Plays
Riley's first and most famous play is Personal Appearance, a three-act comedy produced by the legendary Brock Pemberton of Tony Awards fame. It opened in 1934 at New York's Henry Miller Theatre and was a huge Broadway success, lasting for 501 performances. It starred Gladys George as a movie star and diva who encounters a young and handsome mechanic while on a tour making personal appearances to promote her latest film. Their ill-fated romance provides a biting satire of Hollywood. In 1935, Samuel French published Personal Appearance: a New Comedy in Three Acts in Los Angeles and New York. This play launched Riley's career as a playwright.
After a hiatus of more than five years, Riley returned to Broadway with Return Engagement, another three-act comedy, which opened at New York's John Golden Theatre in 1940. It was produced by the team of W. Horace Schmidlapp, Joseph M. Gaites and Lee Shubert. Return Engagement is a satire of the summer stock theatre and its plot concerns a pair of actors, previously married to each other but now divorced, whose acting parts mirror their real life. The play, starring Evelyn Varden and William Leicester, is set on the terrace of a playhouse near Stockton, Connecticut. After being panned in The New York Times by Brooks Atkinson, the most influential theater critic of his time, it closed after only eight performances. In 1942, Walter H. Baker Co. published Return Engagement: a Comedy in Three Acts in Boston and Los Angeles.
In 1944, Riley tested his next play, Time to Kill, at the Players Club of Warren, Pennsylvania, before submitting it to Pemberton. The same club had tested Riley's previous two plays but this time he also acted as director. For a change, Riley tackled the theme of murder in this melodramatic play: He declared that any humour in Time to Kill was unintentional.
Although he threw barbs at the summer stock theatres in Return Engagement, Riley had to keep trying out his plays in them. For example, his comedy Kin Hubbard was first performed in the summer of 1951 at the Westport County Playhouse in Westport, Connecticut. This biographical play co-starred June Lockhart (who had won a Tony three years before and is now remembered for her roles in TV's cult series Lassie and Lost in Space) and Tom Ewell (who was to star memorably in both the stage and screen versions of The Seven Year Itch, opposite Marilyn Monroe in the latter). Ewell made his debut as a producer with this play. Kin Hubbard is based on Fred C. Kelly's The Life and Times of Kin Hubbard. Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard (1868–1930) was one of America's most influential humorists and cartoonists, in addition to being a journalist, as Riley once was. Hubbard's cartoon "Abe Martin of Brown County" appeared in the Indianapolis News and countless other newspapers for three decades.
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Famous quotes containing the word plays:
“Shaw’s plays are the price we pay for Shaw’s prefaces.”
—James Agate (1877–1947)
“A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)