Forum - LOIS REYNOLDS KERR RECALLS THE PLAYWRIGHTS STUDIO GROUP 1932-1941

At the 1983 conference of the Association for Canadian Theatre History in Vancouver, Lois Reynolds Kerr recalled her own career as a successful awards-winning playwright and the founding of the Playwrights Studio Group, which was established in 1932 and continued to produce plays at Hart House Theatre and the Dominion Drama Festival until 1941. Other playwrights of the Playwrights Studio Group of Toronto included Dora Conover and Winnifred Pilcher, who also contribute their memoirs to this article, Leonora McNeilly, Rica McLean Farquharson, Virginia Coyne Knight, Marjorie Price, Margaret Ness, Jameson Field and Arthur Burrows. Actors and directors involved with Hart House Theatre contributed their talents to the biannual productions, making the Playwrights Studio Group one of the first Canadian organizations dedicated to playwriting.

A la conférence de l'Association d'Histoire du Théâtre au Canada à Vancouver en 1983, Lois Reynolds Kerr retraça sa carrière d'auteur dramatique couronnée de succes car gagnante d'une récompense et rappela la fondation du 'Playwrights Studio Group' qui fut établi en 1932 et continua à présenter des pièces au théâtre de Hart House et au 'Dominion Drama Festival' j'usqu'en 1941. Parmi les autres auteurs dramatiques du Playwrights Studio Group de Toronto se trouvaient Dora Conover et Winnifred Pilcher qui toutes deux vont aussi ajouter leurs souvenirs à cet article, ainsi que Leonora McNeilly, Rica McLean Farquharson, Virginia Coyne Knight, Marjorie Price, Margaret Ness, Jameson Field et Arthur Burrows. Les acteurs et réalisateurs engagés au théâtre de Hart House ont apporté leurs talents aux productions semestrielles, faisant du Playwrights Studio Group une des premières organisations consacrées à la dramaturgie.

The Playwrights Studio Group began in 1932 at a time when an awakened interest in the theatre had resulted from the establishment that same year of the Dominion Drama Festival.¹ The group appears to have been the first Canadian organization whose major concern was playwriting, states Terence Goldie.²

How was our group formed? The following is a first-hand account by Dora Conover, the only living founding member:

Not a doubt our Playwrights Studio Group owed its beginning to a super-persistent little lady by the name of Leonora McNeilly. Miss McNeilly, plump, perfect-mannered, middle-aged child-genius, pampered by a devoted elder brother and sister, was an active member of our Canadian Women's Press Club, so when our short story section decided to have a play contest, she, along with the rest of us, wrote a play. When it did not win a prize she naturally - for her - took it directly to the head of Hart House Theatre for expert criticism.
    Edgar Stone kindly explained over and over and over again that he could not judge a play from reading it, that, in his opinion, a play was not a play until it was presented before an audience. Then, asked Leonora, logically and persistently, how was she to find out?
    Finally, a worn-out Edgar said in desperation, 'Look, Miss McNeilly, you get two of your friends who have one-act plays and I will give you a try-out evening on the stage, a studio performance only, but I will have some of my young directors work with you.'
    The two friends Leonora asked were Rica Farquharson, a well-known newspaper woman, and myself, a long-time newspaper and country magazine woman, married with children and currently taking a play-writing course with Herman Voaden. We were slightly flabbergasted, but we did have plays, and we couldn't let Leonora down. (We would never even have thought of going to Edgar ourselves!) Strangely enough, we took off like a rocket, immensely to Edgar's surprise, I'm sure, and certainly to our own!

And so the Playwrights Studio Group was born.

Dora, now 86 and living near Toronto, was the glue that held our group together. Over a period of forty years, she contributed to two country news magazines and in 1981 she took a trip into interior China where she had lived as a child: she wrote a twice-published seven-part story of that nostalgic journey. Ten of her plays were produced by the Playwrights Studio Group.

Rica McLean Farquharson, who was to become editor of The Canadian Home Journal, was the wife of Robert A. Farquharson, editor of the Mail and Empire and, after amalgamation, of the Globe and Mail. Before dying prematurely of an aneurysm, she contributed eight plays to the Playwright Studio Group. Virginia Coyne Knight, although primarily a musician, contributed eight plays also. She died some years ago. Marjorie Price, the sister of Percival Price, national carilloneur at the Peace Tower in Ottawa, contributed at least two plays. Winnifred Pilcher, now 83, living in Milton, Ontario, had five plays produced by P.S.G. She has contributed part of this paper. Two men, Arthur Burrows and Jameson Field, joined us for a short period, the former presenting two plays and the latter one, under our sponsorship. Margaret Ness, who wrote for the theatre section of Saturday Night, was the last person to be associated with our Group, contributing mainly by her criticism and advice. She wrote a one-act play, Short Circuit, which was entered in a Central Ontario festival by the University College Alumnae Dramatic Club.

Where did we hold our meetings? In the Green Room at Hart House Theatre or in members' homes.

How did we select the plays for our productions? When one of us had a play ready she would bring it to the next meeting and read it aloud. The other members made constructive suggestions. With two evenings a year set aside for us, we often were more concerned about getting enough plays for a bill than in being highly selective.

Edgar Stone, as director of a theatre committed to the advancement of Canadian drama, was encouraging and co-operative. He himself never directed our plays but made the Hart House directors and actors available to us. We also borrowed from outside groups. Among our directors were H.E. Hitchman, Arthur Gelber, Wade Hampton, Peggy Tytler, Dora McMillan, Percy Shute, John Holden, Gordon Alderson and Fred Mallett. Among our actors were Jane Mallett, Lorna Sheard, Alice Hill, Andrew Allan, Babs Hitchman, Peter Mews and Barry Fitzgerald.

Our sets were the black velours curtains of the Hart House stage, and we ourselves scrounged for the furnishings and properties. One play was designed for a setting of two packing cases and weird lighting. Another play required a chesterfield set and dozens of expensive wedding presents including six identical silver water jugs.

To advertise our plays we would address several hundred post cards which we mailed for two cents and on which our upcoming programme was printed. We began by charging twenty-five cents admission and later raised it to thirty-five. For our two war-time revues to raise money for the war effort, we charged seventy-five cents.

We often packed the theatre as an unidentified writer in the Globe recorded on 8 December 1934:

The theatre was crowded to its utmost capacity, with sixty-five extra chairs brought in, and almost all the leaders in local amateur dramatic activity were present. This was a pleasant tribute to the importance which these studio group evenings have assumed, and should encourage their sponsors to hold them more frequently.

Our productions were attended by editors, columnists, critics of the Toronto newspapers and magazines, members of the Press Club, the Heliconian Club, the Arts and Letters Club. We playwrights wearing long dresses acted as hostesses and ushers and afterwards served coffee and refreshments back stage, sometimes on the stage.

For the most part the critics were encouraging and often offered constructive suggestions. B.K. Sandwell of Saturday Night (December 1934) wrote of Dora Conover's Through Darkness, 'having been punched and carved and moulded into shape by a mind experienced in the employment of the resources of the theatre ... there was no let-up of the dramatic tension, and the final curtain was very effective.' Thelma Craig of the Globe and Mail (14 March 1939) wrote about Dora's Growing Pains, an entry in the Central Ontario festival, 'obviously one of the top comedies written by a Canadian playwright ... it was peppered with clever lines.' On 1 May 1940 the same critic called Dora's The Cat and the Mushrooms 'a merry, amusing, scintillating piece.' And about 30 November 1936 Lawrence Mason of The Globe wrote about Rica Farquharson's comedy They Meet Again, 'the hit of the evening, almost every line bringing a laugh ... there is much keen observation in this clever little play and the writing is admirably deft and sure.' Winnifred Pilcher's Both Their Houses was, in the opinion of Thelma Craig of the Globe and Mail (1 May 1940) 'first-rate theatrical story-telling ... a clinical character study ... polished.' Augustus Bridle of the Toronto Star (26 March 1936) wrote about my entry in the Central Ontario festival, Nellie McNabb, 'By long odds the neatest bit of farce-comedy writing ever done in Canada.' B.K. Sandwell of Saturday Night (30 March 1936) wrote about the same production, 'its simple-minded story was carried off with such masterly handling of dialogue, stage situation and even to some extent character drawing that it completely won both the house and the adjudicator.'

Several of our members won honors in the Dominion Drama Festival. Rica Farquharson's They Meet Again won the trophy for the best production of a play by a Canadian in the 1938 Central Ontario play-offs. Winnifred Pilcher won the Samuel French award for Without Benefit of Roof in the 1948 Central Ontario play-offs for the best play by a Canadian author. Marjorie Price in 1935 won the top award, the Dominion Drama Festival Committee prize of $100, at the finals in Ottawa for a play written by a Canadian. It was entered in the Festival by the Playmakers who first produced it at the Mousetrap Theatre, Toronto, in February 1935. The play, God Caesar, was later published by Samuel French of Canada. My comedy, Nellie McNabb, was sent to the finals in Ottawa in 1936 but was nudged out of the top award for a Canadian play by Twenty-Five Cents by Eric Harris of Sarnia. However in the 1940 Western Ontario Regional festival Nellie McNabb, directed by Catharine Brickenden, won all the top honors for the best play in the festival.

Our Group produced a total of approximately sixty plays, including several full-length ones and fifty revue pieces, skits and songs. Seventeen plays by our members are known to be published and are listed with details in an appendix. About 1935 we published and circulated a catalogue listing and giving information about twenty-eight of our plays which had been produced at Hart House. The royalty asked was five dollars for a one-act, two dollars for a curtain-raiser, and fifteen for a three-act.

Why did we, for the most part, write comedy? Because we believed that during the depression people wanted and needed to laugh. We counted the success of a play by the number of laughs it evoked. Consciously or unconsciously we were all influenced by Noel Coward who was at the peak of his popularity.

The Playwrights Studio Group produced plays at Hart House for almost a decade, starting in 1932 and bowing out with two wartime revues in 1940 and 1941. These were critically acclaimed as 'brilliant' and 'sophisticated.' Hart House Theatre was dark for the duration but we did continue to meet together, reading and criticizing new plays and discussing possible markets. After the war when the Dominion Drama Festival was resumed we sponsored two plays by Winnifred Pilcher as entries in 1948 and 1949. Virginia Coyne Knight's The Mighty Mr. Samson in 1949 was entered by The Arts and Letters Club.

Now I'm going to stop generalizing and give you some recollections about my own productions. In 1930, just before my graduation from Victoria College, University of Toronto, the announcement was made in the press that a national playwriting competition sponsored by the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire had been won by Lois Reynolds. The prize-winning play, Open Doors, dealing with the depression and immigration, was produced by G. Dickson-Kenwin in his Little Playhouse in a triple bill of Canadian plays which ran for a week beginning 2 February 1931. This confirmed a successful merging of two of my previous addictions, writing and acting. I was now a Canadian playwright.

Reading about my award, Dora Conover, a complete stranger to me, phoned and invited me to be her guest at tea at the Toronto Women's Press Club. I accepted and by doing so probably changed the whole course of my life. At the tea I met the women's editor of the Toronto Globe who a few days later asked me to become her assistant. Early in 1933 I was invited to join the Playwrights Studio Group which had already presented two evenings of one-act plays at Hart House.

My first of eight plays produced under the sponsorship of the Group was Among Those Present, 27 May 1933, a short three-act comedy which was a satire on the aspirations of social climbing women. The play received rave reviews which I have quite shamelessly quoted in full in my book, Good Luck Elsewhere, ³ and in an interview with Don Rubin for the Ontario Historical Studies Series.⁴ A few years later I condensed Among Those Present into a one-act play which was published in the October 1938 Curtain Call, the Dominion Drama Festival official magazine.

Nellie McNabb, a one-act newspaper-society comedy, was produced on 20 October 1934. I was certain that the favorable press reviews would assure its publication by Samuel French, to whose editor I immediately sent it. It bounced right back. But Nellie McNabb was produced numerous times by amateur groups, and in 1936, when the Playwrights Studio Group decided to enter its first play in the Dominion Drama Festival, Nellie McNabb was chosen by Cameron Matthews, the professional free-lance director whom we had asked to make the choice and direct our entry. Previously we had begged the director who had now succeeded Edgar Stone at Hart House to include one of our plays among the three Hart House entries, but, our request being denied, we entered independently. You can imagine our satisfaction when Nellie McNabb was named as one of the top three plays to go from the Central Ontario region to the finals in Ottawa, ranked by British adjudicator Allan Wade above all three official Hart House entries! And so it was on to Ottawa. My play was scheduled last on the sparkling first night of the festival held in the crowded Ottawa Little Theatre. Harley Granville Barker, the British adjudicator, said 'it brought it off. It was brisk, economical, noteworthy. It hit every nail on the head...' (Ottawa Evening Citizen, 21 April 1936). So, now that two eminent British adjudicators had praised my play, it was not surprising that it was accepted for publication by Samuel French by the same editor who had previously turned it down. Nellie McNabb has been played well over one hundred times at widely scattered places including Johannesburg, South Africa, San Antonio, Texas, and Pender Island, B.C., and has earned me the magnificent fortune of $1,140.40.

Other plays of mine produced by the Playwrights Studio Group include: Jolly Good Fellows (7 December 1933), a comedy in which two countries resolve their disputes by a sports war. This play, which had won the first prize of fifteen dollars in a 1933 contest sponsored by the Women's League of Nations Association of Toronto, was given a second production by a church group. Summer Hotel (1935) a drama set in Muskoka, which I sold outright to T.S. Denison & Company of Chicago for the sum of thirty-five dollars. It shows how human values are influenced by environment. Guest of Honour (1936), our first full-length play, another newspaper-society comedy in which Andrew Allan played the leading role. Lawrence Mason of the Globe wrote about Guest of Honour 'sprinkled the whole play with lines of brilliance and a delightful sense of satire and humour.'(1936, date unrecorded.) Rewritten in the late sixties as No Reporters Please! it features Pierre Elliott Trudeau as a swinging bachelor. XY7 (1939), a full-length wartime spy comedy set in England, involved the attempted theft of plans for a new aircraft, had two later productions, one sponsored by the Heliconian Club to raise money for wartime charities, and the other at my own Hamilton Central Collegiate Institute. I also wrote numerous skits and songs for wartime revues.

Four plays of mine written in the Playwrights Studio Group period were never produced or published but could possibly be better than some of those which were. One of these was Queen Victoria (1933), praised by Edgar Stone and, decades later by Terence Goldie who described it as 'the one historical drama which seems to have had the potential for general theatrical success.' Because of the publicity accorded my plays produced by the Playwrights Studio Group I have been categorized as a writer of light comedy. The fact is, however, that of my total lifetime output of twenty-six plays, more than half - fourteen - are serious dramas. After the Playwrights Studio Group period I kept on writing plays, mostly full-length, bursting into a flame of activity in the late sixties and seventies.

Winnifred Pilcher in her own words is going to tell you her recollections of the Playwrights Studio Group:

Saga of a Playwright Manqué
by Winnifred Pilcher

Why did I write plays in the first place? Any short bits and pieces I got published in the Star Weekly and Saturday Night seemed to suggest dialogue - the ironic quip was my line to be explored. And the first effort in 1928 seemed to bear this out by the publication of Second Best when a contract and a flat twenty dollars from the Eldridge Publishing Company was the result. Well, if it was going to be that easy ... But of course it wasn't, and after a few subsequent submissions came home to roost I went back to bits and pieces. My delusion of becoming a female Noel Coward faded into limbo when I married and became the 'compleat' housewife.
    However, in the mid-thirties I was invited to join the Playwrights Studio Group, making my debut in 1937 with A Change in Male Lead which first had to be submitted to Arthur Burrows who would hopefully direct it. His first comment was 'I don't know where I would find sophisticated enough amateurs to do justice to this.' However, he did, and it was successful, and the Group felt their choice of a new member was justified. Cardinal Flower was a failed attempt in 1938 at real Canadian homespun, located in Muskoka. Homespun obviously was not my line, so back to Noel Coward again! I redeemed myself in the next play, Both Their Houses, 1940, which started me off on the more easily identifiable domestic scene and revealed an early female chauvinist.
    The Second World War led to writing of another kind - black-out skits, monologues and patter songs for our two revues. On one occasion I contributed Murder in the Sewing Room, Family Toothbrush, Glamour Widow, and Bachelors for the Duration, thus earning a press comment 'four contributions by Winnifted Pilcher were particularly effective.'
    Without Benefit of Roof, my next one-act play, dealt with the plight of a young married couple, unable to find a house they could rent, who had to bunk in with 'her' family. This play was entered by the Playwrights Studio Group in the 1948 Central Ontario Regional Drama Festival and won a plaque donated by Samuel French for the best Canadian play and occasioned a three-column heading and photo of me receiving the plaque from Mona Coxwell. But in spite of all the pizazz, the script was apologetically returned.
    With a festival of three-act plays coming up in 1949, and with Noel Coward grinning over my shoulder like his own Blithe Spirit, I prepared Problem Parent for production. Problem Parent had been written around 1940 as an entry in an international contest sponsored by the Dramatists' Alliance of Stanford University, California, in which it received honorable mention. And now, entered by the Playwrights Studio Group in 1949 in the first Dominion Drama Festival for three-act plays, it wasn't long before the strikes against Problem Parent began to loom up. First of all, I had to settle for a young inexperienced director. Secondly, on the night of the play itself, someone on behalf of the festival committee gave a little speech of welcome expressing surprise and pleasure at the large audience, saying, 'Wednesday night is always expected to be the slow night of the week!' Strike three was the adjudicator, an Englishman well known for his love of poetry, his interest in the classical stage and his sardonic reviews. I was sitting behind him during the play and could see his reactions - mostly bored yawns and, I could imagine, scowling at the ignorant audience for obviously enjoying the play. Therefore I was quite prepared for his summing up at the end: 'A waste of time to write, a waste of time to produce, a waste of time to watch.' My small satisfaction lay in a vocal demurral on the part of the audience and, later in the week, a heated confrontation when the Festival Committee met with the adjudicator to reprimand him for his harsh criticism of my play. At the reception on the stage after my play, as I stood next him, I heard good, old loyal Dora say to him, 'I take it you wouldn't call Noel Coward a good playwright, either!'

I was recently asked why hardly any of our plays have become accepted work of dramatic literature or widely performed popular production pieces that still stand up today. There could be several reasons:

1. They just were not good enough.

2. Having the potential, they were not reworked and polished because of the lack of incentive. B.K. Sandwell of Saturday Night was at least once (December 1934) very harsh in his general criticism, accusing us of laziness and unwillingness to face the hard task of the craftsman. This was no doubt true sometimes, but what Sandwell overlooked was that our productions professed to be no more than workshop productions. We had to see our work in interaction with an audience before we were aware of its faults. Sometimes, but not often, we had a second chance, to rewrite before a second or third production by other groups. Otherwise, what incentive had we to polish and rewrite?

3. Only publication by Samuel French of Canada would have carried our plays to enough amateur groups to enable them to be widely performed as in the case of my Nellie McNabb. But Samuel French, it seemed to me, would not publish unless experts from outside the country proclaimed them to be good.

4. Artistic directors of the then existing little theatres had no confidence in Canadian plays, and as for professional theatres, none existed except visiting companies from London or New York.

5. Because most of our plays were comedies we have not been taken seriously. For example, Anton Wagner writes about my work: 'It is the same high-society and journalistic focus of her plays that probably prevented her from emerging as a major dramatist in the 1940s. The comic vision, characterization and action of her plays of the 1930s are simply too narrow in scope to be meaningful long after their presentation.' ⁵ Yet I was writing out of my own experiences as society editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail! Today, comedy is becoming respectable again. In a recent poll of its audiences, the Vancouver Playhouse discovered that 93 percent wanted comedy. And I am wondering if there is any significance to the fact that, after languishing for about a decade and a half, Nellie McNabb has been given two productions in the United States within the last two years.

6. Of course we should have taken advantage of the new outlet for drama presented in the forties by CBC radio. But I myself had no wish to write for radio, the visual dimension is necessary for me.

I wish I could give you more details about those members of our Playwrights Studio Group who are now blithe spirits hovering around today and laughing merrily about the good old days. And I imagine that our blithe spirits along with those of us still living are happy to know that finally some young Canadian playwrights are being recognized, that some artistic directors are willing to take a chance on Canadian plays. And I am sure that our blithe spirits join in thanking historians of Canadian Theatre for recognizing our Playwrights Studio Group as having had a small part in the evolution of Canadian drama.

Forum - LOIS REYNOLDS KERR RECALLS THE PLAYWRIGHTS STUDIO GROUP 1932-1941

1 This paper was first given at the ACTH /AHTC conference in Vancouver, May 1983. I am deeply indebted to Dora Conover and Winnifred Pilcher for their help in collecting the information presented and for supplying pictures, reviews and programmes.
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2 Goldie, Terence William, Canadian Dramatic Literature in English 1919-1939. Ph.D. thesis Queen's University, 1977, p 35.
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3 Good Luck Elsewhere: The Rise and Fall of a Canadian Playwright, by Lois Reynolds Kerr. Excerpts used in Canadian Theatre Review Summer 1980. Full script in the Lois Reynolds Kerr Archive, University of Calgary.
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4 The Ontario Historical Studies Series interview with Don Rubin, 4 October 1979.
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5 Wagner, Anton, The Developing Mosaic, Canada's Lost Plays, Toronto, CTR Publications, York University, p 15.
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Appendix

Conover, Dora Smith
The Cat and the Mushrooms Toronto: Robinson Plays, 1937
Turns Again Home in Canadian Stage, Screen and Studio March 1937
Winds of Life in Six Canadian Plays edited by Herman Voaden, Toronto: Copp Clark, 1930

Farquharson, Rica McLean
Fifty Faces Spring in Echoes (Toronto) 1938
Sure of a Fourth Toronto: Samuel French (Canada), 1935
They Meet Again Toronto: Samuel French (Canada), 1938

Field, Jameson
The Impressionists in Canadian Stage, Screen and Studio January 1937

Kerr, Lois Reynolds
Among Those Present in Curtain Call (Toronto) October 1938
Nellie McNabb Toronto: Samuel French (Canada), 1937
Open Doors in Echoes Toronto, June 1930, and in Canada's Lost Plays: The Developing Mosaic edited by Anton Wagner, Toronto: CIR, 1980
Summer Hotel Chicago: T. S. Denison, 1936

Knight, Virginia Coyne
Cupid on the Wire in Curtain Call (Toronto) April 1938
The Mighty Mister Samson in Curtain Rising edited by W.S. Milne, Toronto: Longmans Green, 1958

Ness, Margaret
Enter the Prince in Curtain Call (Toronto) January 1938

Pilcher, Winnifred
Second Best Franklin, Ohio: Eldridge, 1928

Price, Marjorie
God Caesar Toronto: Samuel French (Canada), 1935
The Six Queens of Henry Toronto: Samuel French (Canada), 1937

25 March 1936 Lois Reynolds Nellie McNabb

22 February 1937 Leonora McNeilly The Alms Box of Ste. Anne

30 March 1938 Rica McLean Farquharson They Meet Again

13 March 1939 Dora Smith Conover Growing Pains

29 January
- 3 February 1940 Lois Reynolds Kerr 'Home from Canada', sixth of 25 items in Well, Of All Things 'A Wartime Review ... Net Proceeds in Aid of War Charities'

15 March 1948 Winnifred Pilcher Without Benefit of Roof

23 March 1949 Winnifred Pilcher Problem Parent