Both Your Houses

Both Your Houses
Both Your Houses
Written by	Maxwell Anderson
Date premiered	March 6, 1933
Place premiered	Royale Theatre; New York City, New York
Original language	English
Genre	Drama
Setting	Cannon House Office Building, Washington, D.C.

Both Your Houses is a 1933 play written by American playwright Maxwell Anderson. It was produced by the Theatre Guild and staged by Worthington Miner with scenic design by Arthur P. Segal. It opened at the Royale Theatre on March 5, 1933 and ran for 72 performances closing May 6, 1933. It was awarded the 1933 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1932–1933.

The title is an allusion to Mercutio's line "a plague on both your houses" in Romeo and Juliet.^[1]

Plot

Reception

Reviewing a 1992 production, Variety described Houses as reminiscent of — but "far more bleak and despairing than" — Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Born Yesterday, calling it "bitter" and "cynical", and assessing the play's message as "heavy-handed" and its characters as "tend(ing) to two-dimensionality."^[2]

Cast

Morris Carnovsky as Levering
Russell Collins as Peebles
Mary Philips as Bus
J. Edward Bromberg as Wingblatt
Jerome Cowan as Sneden
Aleta Freel as Marjorie Gray
Walter C. Kelly as Solomon Fitzmaurice
Oscar Polk as Mark
Robert Shayne as Eddie Wister
Shepperd Strudwick as Alan McClean
Joseph Sweeney as Ebner
John Butler as Merton
William Foran as Dell
John F. Morrissey as Farnum
Jane Seymour as Miss McMurty
Robert Strange as Simeon Gray

References

^ Review: “Both Your Houses” Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine, in the Hyde Park Herald, by Anne Spiselman; published November 5, 2014; retrieved December 3, 2014
^ Review: ‘Both Your Houses’, by Tom Jacobs, in Variety; published August 28, 1992; retrieved May 30, 2016