Hogan examines the themes present in Street Scene through the series of events that happen to the characters.

Street Scene was produced in 1929, ran for 602 performances, won the Pulitzer Prize, and is one of the great plays of the American theatre. It had the longest Broadway run of any of Rice's plays, and, with the exception of the London production of Judgment Day, it gave him probably the greatest satisfaction. The tragicomic history of the play is fascinatingly told in Chapter XIX of The Living Theatre and Chapter XIII of Minority Report. Of special interest is the difficulty that Rice had in marketing the script.

The responses of the producers were emphatically and unanimously negative. I remember some of them. The Theatre Guild, which had produced my play The Adding Machine, said that Street Scene had "no content." Winthrop Ames, a man for whose judgment I had...