Does Anybody See These Plays Anymore?

In my previous blog entry, I looked at 25 plays that DPS was advertising back in the mid 1960s.  After some exploration of the DPS database, I determined that they have kept 24 of the 25 in print, so that's something at any rate.  I was a bit abashed to find that I did not recognize 4 of 5 as being by Harold Pinter, though they are earlier works that are rarely performed.

Turning to the very addictive "page to stage" feature on the DPS website, it turns out that 5 are being performed in the upcoming season (including one High School performance).  DPS probably does have a deeper database that would let me find out when these plays were performed in the last 5 years or so, though I didn't think it quite important enough to go to such lengths.  I suspect that most of the Pinter's are performed from time to time, and the Tennessee Williams' (Milk Train) periodically. I was surprised that two of the more obscure plays on the list (The Family Man and Jo, a musical) are up for production, but that is intriguing in its own way.

DPS seems to be oriented, whether consciously or not, towards the "long tail" model of business (Chris Anderson of Wired has recently popularized this term).  Keep everything in print forever and pick up occasional productions here and there.  (Until fairly recently, this was what the Fantasy record label did, until they were bought out by Concord and their warehouse deemed to be too costly to operate, leading to a purge of their back catalogue.) With the increasing improvements to the quality of print-on-demand services, there really is no reason DPS cannot keep these plays in print.  This does not address whether they might choose to try to market some of the really slow-moving titles with lower performance rights.  Or whether some of these plays have dated too badly to be performed again.

I have picked up a handful that happened to be at the library: Kurtz Gordon's Utopia, Inc. and Howard Moss's The Palace at 4 A.M. (from another ad).  On my next visit, I will try to check out Owen Arno's The Street of Good Friends.  I found Utopia Inc. to be very dated.  The Palace at 4 A.M. is a Pirandello-inspired piece, but perhaps a revival of Pirandello would be better justified than this play (whose main claim to fame is that Christopher Walken was in it when it was on Broadway).  Moss's Folding Green (in the same volume as Palace) seems to hold up a bit better, though it is still not clear to me it would merit a revival.

As a general rule, comedy seems more based in current conditions and dates faster than dramatic or tragic plays, though one can find exceptions of course.  The Arno play is a comedy, and perhaps it will be one of those exceptions.  Most companies aren't that interested in dusting off museum pieces, particularly when the cost to perform is the same as contemporary works.  Perhaps this would have been different in the past, when smaller companies were far more conservative than they are today.  However, in a fascinating piece in the back page of their newsletter, DPS lists the most performed plays across the US from 2000-2009: http://www.dramatists.com/pdf/atPlaySpringSummer10.pdf

The Glass Menagerie is tied for 10th, and the rest are fairly recent plays.  I would argue this does look like much less reliance on the chestnuts than one probably would have seen if looking at a list from the 1980s and perhaps even the 1990s.  How many of these (aside from Menagerie) will stand the test of time and be performed 50 years hence is unclear.  Right now, we seem to be in a period where theatre is attempting to be contemporary and forward-looking, and that may lead to an emphasis on art that is more transitory, less bound to tradition.  On the whole, that is probably not a bad place to be.