Philip Barry

Who Was Philip Barry?

Philip Barry was the most elegant and theologically serious playwright of Broadway’s golden age — a writer whose comedies of manners concealed, beneath their sparkling surfaces, genuine questions about grace, forgiveness, and the nature of the human person. Born in Rochester, New York, educated at Yale and Harvard, he wrote for the Broadway stage from the early 1920s until his death in 1949, producing a series of plays that made him one of the most successful and respected dramatists of his generation.

His best-known works — Holiday (1928), The Philadelphia Story (1939) — are comedies of the wealthy that use the conventions of the genre to raise genuinely serious questions about freedom, authenticity, and what it means to live well. The Philadelphia Story, written for Katharine Hepburn and filmed by George Cukor in 1940 with Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart, is one of the most celebrated American comedies of the century.

Less well known but more theologically significant are Barry’s explicitly religious plays: Hotel Universe (1930) and Here Come the Clowns (1938), which deal directly with questions of meaning, guilt, forgiveness, and the existence of God. These plays were less successful commercially but represent Barry’s deepest engagement with the questions that animated all his work.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Holiday — 1928 — play
• Hotel Universe — 1930 — play
• The Animal Kingdom — 1932 — play
• Here Come the Clowns — 1938 — play
• The Philadelphia Story — 1939 — play