Best Plays?
In a blurb printed on the back of The Best Plays Theater Yearbook 2002-2003 (Limelight Editions, 500 pp., $47.50), the ubiquitous playwright Wendy Wasserstein — who hasn’t had a new play produced since the 2000-2001 season — writes that she treasures the annual volume for its “wonderful albums of photos, Hirschfelds, charts, and good old-fashioned Broadway lore.”
She’s got it just about right, although the Hirschfelds have now perforce ceased. The compendium does have those elements yet again. It also has, as usual, a series of essays that apparently don’t have much meaning for Wasserstein. This is a shame, of course, since informed analysis of and reflection on any given theater season should be welcome.
The comments of Wasserstein and such fellow blurbers as Edward Albee, August Wilson, and Jerry Herman, none of whom point to the book’s enlightening essays, may be telling. The popularity of the annual volume may have very little or nothing to do with the concept of “best plays” and much more to do with the accumulation of facts and figures. Why should that be a surprise, given that the “best plays” designation has always been fallacious? “Outstanding plays” or “plays worth noting,” perhaps. (“Plays that other people liked a good deal but you detested or, at least, had serious reservations about” may be closest to the mark.)
In writing about the choice of plays to be included here, editor Jeffrey Eric Jenkins — who has succeeded Burns Mantle, John Chapman, Louis Kronenberger, Henry Hewes, and Otis Guernsey Jr. — uses the first person plural. “We” apparently is the board of directors — all well-versed theater professionals, some or all of whom may share a disdain for the “best” label.
This year, “we” have chosen the following works to be the season’s more or less arbitrary 10 best: Book of Days, by Lanford Wilson; Dublin Carol, by Conor McPherson; I Am My Own Wife, by Doug Wright; Imaginary Friends, by Nora Ephron; The Mercy Seat, by Neil LaBute; Our Lady of 121st Street, by Stephen Adly Guirgis; Stone Cold Dead Serious, by Adam Rapp; Take Me Out, by Richard Greenberg; Talking Heads, by Alan Bennett; and Yellowman, by Dael Orlandersmith. (Were anyone asking my opinion of the board of directors’ opinions, I’d say that they were correct in giving the nod to Wright, LaBute, Guirgis, and Greenberg but I’d give them some argument about glorifying the others.)
Looking at the list of plays and the list of board members, I’m tempted to think that at least some of the selections depended on who wanted to write about them. I’ll defend the right of my TheaterMania.com colleague Charles Wright to his laudatory remarks about Nora Ephron’s Imaginary Friends but I can hardly concur with them; for example, he claims that the play’s Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy characters are not caricatured, which may be so, but he also seems to see nothing wrong is the depiction of Edmund Wilson, who is caricatured wantonly.
As much as I disagree with some of Wright’s points, his essay may be the best of a bunch that ranges from the merely desultory (plot retelling with a few ideas salted into the prose) to the self-impressed (author’s style lending pretentious airs to sincere scripts). Editor Jenkins covers the Broadway season adequately enough, although a few of his observations seem off-kilter. (He’s the latest — and one hopes the last — to go after Bernadette Peters’s Mama Rose in Gypsy, contending that the star’s performance of “Rose’s Turn” on the Tony Awards telecast was bad. Has he swallowed the Michael Riedel line?) Mel Gussow blandly surveys the Off-Broadway scene, and maybe the reporters could have culled quotes from reviewers other than Ben Brantley and one or two others for a wider look at the critical response to the shows under consideration.
No, the essays are not what draw readers to this volume; it’s the opportunity to looking at the revenue pies, to wander through the production lists, to recall this play and that one, the cast members, the creative teams. It’s the chance for readers to pit their reactions against the board’s. When TheaterMania editor-in-chief Michael Portantiere first heard about the selections, he questioned via e-mail the absence among the big 10 of Hairspray — which I mention only because Jenkins quotes the jaw-dropped Portantiere at the top of his report. Had I been thumbing through these pages pre-publication, I might have cabled Jenkins with a big exclamation point on the subject of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away; I’d have remarked, “What, Imaginary Friends and not this?”
There’s more fun to be had in perusing the accumulation of various halls of fame and awards lists. They’re all here, along with some of the voting processes. Much of this information is available elsewhere, notably in Variety; but an annual subscription to Variety can break a bank and everything here is gathered into a few pages. Finally, some people will want to give the book the theatergoer’s/theater pro’s version of a “Washington read” — i.e., go immediately to the index to see if the people you like are there or if you’re there yourself. When all is said and done, as is always the case, this is a reference volume that anyone interested in New York theater (and nationwide theater) ought to think about adding to his/her library soonest.
