Any Day Now (play)

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Directed byRobert Klein

Date premieredJune 3, 1941 (1941-06-03)

Place premieredPicstator Studio Theatre, New York

Any Day Now
Written by	Philip Yordan
Directed by	Robert Klein
Date premiered	June 3, 1941 (1941-06-03)
Place premiered	Picstator Studio Theatre, New York
Original language	English
Genre	comedy
Setting	Dvoreck living room, Chicago

Any Day Now is a 1941 American play by Philip Yordan which debuted at the Picstator Studio Theatre.^[1]

The play only had a short run but it was seen by director William Dieterle which lead to Yordan being invited to Hollywood and starting the writer's long screenwriting career.^[2]^[3]

Rudolph, the son of a Polish bootlegger, keeps thinking up get rich schemes. One of his schemes results in an innocent man going to prison. Rudolph falls in love with Irene, who is married to a crook.

Background

Yordan was from Chicago and had just graduated from the University of Illinois. It was Yordan's second play, written after Anna Lucasta but produed first.^[4]^[5]

Original cast

Charles de Scheim (replaced by John Randolph)^[6] as Rudolph Dvoracek
Pert Kelton as Irene Burke
Robert Harris as Kubush Dvoracek
Ralph Bell as Janik Dvoracek
Gerald Kean as Frank Dvoracek
Dara Birae as Theresa Dvoracek
Walter Martin as Ernst Muller
Jutta Wolf as Anna
Warren Briggs as Carl
Richard Odlin as Eddie Burke
David Sievers as officer
Ross Matthew as Mr Thompson
Alan MacAteer as Man

Reception

The Brooklyn Eagle called it "a slow moving cumbersome comedy... it isn't an interesting family. Its members say nothing entertaining, wise or true. The boy's adventures are dull and repetitious."^[7]

Critic Axel Storm called it "a sort of Abbie's Irish Rose played to a Chicago setting in an irish accent... Yordan wrote with a reportorial accuracy... [but] a profound lack of ingenuity in tyhe plotting... a very bad play very well written and the author will probably get something telling off his chest sooner or later. He's worth watching."^[8]

Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times called it "third-rate Group Theatre stuff—studiously spontaneous in writing and staging. Mr. Yordan tries to make his writing look like scribbling, and Dr. Klein has worked out his direction so carefully that the stage is as busy as lunch hour in the fur district... Mr. Yordan knows what to write about and he has a good American idea."^[9]

America: A Catholic Review of the Week wrote the play "has much to commend it" and had "plenty of drama".^[10]

The play was brought for Broadway production by Benjamin Gallinger but there was no Broadway version.^[11] Yordan went on to have Broadway success with Anna Lucasta

References

↑ Ley-Piscator, Maria (1970). Piscator experiment : the political theatre. Southern Illinois University Press. p. 167.
↑ McGilligan, Pat (1991). "Philip Yordan:The Chameleon". Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. University of California Press. p. 343.
↑ Graham, Sheilah (14 April 1046). "Millionaire Philip Yordan Lives on Less than $40 a week". The Courier-Journal. p. 33.
↑ "New playwright for 'Any Day Now'". Brooklyn Eagle. 25 May 1941. p. 40.
↑ "Virginia Wright". Daily News. 4 October 1944. p. 25.
↑ "Off broadway". Daily News. 1 June 1941. p. 70.
↑ "Any Day now acted". Brooklyn Eagle. 10 June 1941. p. 4.
↑ Storm, Axel (17 June 1941). "Broadway nights". The Cushing Daily Citizen. p. 6.
↑ Atkinson, Brooks (June 10, 1941). "Studio Experiment". New York Times. p. 28.
↑ "Theatre". America A Catholic Review of the Week. 21 June 1941. p. 306.
↑ "Stage notes". The Daily Worker. 14 June 1941. p. 7.

v t e Works by Philip Yordan
Plays	Any Day Now (1941) The Honest Gambler (1943) Anna Lucasta (1944) Windy City (1946)
Films as writer	Syncopation (1942) The Unknown Guest (1943) Johnny Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1944) When Strangers Marry (1944) Dillinger (1945) The Chase (1946) House of Strangers (1949) Reign of Terror (1949) Edge of Doom (1950) Detective Story (1951) Drums in the Deep South (1952) Mara Maru (1952) Houdini (1953) The Naked Jungle (1954) Johnny Guitar (1954) Broken Lance (1954) The Last Frontier (1955) The Man from Laramie (1955) Conquest of Space (1955) No Down Payment (1957) The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958) The Bravados (1958) The Bramble Bush (1960) Cry Wilderness (1987) The Unholy (1988)
Films as writer/producer	Whistle Stop (1946) Anna Lucasta (1949) Man Crazy (1953) The Big Combo (1955) Joe MacBeth (1955) The Wild Party (1956) The Harder They Fall (1956) Men in War (1957) Four Boys and a Gun (1957) Island Women (1958) Anna Lucasta (1958) God's Little Acre (1958) Day of the Outlaw (1959) Studs Lonigan (1960) King of Kings (1961) El Cid (1961) 55 Days at Peking (1963) The Day of the Triffids (1963) Circus World (1964) The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) The Thin Red Line (1964) Battle of the Bulge (1965) Crack in the World (1965) Custer of the West (1967) Krakatoa, East of Java (1968) The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969) Captain Apache (1971) Bad Man's River (1971) Brigham (1977) Cataclysm (1980) Night Train to Terror (1985) Bloody Wednesday (1988) Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars (1992) Dead Girls Don't Tango (1992)
Related	Benmar Productions Security Pictures Samuel Bronston Bernard Gordon Sidney Harmon Irving Lerner Milton Sperling Ben Maddow Julian Zimet

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