The play’s (not) the thing…

It’s a depressing fact of Broadway life is that plays have long been usurped by the ever-dominating musical. In the dark days (in every sense) of January and February, you are lucky if you can find one commercial drama playing on the Great White Way, though there is now more chance of a rival attraction or two from the institutional presence of Manhattan Theatre Club and Roundabout Theatre Company having permanent Broadway homes at the Biltmore and American Airlines Theatres respectively, though the Roundabout often do musicals, too. (Lincoln Center Theatre, too, make regular forays to Broadway away from their home base, as they are doing right now with Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing).

As a result, only a handful of contemporary American playwrights are ever seen regularly on or near Broadway – the late Wendy Wasserstein, Terrence McNally, and the increasingly ubiquitous Richard Greenberg, whose Three Days of Rain is about to be revived on Broadway with a cast led by Julia Roberts. (Greenberg, interviewed in the New York Times yesterday, was refreshingly frank about his previous most recent Broadway entry, A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, staged earlier this year under the auspices of the Roundabout at the American Airlines: “When someone writes a bad thing about a play that’s actually bad, how much can I protest?”)

But the spring always brings hope, and in addition to Awake and Sing and Three Days of Rain, there’s a sudden downpour, so to speak, of plays – several, of course, as usual that were first seen and acclaimed in London, like Festen and The History Boys (transferring in recreations of their Almeida and National Theatre productions, though re-cast for the first and with the original cast for the second), or a trilogy of Irish plays, Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore and Conor McPherson’s Shining City, being staged in new productions, plus a revival of Brian Friel’s The Faith Healer that returns Ralph Fiennes to Broadway, via Dublin where the production was first done. There’s only one original American play in all of this – Lisa Kron’s Well that comes from an acclaimed Off-Broadway run.

But is there an audience for this much straight dramatic fare? The audience for plays as opposed to tourist-friendly musicals in New York has been shrinking for years, as ticket prices have been rising; yet the home that plays were supposed to find off-Broadway instead has been compromised too, by the sort of rising production costs and the escalating ticket prices that accompany them that mean that audiences might as well shell out for a Broadway ticket instead: at half price, which most of them are invariably available for, it actually often becomes cheaper there than seeing a play off-Broadway. (Last Saturday, I saw a four-person musical, with no set to speak of and just a one-man band, that ran for 90 minutes, for $55; for the same price, I could have had a lavish Broadway musical from the Half price ticket booth).

Changes need to be made to make plays more attractive again; and I noticed one helpful start. The half price booth have made an interesting intervention in making it easier for people who want to see plays: instead of compelling them to stand in the interminable queues alongside the musical watchers, there’s now a dedicated ticket window for people who want to buy play tickets.