The Lost Group Theatre Plays: Vol IV: Men in White, Big Night, & Night Over Taos

Three more classics of the Group Theatre finally see publication! The final play of the Group’s first season, Night Over Taos, is Maxwell Anderson’s (Pulitzer Prize Winner for Both Your Houses and the author of the acclaimed Winterset) prose drama. As one of the Group’s few dramas based on actual events, their third play tells of the battle for the formation of the state of New Mexico, and the Mexican freedom fighter who resists the encroaching American attack during the Mexican-American War. In its second year, the Group followed its dramatic indictment of the advertising industry (Lawson’s Success Story) with one of their only comedies. Dawn Powell’s caustic dissection of the 1920’s ‘Mad Men’ has been published in its original version for the first time. Though the Group Theatre changed the ending to make it more uplifting, (and changed the named to Big Night from The Party) we’ve restored Ms. Powell’s intended biting ending. In this play of “take my wife, please,” Ed and Myra Bonney, who have been living beyond their means, are both challenged to see how far they will go to keep up their lifestyle when Myra’s hopeful, old paramour shows up and can offer Ed a huge advertising contract – IF the price is right. While men could write ‘cads’ in the 1930’s, Powell was nearly crucified for writing such unlikable characters. Sidney Kingsley’s Pulitzer Prize Winning Play Men in White was one of the Group’s first huge hits and set the precedent for the modern medical drama. Kingsley’s medical research was remarkable and specific, and that is why the audiences were so taken with this hit drama. Though medicine has changed greatly in 80 years, most of the larger issues in the play are still relevant: government takeover of healthcare, the stress put upon our young medical students, and the corporate business wheeling and dealing needed to keep the hospitals profitable.