Organizational History
The roots of the American Play Company go back to the 1880s, when Elizabeth Marbury (1856-1933) became the protégé of theatrical impresario Daniel Frohman and convinced Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), to let her act as her exclusive business representative. Marbury, through her corporation Elizabeth Marbury, Inc., became the sole representative of the French Society of Authors, a trade union for professional writers, as well as the agent of such literary luminaries as George Bernard Shaw, Edmond Rostand, W. Somerset Maugham, J.M. Barrie, Arthur Wing Pinero, Rachel Crothers, George M. Cohan, Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, and P.G. Wodehouse, among others.
In 1914, Marbury decided to merge her company with Selwyn & Co, a competing theatrical agency, to form the American Play Company. By 1930, the American Play Company was actually an amalgam of Selwyn & Co., Elizabeth Marbury, Inc., The John Rumsey Play Company, the original American Play Company, and The De Mille Company. John Rumsey took over the day-to-day management of the business from 1930 until the 1960s.
In 1950, Rumsey negotiated a merger between American Play Company and Century Play Company, a competing agency whose roots are less clear than those of the American Play Company. Century Play Company was founded at the beginning of the 20th century, and may have been a subsidiary of the Schubert organization until that company, feeling governmental anti-trust pressure, spun the agency off as its own entity. It was run by James Thatcher and Thomas F. Kane; Thatcher died in 1930, and Kane ran the business until his death in 1950, after which the company was sold to American Play Company.
In the early 1960s, the company was purchased by Sheldon Abend. Abend's interest in the issue of intellectual property was such that a significant Supreme Court case on copyright, Stewart v. Abend, bears his name. Abend argued, and the Supreme Court agreed, that widows and heirs of deceased authors should recoup royalties after the death of the original author and once the copyright was renewed by the heirs.