For me, though, the really big surprise was the dog that
didn't bark. Only one of the top 11 plays, The Glass Menagerie,
is a classic, and it was written in 1944. The others were all written
between 1994 and 2006. And in addition to The Glass Menagerie,
only five classics by playwrights other than Shakespeare ... made it onto
the longer list.
As for the celebrated playwrights of the past who didn't
make the cut, the list is alarmingly long. No Samuel Beckett, no Bertolt
Brecht, no Anton Chekhov, no Georges Feydeau, no Henrik Ibsen, no William
Inge, no Eugene Ionesco, no Arthur Miller, no Clifford Odets, no Eugene
O'Neill, no George Bernard Shaw, no Aristophanes or Euripides or
Sophocles, no Rodgers and Hammerstein or Frank Loesser or Lerner and Loewe
... no history, in other words.
What to make of all this? It suggests to me that American
theaters have a pronounced bias in favor of new and newish plays by
American authors, especially ones that have high public profiles. (Six of
the top 11 plays of the past decade have been produced on Broadway, while
five of them won Pulitzer Prizes.) Up to a point, that's good news. New
playwrights deserve a chance, and it looks like most of our drama
companies are giving it to at least some of them. But it also appears that
far too many of those same companies may be steering clear of the
classical revivals that are no less central to the continuing health of a
theatrical culture — and that is very bad news indeed.
