Rice was a prolific, even tireless writer. His plays over the next five years included the unproduced "The Sidewalks of New York" (1925), "Is He Guilty?" (1927) and "The Gay White Way" (1928) and two collaborations, "Wake Up, Jonathan" (1928) with Hatcher Hughes, a dramatist unknown today and "Cock Robin" (1929) with Philip Barry, a Broadway name equal to Rice's. None of these plays were a success. Rice was a theatre professional by this time: open to collaboration, increasingly interested in producing and directing his own plays. In the 1930s, he even bought a Broadway house, the famed Belasco Theatre.