Early years

Rice was born Elmer Leopold Reizenstein in New York City, New York. After graduating cum laude from New York Law School in 1912, he began a short-lived legal career. He turned to writing, and his first play, the melodramatic On Trial (1914), was the first American stage production to employ the flashback technique of the screen.

Career

His first major contribution to the theatre, however, was the expressionistic The Adding Machine (1923), which satirized the growing regimentation of man in the machine age through the life and death of the arid book-keeper, Mr. Zero.

Rice's next play, Street Scene (1929), later the subject of an opera by Kurt Weill, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for its realistic chronicle of life in the slums. The Left Bank (1931), described expatriation from America as an ineffectual escape from materialism, and Counsellor-at-Law (1931) drew a realistic picture of the legal profession for which Rice had been trained. The depression of the 1930s inspired We, the People (1933), the Reichstag trial was paralleled in Judgement Day (1934), and conflicting American and Soviet ideologies formed the subject of the conversation-piece Between Two Worlds (1934).

After the failure of these plays, Rice returned to Broadway in 1937 to write and direct for the Playwrights' Producing Company, which he helped to establish. Of his later plays, the most successful was the fantasy Dream Girl (1945), in which an over-imaginative girl encounters unexpected romance in reality. Rice's last play was Cue for Passion (1958), a modern psycho-analytical variation of the Hamlet theme in which Diana Wynyard played the Gertrude-like character, Grace Nicholson. Rice was the author of a controversial book on American drama, The Living Theatre (1960), and of an autobiography, Minority Report (1964).

Rice was the first director of the New York office of the Federal Theatre Project, but resigned in 1936 to protest government censorship of the FTP's "Living Newspaper" Ethiopia, about Mussolini's invasion of that country.

Personal life

Rice was married in 1915 to Hazel Levy, and had two children with her, Margaret and Robert. After his divorce in 1942, he married actress Betty Field with whom he had three children, John, Judy and Paul, before their divorce in 1956. He lived for many years on a wooded estate on Long Ridge Road in Stamford, CT, until his death in 1967 while on a trip with third wife, Barbara.

Rice was portrayed by the actor Jon Favreau in the 1994 film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.