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On 14 June 1943, the reigning glitterati of the day Eleanor Roosevelt, Mayor LaGuardia, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor - were at the 46th Street Theatre in New York to witness the Broadway Production of five one-act plays written and enacted by enlisted men. The performance, called The Army Play by Play, was the remarkable product of the U.S. Army and the genius of famed producer John Golden. In his introduction to published version of the plays, Golden explains how, working with the Army Special Service Staff, he created the John Golden-Second Service Command One-Act Prize Play Contest, which garnered 115 original playscripts from American soldiers at Army camps around the nation (x-xii).1 A selection committee that included Elmer Rice and Russel Crouse chose the five best scripts. Golden asserted that staging the plays "became my patriotic duty" (xii-xiii). The five scripts chosen were mounted and presented on Broadway to raise funds for the Soldiers and Sailors Club. The opening performance earned $100,000, and the plays were subsequently staged for President Roosevelt at Hyde Park. They officially opened on 2 August 1943 at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York, where they ran for 40 performances; and later were produced at theatres and army bases around the country.
One wonders what sort of instructions Crouse, Rice, and the others on the selection panel might have given about the desired criteria for choosing scripts. One also wonders about the 110 scripts not chosen. Their whereabouts are not known; and it would be illuminating to know what issues they raised. But the five surviving and published scripts that comprise The Army Play by Play were written and performed, for the most part, by first time playwrights and by inexperienced, non-professional actors all drawn from the military. The five one-acters of The Army Play by Play thus provide a unique glimpse of wartime military life and the war effort as it is seen and dramatized by servicemen. In part, Golden's enthusiastic and somewhat magniloquent praise is apt. he writes:
The plays that you are about to read are, in a sense, folk-plays, for they express with disarming simplicity, the sentiments, the expressions spoken, listened to and lived through by our boys in the service gleaned from their...