Saturday, December 03, 2011
When New Plays Get Old by Howard Sherman
HowlRound: Are you familiar with any of these plays? Stand-Up Tragedy. Daytrips. Romance Language. A Place With The Pigs. From The Mississippi Delta. Rebel Armies Deep Into Chad. Pill Hill. Messiah. In Perpetuity Throughout The Universe. A few? None? Don’t feel bad, because to my knowledge, none of them have received a major production in years. Yet they were all new plays that received prominent productions from the mid 80s to the early 90s. Some had New York runs, both long and short. I saw them all, and worked on several.
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2 comments:
As the years go by, the saturation of new plays in the market has certainly made those Samuel French catalogs grow in thickness. As somebody who enjoys working on new plays, I often wonder the same things as the author, why is it that plays that run to sold out houses and critical acclaim then close and are never heard from again. There is something to be said for a show having its time and place and maybe its not a bad thing they slip into obscurity.
It's so sad what happens to plays that aren't even that old. Why do some not get any recognition and others become widely famous? It has always puzzled me what makes some plays or musicals become big hits. Because most of the time the hits aren't even good. Look at half of the things on Broadway. They aren't very good most of the time, they've just become popular. But why? I worked on a lot of awesome new work this summer, but they will probably never reach critical acclaim. Is it because the right people didn't see them? Or is it just a right time and place thing?
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