Theater News

The Next Time It Happens

What are the long-run chances of a follow-up to a Tony-winning play? Filichia crunches the numbers.

The cast of Take Me Out
The cast of Take Me Out

Richard Greenberg’s previous Broadway play, the Tony Award-winning Take Me Out, did better with the critics than his newest Broadway play, The Violet Hour. Should we be surprised? No, you say, because you’ve heard about the chaos that surrounded the production. Out of five actors who started rehearsals, only three survived — a casualty rate of 40%. Is that the highest level of carnage in Broadway history? No, that distinction may belong to Any Wednesday, the 1964 comedy that opened at the Music Box with only two of the four actors that were set as rehearsals began.

Oh, well. At least the refurbished Biltmore, bedecked in cream-and-gold, is a big hit. But I didn’t expect that The Violet Hour would be because history shows that, after a playwright wins a Tony for Best Play, his next one usually suffers at the hands of the critics and/or the public.

There have been 57 Best Play winners. Only three of their writers were able to achieve a longer Broadway run with their very next work, and two of them not by much. Joseph Hayes, whose 1955 Tony-winning The Desperate Hours ran 221 performances, saw his next play, Calculated Risk, rack up nine performances more. Tom Stoppard’s Travesties ran 156 performances while his subsequent double-bill of Dirty Linen and New-Found Land did three performances better. Only Terrence McNally, whose Love! Valour! Compassion! ran for seven months, saw his next play far exceed that run: Master Class had a 20-month stint.

That one won a Tony, too, making McNally one of only two playwrights who won in consecutive years. The other, Tony Kushner, had Angels in America: Millennium Approaches on the boards six months before Angels in America: Perestroika joined it in repertory. Given that both closed on December 4, 1994, here’s another case where the first play met with more popular success. [XXX]

Wait a minute, you say; let’s back up to Terrence McNally. Didn’t he follow up the 20-month Master Class with the 48-month Ragtime? Yes, but Ragtime was a musical. Let’s just stick to Best Play winners followed by Next Plays, because a musical is a completely different animal whose score is an equal if not bigger part of the show. So we shouldn’t compare Harvey Fierstein’s 35-month run of Torch Song Trilogy with his subsequent 51-month run of La Cage aux Folles but, rather, with his next Broadway play: Safe Sex, which lasted one week.

Is 35 months to one week — a 156:1 ratio — the biggest comedown for any author? No, for Archibald MacLeish saw J.B. run 317 days and Scratch stay but two — a 158:1 ratio. David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, which ran 22 months, was followed by Face Value, which closed in previews. Yet even that was a better fate than the one endured by Howard Sackler: His The Great White Hope lasted 16 months but his Semmelweiss closed out-of-town.

James Earl Jones inThe Great White Hope
James Earl Jones in
The Great White Hope

Others who experienced steep falls from grace include Frank D. Gilroy (The Subject was Roses, two years; That Summer — That Fall, nine days), Brian Friel (Dancing at Lughnasa, one year; Wonderful Tennessee, one week), John Patrick (The Teahouse of the August Moon, 30 months; Good as Gold, two months), Anthony Shaffer (Sleuth, three years; Whodunnit, six months), William Gibson (The Miracle Worker, 21 months; A Cry of Players, two months), Hugh Leonard (Da, 1978, 20 months; A Life, two months), Dore Schary (Sunrise at Campobello, 17 months; The Devil’s Advocate, four
months), and Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman, 21 months; his adaptation of An Enemy of the People, one month).

See? It happens to the great ones, too — though Miller’s The Crucible ran six months while his next one, A View from the Bridge, did almost as well with four months. Take a look at T.S. Eliot (The Cocktail Party, a year; The Confidential Clerk, three months), Tennessee Williams (The Rose Tattoo, nine months; Camino Real, two months), Jean Anouilh (Becket, six months; The Rehearsal, two months), Robert Bolt (A Man for All Seasons, 16 months; Vivat! Vivat Regina! three months), Herb Gardner (I’m Not Rappaport, more than two years; Conversations with My Father, less than one year), Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 19 months; The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, four months), Yasmina Reza (Art, a year and a half; Life x 3, three months), August Wilson (Fences, 15 months; Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, three months), and David Rabe (Sticks and Bones, seven months; In the Boom Boom Room, one month).

After Tom Stoppard’s first Tony win, he had a 6:1 ratio (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, one year; Jumpers, two months) but, after his latest Tony win, a 16:1 ratio (The Real Thing, 16 months; Artist Descending a Staircase, one month). Another playwright who twice experienced the jinx is Neil Simon, first with the comedown from Biloxi Blues (15 months) to the female version of The Odd Couple (eight months), then with the fall from Lost in Yonkers (almost two years) to Jake’s Women (seven months).

Others had less precipitous drops, such as John Osborne (Luther, six months; Inadmissible Evidence, five months), Peter Weiss (Marat/Sade, four months; The Investigation, three months), Harold Pinter (The Homecoming, nine months; The Birthday Party, four months). Still, drops they were. Still others came close to matching their Tony successes, such as Peter Shaffer (Equus, 35 months; Amadeus, 34 months). But Amadeus won a Tony, too, and was followed by Lettice and Lovage, which ran nine months. Wendy Wasserstein can hold also her head up quite high, for after The Heidi Chronicles (18 months) came The Sisters Rosensweig (16 months).

Then there were the playwrights who never had another play on Broadway after their Tony wins: Jan De Hartog (The Fourposter), Goodrich and Hackett (The Diary of Anne Frank), Frank McMahon (Borstal Boy), Jason Miller (That Championship Season), Joseph Walker (The River Niger), Michael Cristofer (The Shadow Box), Bernard Pomerance (The Elephant Man), Mark Medoff (Children of a Lesser God), and David Edgar (Nicholas Nickleby). Some, like Cristofer and Medoff, had works produced Off-Broadway, but that’s another story (and a different economic situation). Two other authors didn’t follow up their successes because they died: e.g., Eugene O’Neill (Long Day’s Journey into Night) and Thomas Heggen, who co-authored the very first Tony-winning Best Play: Mister Roberts. His collaborator on that one, Joshua Logan, saw his next play, The Wisteria Trees, run six months.

Robert Sean Leonard and Scott Foley in The Violet Hour(Photo © Joan Marcus)
Robert Sean Leonard and Scott Foley in The Violet Hour
(Photo © Joan Marcus)

There are six others who haven’t had new plays on Broadway since their Tony wins, but given that they’ve all been in recent years — Frank Galati (The Grapes of Wrath), Alfred Uhry (The Last Night of Ballyhoo), Warren Leight (Side Man), Michael Frayn (Copenhagen), David Auburn (Proof), and Edward Albee (The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?) — we’ll give them a little more time to return and we’ll hope that they buck the trend.

Add up the figures and here’s what you’ll find: The Tony-winning plays wound up running a total of 897 months and counting (for Take Me Out is still running) while the follow-ups rang in at a mere 205 and counting (for The Violet Hour is still running) — less than a quarter as long. And for those who would point out that Greenberg’s newest play is only set for a limited engagement, you and I both know that, had it gotten raves and/or met with popular success, its producers would find a way to keep it going.

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]