Sylvia Regan

1908-

Sylvia Regan, playwright, studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Morning Star, her first produced play, opened on Broadway on April 16, 1940.

Other plays include A Hundred Million NIckles, Safe Harbor, 44 West, The Twlfth Hour and Zelda. Her biggest commercial success came in 1953 with The Fifth Season, which starred Menasha Skulnik and ran on Broadway for 654 performances.

In 1940, Regan married composer Abraham Ellstein, who later collaborated with her on two musicals, Marianne and Great to Be Alive. Together they wrote an adaptation of The Golem, commissioned by the Ford Foudnation and produced in 1962 by the New York City Opera under the direction of Jules Rudel.

Sylvia Regan was born in New York City on April 15, 1908, to Polish Jewish immigrant parents Louis and Esther (Albert) Hoffenberg. She spent her earliest years speaking both English and Yiddish in the Lower East Side neighborhood she eventually wrote about in her play Morning Star.

On March 25, 1911, a fire destroyed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory located in Regan's neighborhood, killing 146 people. Regan, three years old at the time, visited the site with her mother. "I was holding onto the cold metal handle of a baby carriage as (my mother) told a friend about hearing the screams of the girls who had been trapped inside that building, and about the bodies that fell tothe sidewalk," recalled Regan in 1999. "I'll never forget it; my mother was crying." The Triangle Shirtwaist fire figures prominently in Morning Star.

The Hoffenberg family followed the path of many immigrants and moved from the Lower East Side to the Bronx and subsequently to New Haven, Connecticut, where Regan graduated from highschool. When Regan was eight years old, her mother died in a traffic accident. Eighteen months later her father remarried; Regan was very fond of her stepmother.

Following high school, Regan attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and sought to support herself by auditioning for professional productions. She made her Broadway acting debut as Anna, the Romanian girl, in We Americans, a hit of the 1925-26 season that also marked the Broadway debut of actor Paul Muni. She continued in this role when the show toured major American cities in1927 and 1928. She eventually understudied the lead but only performed it once.

In 1928, Regan was cast in a second Broadway role as Elizabeth in Waltz of the Dogs. Her stage appearances in the years that followed included Marjorie in Poppa (1929) and the Mexicanmother in Night Over Taos (1931). From 1928 to 1930, Regan also designed hats and headdresses for Broadway shows, including Dear Jane and Alice in Wonderland. In 1931 she married James J. Regan, a lawyer, but the marriage ended in divorce four years later. During the thirties Regan worked as a theatrical promotions and public relations manager, first for the Civic Repertory Theater (1932ó1936) and then for the now legendaryMercury Theatre company of Orson Welles and John Houseman (1936ó1938).

Regan has said that her career as a playwright began almost by chance, when she was recuperating from sunburn and, out of boredom, sat down at her aunt's typewriter. She wrote her firstplay Every Day but Friday in 1937, basing it on a story told to her by Clifford Odets, who had been a family friend since childhood. Odets, who was at the time becoming famous through productions by the Group Theatre, later wrote his own version of the story, Rocket to the Moon. Every Day but Friday was never produced, but it won Regan a $200 scholarship to write a second play, titled A Hundred Million Nickels.

According to Regan, the idea for Morning Star came to her "all at once." The play had its premiere on April 16, 1940, at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway, starring Molly Picon, a popularactress of the Yiddish theatre who made her English language debut as Becky Felderman. New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson reviewed the production favorably, but the timing of the production was unfortunate,as the next day France fell to the Nazis. Producer John Golden provided $5,000 to keep the show alive for awhile, but attendance for all Broadway shows dropped and the production had to close after a short time.

Later in 1940, Sylvia Regan married Abraham Ellstein, a composer and conductor who had written the music for two songs in the original script of Morning Star, "Under a Painted Smile" and "We'll Bring the Rue de la Paix." After they were married, the couple collaborated professionally on two musicals, Marianne and Great to Be Alive. The latter opened at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York in 1950.

In 1951 Morning Star was produced at the Embassy Theatre in London under the title The Golden Door. On October 5, 1952, Theatre Guild on the Air broadcast Regan's work nationally as a radioplay via the National Broadcasting Company network. The play then dropped into obscurity.

Regan's biggest commercial success on Broadway was her play The Fifth Season, a lighthearted look at the garment business, which opened in 1953 and ran for 654 performances. The titlerefers to five seasons in the garment industry: spring, summer, winter, fall, and slack. In 1954, The Fifth Season was produced at the Cambridge Theater in London.

In 1961 Regan and Ellstein received a grant from the Ford Foundation for an opera project called The Golem, which opened at the New York City Opera on March 22, 1962. The husband and wife team collaborated on the libretto and Ellstein composed the music. Frederick M. Windship of United Press International described The Golem as a "solid theatrical achievement," which combined a "finely wrought scoreand the couple's poetic libretto." Abraham Ellstein died unexpectedly in 1963.

After The Golem, Regan wrote several other plays, including Zelda which was produced on Broadway in 1969, Safe Harbor, 44 West, and The Twelfth Hour.

In 1998 Morning Star, again with the title The Golden Door, was the inaugural production of the Tenement Theater in New York City's Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. In May of 1999, Morning Star had its first major professional production in nearly fifty years when it was produced at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, receiving rave reviews. Sylvia Regan, then aged 91, attended the premiere. Aproduction by the Asolo Theatre Company in Sarasota, Florida, followed in 2000. Missouri Rep's staging is Morning Star's third major presentation in our era.

Regan has received many honors,including a Citation of Merit Award from the National Council of Jewish Women. Now aged 93, Sylvia Regan continues to live in New York City.