The American Legacy
Metropolitan Playhouse
The American Legacy

220 East Fourth Street ~ New York, New York 10009
Administration: (212) 995 8410  ~  Tickets: (212) 995 5302
A 2007 Company of the Year ~ nytheatre.com
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Some History: Evening B
Russian Tea
Dramaturgy by Gladys Foxe; Edited by Dana Sumner-Pritchard
       

        Russian Tea features the real life character John S. Sumner (1876–1971), an admiral’s son, head of New York Society for the Suppression of Vice from 1915-50.

        The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV or SSV) was founded in 1873 and was dedicated to supervising the morality of the public. Its specific mission was to monitor compliance with state laws and work with the courts and district attorneys in bringing offenders to justice. It and its members also pushed for additional laws against perceived immoral conduct. While the NYSSV is better remembered for its opposition to literary works, it also closely monitored the news-stands, commonly found on city sidewalks and in transportation terminals, which sold the popular magazines of the day.

Under Sumner's leadership, the NYSSV forced Stanisław Przybyszewski's Homo sapiens and Theodore Dreiser's The Genius off the market., opposed Margaret Sanger and publishers of birth control books, managed to get James Joyce's Ulysses banned in the US because of a reference to masturbation, and shut down Mae West's Broadway play, Sex, sencing West to jail for ten days.

More on Sumner and NYSSV

On Wikipedia

Biography of John S. Sumner