Background
Lawrence Langner was born in Swansea, South Wales, the son of Braham Langner, a businessman, and of Cecile Mendola.
Lawrence Langner was born in Swansea, South Wales, the son of Braham Langner, a businessman, and of Cecile Mendola.
He attended grammar schools in Swansea and in Margate, England.
After his studies, Langner took a job as junior clerk for J. Bannister Howard, theater manager and operator of provincial road companies. Shocked at finding her thirteen-year-old son surrounded by chorus girls, Langner's mother arranged a less provocative apprenticeship to Wallace Cranston Fairweather, a chartered patent agent. Langner passed the examination of the British Chartered Institute of Patent Agents in 1910 and advanced rapidly.
Sent to New York to represent his London firm in January 1911, he found his expertise in British and European patent law was a rare asset in the United States. By 1913 he had set up his own firm, and later founded the firm of Langner, Parry, Card, and Langner with his brother Herbert.
During World War I, Langner was consultant on munitions patents to the Army Ordnance Department. Naturalized in 1917, he served on the advisory council that prepared the patent sections of the Treaty of Versailles. He was executive secretary of the National Advisory Council to the Committee on Patents of the House of Representatives in 1939-1945. He was also one of the organizers of the National Inventors Council of the Department of Commerce, serving as its secretary from 1940 to 1958.
Langner is far more famous for the career in the theater that he pursued simultaneously with his patent work. In 1914, with friends from among New York's young artists and literati in Greenwich Village, he organized the Washington Square Players, a "little theater" modeled on European independent art theaters and Maurice Browne's Chicago Little Theater. They sought to elevate the New York theater above the farces, melodramas, and "tired businessman" musicals common on Broadway.
From February 1915 through April 1918, the Players presented sixty-two one-act plays and six full-length works. Members of the group, Langner among them, wrote a number of the short plays. Others were written by the young Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, and such European authors as Leonid Andreyev and George Bernard Shaw. American entry into World War I ended the Players as an organization, but many of the people involved appeared again in the programs of Langner's postwar Theatre Guild. Shortly after the Armistice, Langner, actress Helen Westley, and designer Rollo Peters, after many discussions with other Washington Square Players alumni, drew up a short policy statement for a "professional" art theater aiming "to produce plays of artistic merit not ordinarily produced by the commercial managers. "
The Theatre Guild began its long and influential career on April 19, 1919, with the opening of Bonds of Interest by Nobel Prize winner Jacinto Benavente. An organization unique in American theater history, the Theatre Guild came to be regarded by many as the world's major art theater, and from the beginning Langner was one of its prime movers. It was he who negotiated its agreements with Shaw, "the backbone of the Guild in the early days. " Langner's international patent business gave him contacts with major British and European playwrights, and the Theatre Guild introduced American audiences to many of the major new foreign plays, as well as to works by O'Neill, Maxwell Anderson, and other Americans. Langner and the Theatre Guild succeeded so well in proving that serious dramatic art could succeed on Broadway that commercial managements began to compete for the better plays.
Langner was a strong believer in the artistic advantages of a company of actors playing in repertory instead of the single-play long-run system, and he influenced the Theatre Guild in its experiments, beginning in the 1926-1927 season, with a company of actors doing several plays. Instead of the complex system of changing the program daily, which was traditional in repertory, he suggested weekly changes, the same cast alternating two plays for a week at a time. Using this system, the Theatre Guild achieved its greatest period of artistic and financial success, producing fourteen successive hit plays between April 1926 and October 1928, a record never surpassed in the New York theater. Its brilliant acting company was led by Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Helen Westley, and Dudley Digges, and featured an impressive number of actors who later became stage and film stars. The Theatre Guild's subscription lists in several major cities grew until finally it was no longer possible to handle both the repertory system and touring effectively, so the acting company was abandoned in 1931. The indefatigable Langner then founded the New York Repertory Company (1931 - 1933) and built the Westport Country Playhouse in 1932. He operated both with his wife while continuing to work with the Theatre Guild. (The Langner family continues to operate the playhouse. )
As administrator of Theatre Guild productions with Theresa Helburn, Langner supervised production of more than 200 plays, including Strange Interlude (1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), Mary of Scotland (1933), Porgy and Bess (1935), Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), Saint Joan (1951), Picnic (1953), and Bells Are Ringing (1956). From 1945 to 1954, Langner worked on "Theatre Guild on the Air, " the radio drama series for which Armina Marshall was executive producer; he produced television plays with Marshall and Helburn, 1947-1953, and later with Helburn and H. William Fitelson for "The U. S. Steel Hour, " 1953-1955. These were the Theatre Guild's contributions to the "golden age" of television drama.
He founded the American Shakespeare Festival Theater and Academy (1950), opening its new theater at Stratford, Connecticut, July 12, 1955. He continued to be active in theater and television production until his death in New York City.
On November 25, 1915, Langner married a Texas-born singer, Estelle Roege. They had one daughter. After Langner's first marriage ended in divorce in 1923, he married in 1924 actress Armina Marshall, who later became a producer in association with him and in her own right. They had one son.