The Guinea Pig (play)
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''The Guinea Pig'' is a 1929
comedy Comedy is a genre of fiction that consists of discourses or works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, film, stand-up comedy, television, radio, books, or any other entertainment medium. The term o ...
in three acts by
Preston Sturges Preston Sturges (; born Edmund Preston Biden; August 29, 1898 – August 6, 1959) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and film director. In 1941, he won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the film '' The Great McGinty'' (1940), h ...
, his first play to appear on
Broadway Broadway may refer to: Theatre * Broadway Theatre (disambiguation) * Broadway theatre, theatrical productions in professional theatres near Broadway, Manhattan, New York City, U.S. ** Broadway (Manhattan), the street **Broadway Theatre (53rd Stree ...
. The Broadway production was directed by Walter Greenough and produced by Sturges. It opened on January 7, 1929, at the President Theatre, and ran for 67 performances, closing in March of that year. Sturges conceived of the idea for the play from personal experience, after an actress he was dating explained her erratic behavior as the result of her trying out scenarios for the play she was writing. Sturges decided that if she could write a play, so could he, and began writing ''The Guinea Pig'', completing the third act that night, although the rest took somewhat longer. When he showed the result to the actress, she let on that she had never been writing a play at all, but when Sturges insisted she read some of his writing, she complimented the dialogue, saying that it was "like champagne.", pp. 237-245 Sturges was unable to find a producer who wanted to mount the play, even though a production at the Wharf Theater in
Provincetown, Massachusetts Provincetown is a New England town located at the extreme tip of Cape Cod in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, in the United States. A small coastal resort town with a year-round population of 3,664 as of the 2020 United States Census, Province ...
was a local hit, so he and his friends decided to produce it themselves, on a budget of $2,500, which was provided by a rich acquaintance. Sturges later wrote that ''The Guinea Pig'' contained the biggest laugh he ever received in the theatre, when the ingenue asks the young leading man what a man would say to a woman so that she would instantly give herself to him, and the young man replies, "I wish I knew." An original copy of the 1929 script with a cast photo sold at auction for $2,000 on July 30, 2012, at the
Profiles in History Profiles in History was an auction house in Los Angeles, California. It was founded in 1985 by Joseph Maddalena and is an auctioneer and dealer of authentic and original collectibles, including Hollywood memorabilia, historical autographs, letters ...
auction house.


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* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Guinea Pig (Play), The 1929 plays Comedy plays Plays by Preston Sturges