Books: Monotony Report

MINORITY REPORT by Elmer Rice. 474 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.50.

Elmer Rice has seen life from a seat somewhere left of center. A vast portion of his autobiography details his fights for the cause of socialism, his championship of the downtrodden. While all this leaves no doubt that Rice, at 70, is nobody’s man but his own, Minority Report seems to have been put together by a civil rights pamphleteer rather than by a playwright: in the first 80 pages there are but two lines of directly quoted conversation.

Elmer Leopold Reizenstein grew up in Manhattan in a family of decent-hearted intellectual ciphers who owned no books. His mother smothered him in a cocoon of maternal affection; his father, an epileptic, mainly embarrassed the boy. But there was Grandpa, who took him to plays at the German Theater in Irving Place at an early age, and Uncle Will, who offered to slip him the money for his initial excursion into sex at 16.

Rice, who changed his name in 1919, is curiously reticent about naming his loved ones. His first wife, to whom he was married for almost 30 years is never identified* and while he admits numerous extramarital affairs, only one of the ladies is given a name, and that one—”Laura”—not her own. But where the heart was not involved, Rice is free with names: Robert Sherwood Maxwell Anderson, Thomas Wolfe (“He always struck me as gauche, self-conscious and morbidly self-absorbed As for his books, I have never been able to get through any of them”).

Wolfe, were he alive, might well say the same of Minority Report. Not only does Rice exhibit an astonishingly tin ear for dialogue; his autobiographical e frequently reads like a parody of all the memoirs ever written. “We had what is now known as a cookout, with Mrs. Roosevelt, in a bungalow apron toasting the frankfurters over a charcoal grill. When her son Elliott shouted ‘Hey, Ma, we’re all out of beer!’ she replied sharply, ‘You know there’s always enough beer! Just look around for it!’ It was a domestic scene that made one happy to be an American “

Rice’s first play was On Trial, produced in 1914. His iconoclastic Street Scene came along in 1929, followed by Dream Girl in 1946; his latest (and 27th) was Cue for Passion, which had a five-week run in 1959. Almost 50 years of writing, directing, traveling and —according to his boast—lovemaking, should have supplied material for still another play—or even a good book.But Rice has always given the best lines to somebody else.

* She was Hazel Levy, whom he divorced in 942 to marry Actress Betty Field; she divorced him in 1956.