A trio of promising works resulted in a stimulating Festival of New Plays for the Southern Writers’ Project the weekend of May 16. Showing patience, Alabama Shakespeare Festival officials offered revised readings of the latest versions of two plays unveiled in 2009. Both Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s “The Flagmaker of Market Street”...
Tony Award given to Alliance Theater, 2007 By recommendation of the American Theatre Critics Association, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford Conn., now in its 46th year, will be awarded the 2010 Regional Theater Tony Award at the ceremony on June 13. The announcement was made...
Following are some thoughts on the controversy, mainly from our New Plays Committee, with some reference to our Steinberg/ATCA and Osborn awards. If you want to chime in, email Chris Rawson....
In the dustup over the Pulitzer Committee’s decision to bypass the recommendations of its Drama Panel and give the drama award to (gasp!) a musical, Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s searing look at the impact of bipolar disorder on one American family, “Next To Normal,”...
Some are wondering if Charles McNulty and other Pulitzer drama panelists should resign in protest. There is precedent. But actually, the jury is reappointed afresh each year — which is not to say that certain critics haven’t reappeared on it often, especially back in the...
Mr. McNulty seems to have assessed the situation all too accurately. I am an unapologetic admirer of “Next to Normal,” but I certainly have to endorse the so-called coronation factor. I read “Chad Deity” as a recommended entry in the ATCA/Steinberg award process. While I wholeheartedly...
Actually, the foolish choices for Pulitzer for Drama go back further and are more embarrassing than Leonard suggests. In the 1931-32 season, the Pulitzer went to Of Thee I Sing over O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. By the sixties several unlikely musicals had won over significant plays (e.g., Fiorello over A Raisin...
It was brave, decent and honest of McNulty to go public. Trouble is — as McNulty knows — the history of the drama Pulitzer has long had a whiff of the ridiculous about it. Yes, I’m back to Harvey and Glass Menagerie, and that old Woolf, as in Virginia, too....
Living in Louisville, I’ve been at nearly every Humana Festival except for the nine years I lived in San Francisco. Festival number 34 was neither the best nor the worst but I wish it had offered at least one breakout piece such as “After Ashley”...
March 27, Louisville, KY — Bill Cain’s “Equivocation” is the winner the $25,000 2010 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award. The largest such prize in the country, the Steinberg/ATCA recognizes the best American scripts which premiered professionally in the award year (2009) outside New York City. Playwright...