Portland’s Owen Gould Davis

from 2021 Southern & Coastal Maine

Bath Nurse Cared For The Gettysburg Wounded

by James Nalley A most prolific playwright

Between 1922 and 1945, a Portland-born man became a busy and popular playwright on Broadway in New York City. In fact, he wrote more than 200 scripts, with at least 75 produced on stage, making him the most prolific playwright in the pre-television era. Surprisingly, despite such accolades and even a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, his name has been overshadowed by many of his contemporaries, such as poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) and novelist Jack London (1876-1916), and somewhat forgotten in the field of theater.

Owen Gould Davis was born in Portland on January 29, 1874. However, the family moved to Bangor, where he lived until he was 15. His interest in writing plays came early and he often wrote them for his eight siblings, who performed them in the town. After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Tennessee for one year (1888-1889) and then transferred to Harvard University, where he graduated in three years. Interestingly, his time in Tennessee and Massachusetts was not as memorable to him as his success as a playwright. For example, in his autobiography titled I’d Like to Do It Again (1931), he stated the following: “When I was about 15, my father’s business took him to the Cumberland Mountains in southern Kentucky…and he took my mother and the younger children with him, sending my older brother to Massachusetts Tech [MIT] and me to Harvard. For some queer reason, the memory of the years I spent at Harvard is vague and shadowy.” However, he was active with the Harvard Society of Arts drama organization.

For the first two decades of his playwriting career, Davis produced melodramas that followed a certain formula. For instance, according to the Encyclopedia of American Drama, his plays all contained “life-threatening, visually exciting predicaments out of which the good emerged at the ultimate expense of the villains who put them there.” Moreover, as stated in the article Fame,

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Ice, and the Elusive Owen Davis (2020) by Jack Neely, “Most of his plays were crowd-pleasing potboilers, mysteries, silly comedies, and tearjerkers, hardly Pulitzer candidates.”

However, his plays proved to be popular with the public. For example, in 1897, his first play titled, Through the Breakers, opened in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It ran for three straight years. In September 1900, his first Broadway play titled, Reaping the Whirlwind opened with great success. In 1901, he married actress Elizabeth Drury Breyer and remained in New York City, due to both of their careers.

Over the next two decades, he wrote or was otherwise involved in 75 additional Broadway productions, either under his own name or under one of his many pen names. In this regard, before World War I, he wrote racy sketches about lowlifes in New York for the Police Gazette under the name Ike Swift. Davis also wrote under other pen

Owen Gould Davis

names such as Martin Hurley, Arthur J. Lamb, Walter Lawrence, John Oliver, and Robert Wayne. In other aspects, he became the first elected president of the Dramatists Guild of America in 1919.

His big break as a major playwright came in 1923, when he wrote Icebound, which opened on Broadway at (cont. on page 24)

(cont. from page 23) the Sam H. Harris Theater on February 10, 1923, and closed on June 1, 1923, after 145 performances. However, the play also won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, beating Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie and Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted. This got him noticed in larger theatrical circles. According to Neely, “Unlike most Pulitzer-winning plays, Icebound became a household word, first a radio play broadcast from New York and then a Paramount silent feature in 1924 (directed by silent film director William DeMille, the elder brother of Cecil B. DeMille, the founding father of American cinema). The film featured at least one actor from the original Broadway play, earned a national release, and received critical praise for its extraordinary realism.” Sadly, the film is now considered “lost.”

From 1927 to 1930, Davis served on the staff of Paramount Pictures as a screenwriter. During that time, his work included the films They Had to See Paris (1929) and So This is London (1930), both of which starred humorist Will Rogers. By 1931, Davis had become so popular that he wrote the aforementioned autobiography, which was a lighthearted narrative of his early life and subsequent Broadway successes over 233 pages.

However, like all genres, their popularity comes and goes with time. As stated by Neely, “Davis lived to see his brand of melodrama and light comedy become old-fashioned…He saw his last production, The Insect Comedy, flop on Broadway in 1948. On October 13, 1956, Davis died in New York. He was 82 years old. He was survived by his wife and second son Donald. On a side note, his first son and actor Owen Davis Jr. drowned in a sailing accident off Long Island at the age of 41.

Today, Davis’s name is rarely mentioned, and he has been overshadowed by more well-known writers of his generation. However, there have been some revivals of his play Icebound, with the most recent one being an off-Broadway production in 2014. In this regard, it is fitting to close with a line from the play that best sums up his writing style: “Sometimes somebody sort of laughs, and it scares you; seems like laughter needs the sun, same as flowers do.”