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by Amnon Kabatchnik (Author)
The entity known as Broadway began with several stage contributions by the American playwright-actor-director William Gillette. Gillette's major success was Sherlock Holmes, a compilation of half-a-dozen short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle into a cohesive plot line. It played at Manhattan's Garrick Theatre, garnered positive reviews, and ran for 256 performances. During the decade of 1900-1910, a number of prolific melodramatists whipped up various four-act plays featuring plays of crime and punishment populated by flamboyant villains, brawny heroes, and damsels in distress. Hal Reid's heroines went through dangerous cliffhangers. Clyde Fitch introduced elements that became hallmarks of detective fiction - the innocent party entrapped by circumstantial evidence as a murder suspect, the lack of alibi, and the sharp cross-examination of the suspect before the attorney of the defense agrees to take on the case.
In Owen Davis's Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Girl (1906), an inheritor of a fortune goes through a series of attempts on her life, by knives, pistols, and bombs. George M. Cohan set the frightening action of Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913) in a vacant lodge during a stormy night.
Elmer Rice inserted in On Trial (1914) cinematic flashbacks to cover the events that preceded a murder trial. John Willard was hailed for the ingenious use of secret panels and sliding doors in The Cat and the Canary (1922).
Acts of crime began to emerge in the works of notable playwrights, albeit in a more subtle approach-August Strindberg, Maxim Gorky, Bertolt Brecht-providing psychological insights. From England came to Broadway plays of betrayal, violence, and detection by W. Somerset Maugham, J. B. Priestley, and Daphne du Maurier, followed by the French Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Jean Genet, the Hungarian Laszlo Fodor, the German Ernst Toller, the Spanish Garcia Lorca, and the Italian Ugo Betti.
Also, mixing their ink with blood were the American novelists Damon Runyon, James Baldwin, Arthur Miller, and William Faulkner, as well as the Nobel Prize winners Eugene O'Neil, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway.
The book's entries are presented chronologically and include a plot synopsis, production data, opinions by critics, and biographical sketches of playwrights and key actors-directors.
Amnon Kabatchnik, now retired, was a professor of theater at SUNY Binghamton, Stanford University, Ohio State University, and Elmira College. He directed numerous dramas, comedies, thrillers, and musicals in New York and across the United States. He is the author of Sherlock Holmes on the Stage, Courtroom Dramas on the Stage, Horror on the Stage, Murder in the East End, as well as the seven-volume series, Blood on the Stage.
