#Leighton Osmun

[royatlyfree1923]

SYLVIA

April 25, 1923

Sylvia is a three-act comedy by Leighton Osmun that opened April 25, 1923 at Provincetown Playhouse and ran for 13 performances. 

Leighton Graves Osmun was born in Newark NJ in 1881. Sylvia was the third of his five Broadway* plays between 1919 and 1931.  He wrote the novel The Clutch of Circumstance in 1914, which also included a character named Sylvia. In Hollywood, he worked alongside Cecil B. DeMille. He died in California in June 1929. 

* This production pre-dates the geographical and seating requirement of what is now considered a ‘Broadway’ show. 

SYNOPSIS

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Provincetown Playhouse (133 MacDougal Street) is named for the Provincetown Players, who converted the former bottling plant into a theater in 1918. The Players were formed while vacationing in Provincetown, Mass. The original Players were Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Djuna Barnes.  The building was extensively renovated in 1940 when it became designated as an Off-Broadway rather than a Broadway theatre.  The Playhouse’s longest-running play was the five-year run of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (1985-1990) by Charles Busch, which was also its last major production before being shut down for many years, needing building code upgrades.  From 1998 until the present, the Playhouse has primarily been used by New York University’s Educational Theatre department. In the Fall of 2008, however, the original Playhouse structure was torn down to make way for office space for the university’s law school, citing that the original building’s foundation (built in the 1840s) was structurally unsound to build upon. The university promised a new theatre in the same air space as the original and construction was completed by the fall of 2010. The space was then returned for use by the University’s Educational Theatre program.