as well, the character of Jefferson. Kingsley’s Jefferson is a private doer, an inventor and architect who would rather retire to the comforts of private life than deal with Hamilton’s petty political intrigues.

Hamilton is more completely the politician, one who will connive but who is also statesman enough to compromise for the better candidate when his side cannot win. The play treats neither Hamilton’s ambitions nor his ideas kindly. In fact, Kingsley seems to have gone out of his way to bring in a nasty case involving Hamilton’s philandering, perhaps to contrast Hamilton’s sense of private pleasures with Jefferson’s pastoralism. Although Hamilton is not simply a villain in this version of American history, there is no question that Kingsley’s sympathies are with Jefferson, the man who trusts the people. At the end, it is Jefferson who has come to be in the middle, standing between the extremes of anarchy (the excesses of the French Revolution) and monarchy (Hamilton’s desire for an aristocratic America). The conclusion places Jefferson’s election in the context of progressive history. Hamilton laments that he lacks Jefferson’s faith in the people, and both he and Jefferson conclude finally that their particular portion of American history has been fashioned by an irresistible destiny, the people’s need for freedom.

Detective Story

In preparation for the writing of Detective Story, Kingsley spent two years haunting detective squad rooms in Manhattan, gathering the naturalistic details that would give his dramatization of New York police work a searing authenticity. The resulting production featured a combination of the contemporary and the timeless, a blending of the texture of realism with a structure drawn from dramatic tradition.

The opening of the play features a symphonic blending of the varied characters of the police world and suggests immediately the richness and flexibility of the social interaction in this place of emerging good and evil. The initial dialogue presents the quotidian nature of police work—even its monotony. More idiosyncratic elements appear with Keogh, the singing policeman, and the paranoid Mrs. Farragut. These elements help to sketch out the varied nature of humanity’s furtive desperation, an idea basic to Kingsley’s vision.

The play focuses on the character of Detective James McLeod and the series of events that combine to destroy him. Although he seems a good man, committed to justice and integrity, his cruelty and his tendency to make absolute judgments are his tragic flaws. His understandable impatience with the criminal justice system lures him into a false confidence in his own instinctive sense of the evil in people. Although his superior tells him that he has a messianic complex, McLeod sees himself as a man of principle fighting both criminals, whom he believes are a separate species, and the justice system, which he sees as hopelessly flawed by loopholes for criminals. The plot centers on his search for evidence to convict an abortionist, the notorious Dr. Schneider. McLeod is also interrogating a shoplifter and a burglar, Arthur, who is a young first offender. Even though the complainant is willing to drop the charges against Arthur, McLeod refuses to release him, and he also beats Dr. Schneider severely during questioning, seriously injuring him. Ironically, McLeod’s relentless quest for truth leads to the discovery that his own wife, Mary, whom he has idealized, has had an abortion performed by Dr. Schneider.

Kingsley’s stage directions refer to the squad room as “ghost-ridden,” and the play reveals McLeod as a prisoner of an unexamined past. His wife’s accusation that he is cruel and vengeful, like the father he has despised, rings true: Though torn by his love for Mary, McLeod cannot help but condemn her. For him, forgiveness is too great a price to pay to a flawed world. His whole existence is at stake, yet he is unable to take the action—the act of forgiveness—that would save him. Indeed, his inflexibility is so inherent in his character that when, dying from wounds he received when the burglar tried to escape, he relents—letting young Arthur go and forgiving his wife—this final insistence on the possibility of change seems implausible and melodramatic.

Because McLeod’s attitudes are tied to the social system, tragic form and cultural realism blend rather smoothly. The other characters contribute to the tragic dimension as well. The uncooperative attitude of the suborned witness, Miss Hatch, gives credence to McLeod’s view that his instincts are more reliable than the system of courts and juries. Both Dr. Schneider’s lawyer and McLeod’s own lieutenant warn him not to act as judge and jury, and Joe Feinson, a journalist, advises him to humble himself before he digs his own grave. Arthur represents the essential goodness McLeod would deny, and the complainant’s willingness to forgive Arthur stands out as one alternative for the detective-accuser. Detective Brody, who has been humanized by the death of his son, makes the strongest case for a belief in the fundamental goodness of human beings.

Bibliography

Atkinson, Brooks. “Darkness at Noon.” Review of Darkness at Noon, by Sidney Kingsley. The New York Times, January 15, 1951, p. 13. Finds the acting of Claude Rains, as Rubashov, to be effective but believes that Kingsley, “less a writer than a showman in this theatre piece,” does not do justice to Arthur Koestler’s novel: “His melodrama comes with elements of the glib propaganda play that we find so distasteful when it is on the other side.” Also finds fault with Kingsley’s “cumbersome and diffuse” scenes. Kingsley directed this play, as he did all of his Broadway plays except The Patriots.

Atkinson, Brooks. “Detective Story.” Review of Detective Story, by Sidney Kingsley. The New York Times, March 24, 1949, p. 34. This review of Kingsley’s “vivid drama with a disturbing idea” cites Kingsley’s reputation as a responsible playwright, finding this play of intolerance in “the day’s grist of crime in a New York precinct police station …often pithy and graphic,” especially in the minor characters. Kingsley “has the saving grace of being thorough and sincere; and he makes quite a play of it in the end.” The play marked the beginning of Kingsley’s reputation as an artist and a technician, rather than a visionary.

Gassner, John. Theatre at the Crossroads: Plays and Playwrights of the Mid-Century American Stage. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960. An overview of Kingsley’s work from the Group Theatre days to Darkness at Noon, of which Gassner opines: “more workmanlike than inspired, more melodramatic than tragic, more denunciatory than psychologically and intellectually explorative.”

Morphos, Evangeline. “Sidney Kingsley’s Men in White.” Review of Men in White, by Sidney Kingsley. Tisch Drama Review 28 (Winter, 1984): 13-22. A full and thorough study of the Group Theatre’s production of Men in White, offering several insights into the selection, rehearsal, and performance processes. Particularly valuable is the discussion of the Lee Strasberg/Sidney Kingsley partnership. Includes many comments by Kingsley about the process, production history, and actors’ methods. This issue is devoted entirely to Group Theatre productions.

“Sidney Kingsley: Playwright Won Pulitzer Prize.” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1995, p. 10. The life and works of Kingsley are summed up in this obituary.