Makes Broadway

A play on Broadway is the goal of many, achieved by few. John Hess '39, whose comedy The Grey-Eyed People, opened at the Martin Beck Theater in New York December 17, would seem to have had enough success in the fields of television, radio and magazine writing to remain immune to the lure of playwriting. His "Love of Life" series is one of the topranking daytime television soap operas; he is also the author of hundreds of radio and TV scripts, as well as stories for Cosmopolitan and Esquire. However, he was not easy in his mind until he had written and consigned to the wastebasket four plays; then finished the one now showing. Its title comes from a line in Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem, The Little Tavern: "We were the greyeyed people, the sweet elite who laughed so well, were kind and trusted one another." The comedy has to do with repentant Communists, the radio and TV advertising business and suburbiana.

Perhaps his desire to see his own play on Broadway first took root at Dartmouth, where John Hess won the first prize of .$100 in the Eleanor Frost play contest for his original one-act play, Wise Apple, which was presented by the Experimental Theater. After his graduation, following a year of study at the Yale Drama School, he went into radio, then magazine writing and television.