"Bigger Than Broadway!"

by Richard Zoglin 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series

[Richard Zoglin’s report on the regional theater in the United States was published in Time magazine on 27 May 2003.  (The text below is taken from the online posting which had no text enhancements, so in addition to my bracketed comments, mostly identifications, I have italicized the titles of plays and works of literature, and added some boldfacing in the last section.)

[Readers will no doubt note that this article is 21 years old.  For that reason, I have taken the liberty of identifying as many of the plays and productions author Zoglin names that I can, as some aren’t well known today (and a few didn’t make it out of obscurity).  By the same token, I have inserted the life dates of the people Zoglin mentions as a few of them have passed on since 2003.]

The world’s a stage: The outdoor Elizabethan theater is one of three venues in Ashland, Ore.

By the time the eco-terrorists show up — a band of tree sitters, with names like Lynx and Aquarius and Smokebomb, who drop from the skies, rappelling down the trunks of a redwood grove onstage — your head is already spinning. Daughters of the Revolution, one-half of David Edgar’s [British; b. 1948] two-play cycle about an American political campaign called Continental Divide [2003], has mostly been talk up to this point. But what talk! The play has nearly 50 characters, rapid-fire dialogue and an impossibly complicated plot involving leftover ‘60s radicals, skeletons in the closet, the clash between ideals and pragmatism in politics, and a hot-button ballot initiative that would mandate loyalty oaths for all voters. And that’s only half the story. Daughters of the Revolution centers on the Democratic side of a gubernatorial race in an unnamed Western state; its companion play, Mothers Against, focuses on the Republican side. In all, it’s six hours of dense, unruly, sometimes maddening, always engrossing drama.

And you have to go to Oregon to see it.

Continental Divide, currently being given its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland (in a coproduction with California’s Berkeley Repertory Theater, which will mount it later this year), is just the latest sign that challenging American theater is alive and well and nowhere near Broadway.

[Continental Divide was co-commissioned by OSF and Berkeley Rep in 2003. It premièred at OSF from 1 March to 13 July and then opened in Berkeley on 6 November, running through 28 December.]

It’s hardly news, of course, that theaters beyond the Hudson River are doing good work. Or that many of the plays that wind up on Broadway and off Broadway get their start at regional theaters. Nor should it be a surprise (though it was) that this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama went to a play most of New York City’s tastemakers had never even heard of: Cuban-born playwright Nilo Cruz’s [b. 1960] Anna in the Tropics [2002; 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama], which had been produced only at the 104-seat New Theater in Coral Gables, Fla.

What isn’t so apparent — until you spend some time, as I did over the past few months, surveying regional theaters across the country — is that these companies are pursuing whole chunks of the repertory that New York, with its commercial pressures and unforgiving critics, largely ignores. And local audiences are getting a better taste of the possibilities of theater than most New Yorkers get in an entire season. The plays that succeed on and off Broadway these days are, as a rule, small things: two-and three-character relationship dramas (those big casts cost money!); minimalist exercises in craftsmanship; tidy little plays that convert big subjects into manageable private dramas (Proof, Copenhagen, How I Learned to Drive, to name just a few recent award winners). Plays of epic size and scope, works that examine American history and the American experience, plays that attempt to engage the audience in social and political issues — for those, mostly, you’ve got to look in the hinterlands.

[David Auburn’s (b. 1969) Proof was developed at George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1999; it won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play. The play, with a cast of four, originally opened at New York City’s Manhattan Theatre Club on 23 May 2000 and transferred to Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre on 24 October 2000.

[The Off-Broadway première also won the 2001 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play, and Drama League Award for Outstanding Production of a Play.

[Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (British; b. 1933) premièred in London in 1998, at the National Theatre. It opened on Broadway at the Royale Theatre on 11 April 2000, winning three Tonys that year, including Best Play; the production also took the 2000 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play. It has a cast of three.

[How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel (b. 1951), written and developed during a summer 1996 residency at the Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska, premièred on 16 March 1997 at Off-Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1998. The play, which has a cast of five and a simple set, had many subsequent productions in regional theaters in the U.S., Off-Broadway in New York City, abroad (the London première was in 2015), and U.S. colleges and universities.  It had its Broadway première at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on 19 April 2022 and received three 2022 Tony nominations and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play. 

[The 1997 Off-Broadway production of How I Learned also won a batch of awards, including the 1997 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, and Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play. The Vineyard Theatre mounting also won the 1997 Obie Awards for both Playwriting and Direction.]

A couple of years ago, for example, a San Francisco playwright named Joan Holden [1939-2024] had the somewhat unpromising notion of turning Nickel and Dimed [2001], Barbara Ehrenreich’s [1941-2022] best-selling book about her experiences as a minimum-wage worker, into a stage play. The result is an episodic but incisive series of vignettes about the impossibility of making ends meet while waiting tables in Florida, scrubbing toilets in Maine and stocking discount-store shelves in Minnesota. Nickel & Dimed [2002] has its deficiencies as drama, but it’s a rare example of theater that tries to open people’s eyes to the way life is lived in the real world — and maybe even rouse them to action. Midway through the second act, the actors step out of character, stop the play and conduct a 10-minute discussion with the audience on how much a cleaning woman deserves to be paid. Producers in New York haven’t given it much attention, but Nickel & Dimed is making a successful march through the regionals, from Seattle to the Trinity Rep in Providence, R.I.

[Nickel & Dimed had its New York City première by the Off-Off-Broadway 4Graces Theater Company at the Bank Street Theater from 5 to 28 October 2006. It was reviewed in the New York Times by Andrea Stevens on 11 October 2006 (“Evoking Lives Struggling to Exist on Bare Minimums").]

In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater last fall presented writer-director Eric Simonson’s [b. 1960] big, imaginatively staged adaptation [6 September-6 October 2002] of Moby Dick; there was no whale, but a surprising amount of Herman Melville’s [1819-91] imposing novel [1851] made it onstage. (Adaptations of epic novels, like John Irving’s [b. 1942] Cider House Rules [1985], have a habit of flopping in New York.) Houston’s enterprising Alley Theater last fall staged a fine production of The General from America [1996], Richard Nelson’s [b. 1650] brooding, against-the-grain, surprisingly convincing historical drama about Benedict Arnold [1741-1801]. (The play later opened off-Broadway [Theatre for a New Audience at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. 2002], where the critics, predictably, dissed it.)

[Cider House Rules, the stage adaptation of Irving’s novel, had a somewhat tortuous history. It was conceived by Jane Jones (b. 1954?), the co-founding artistic director of Seattle’s Book-It Repertory Theatre, and Tom Hulce (b. 1953), actor and producer, in 1995, and they got Peter Parnell (b. 1953), playwright and children’s-book author, to write the script.

[The result was a two-part play that ran over seven hours together.  It premièred at Book-It in June-July and October-September 1995 under Jones’s direction. It was picked up by Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum, where it ran from June to September 1996. 

[The adaptation was scheduled for staging at the Atlantic Theatre Company in New York City for the 1999-2000 season, and Part I, Here in St. Cloud’s, was staged, with Hulce as co-director, in May-June 1999.  It ran 3¼ hours and cost Atlantic about $300,000.  With largely mixed reviews, ATL couldn’t raise the money to mount the second part and the play cycle was never completed in New York.]

“Our responsibility is to do big stuff — not the next one-set, three-character play,” says Gregory Boyd [b. 1951], artistic director of the Alley [1989-2018], which has commissioned, among other new works, a play from Keith Reddin [b. 1956] about the Luddite rebellion in 19th century England. Regional theaters are one place where educational is not a dirty word. Performances are often followed by discussion sessions; the programs (so pathetically inadequate in New York) are filled with background articles on the play’s issues or real-life subject matter. People leave the theater with something more than stagecraft to talk about.

[Reddin’s Luddite play is The Prophets of Nature.  The only production for which I could find a record was by the Off-Off-Broadway Sonnet Repertory Theatre at the Belt Theatre in New York City from 16 to 20 June 2004, which appears to have been the play’s première. I couldn’t find any reviews of the production, however. Six years later, the Salt Lake Acting Company in Utah presented a single, free reading of The Prophets of Nature on 15 February 2010 as part of its New Play Sounding Series. There were several announcements of the reading (including Playbill on 6 February 2010), but no after-event commentary. The text of The Prophets of Nature doesn’t seem to have been published.]

Even with more commercial works that play the regionals with one eye on the ultimate prize — Broadway — the audience participates in a more direct way. Last winter Ellen Burstyn [b. 1932] played the title role in Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, a one-woman stage adaptation [by Martin Tahse, 1930-2014; not to be confused with the 1994 TV mini-series adaptation] of Allan Gurganus’ [b. 1947] best-selling novel [1989], which had its world premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe Theater [2003]. She was still stumbling a bit (engagingly, catching herself with a casual “I mean . . .”) as she tried to master the demanding part, but audiences had the frisson of being present at the development of what may (when the show comes to Broadway this fall) turn out to be one of the great stage roles.

By most measures, the regional theaters are booming. There were just 23 in 1961, when the first national organization of nonprofit theaters was formed [Theatre Communications Group (TCG), established in 1961]; today there are 1,800. Many have gleaming new theaters, with two or even three stages, and state-of-the-art production facilities that put to shame the cramped old boxes on Broadway. “Frankly, it’s something of a step down for me when I go to New York,” says Jack O’Brien [b. 1939], artistic director of San Diego’s Globe Theaters [1965-present] — who has lately been going to New York often to direct hit shows like Hairspray [Broadway: 15 August 2002-4 January 2009 (8 Tonys, including Best Musical and Best Direction of a Musical); première: Seattle, May-June 2002].

For playwrights, the chance to see their new work given a sumptuous first staging is matched only by the ability to keep tinkering with it while shielded from the harsh lights of Broadway. “One of the things you find is that there’s a low level of audience pretension,” says Richard Greenberg [b. 1958], who has developed plays like Three Days of Rain [1997; Broadway, 2006 (Julia Roberts’s stage début)] and The Violet Hour [2002; Broadway, 2003] at South Coast Repertory in California’s Orange County. “There’s a receptiveness about the audience. Their responses are pure. And that’s especially good early on, when you’re not so sure how or if your play is communicating.”

Today’s tough economic times have brought their share of pain, of course. Subscriptions and ticket sales have held their own at most of the major theaters (though advance bookings have dropped, as they have on Broadway since Sept. 11), but it has been a struggle to keep corporate and private donations coming. Seattle’s ACT company, one of the city’s three major theater groups, announced last winter that financial woes would force it to close down at the end of the season — before $1.5 million was raised at the last minute to keep it going for at least another season. The Seattle Rep, across town, is in less dire straits, but will still have to reduce staff and cut its roster of plays from nine to six next season. These pressures could increase the danger that regionals will shy away from risky fare, in favor of tried-and-true revivals, or new works that might have the prospect of a commercial run in New York. That is a criticism that some have long made of the regionals; off-Broadway is still a more receptive place for certain kinds of stylistically experimental plays. “I find that sometimes theaters are a little tame when it comes to choosing their seasons. They want to cater to their audiences,” says playwright Cruz. “A lot of regional theaters won’t take chances with work that deals more with experimentation.”

A successful regional theater, of course, has to strike the right balance, to know its audience and serve its tastes while pushing it, at least on occasion, into new territory. What’s gratifying is how well many of them are doing it — and proving in the process that all the country’s a stage.

The Top Five Regional Theaters

Some focus on new work; others have a commitment to the classics. Bringing new plays and artists to the national stage is important, but so is serving your local audience. TIME traveled the country to find the five theaters that do both best — and know how to put on a great show.

1 Goodman Theater, Chicago

With the groundbreaking Steppenwolf troupe and such ambitious smaller companies as the Victory Gardens Theater, Chicago’s theater scene is lively. But the Goodman continues to make the biggest national mark. Artistic director Robert Falls [b. 1954; Artistic Director of the Goodman, 1986-2022] has supplied Broadway with acclaimed adaptations of American classics (including this season’s Long Day’s Journey into Night [Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953); 22 February-6 April 2002]) and has nurtured such important new voices as Rebecca Gilman [b. 1964 or 1965] (Boy Gets Girl [13 March-8 April 2000]) and — along with Chicago’s Lookingglass Theater — Mary Zimmerman [b. 1960] (Metamorphoses [premiered in 1996 as Six Myths; Off-Broadway: 2001; Broadway: 2002, Tony for Best Direction of a Play, 2 additional nominations]). The Goodman is currently introducing Gem of the Ocean [28 April-24 May 2003] . . ., the latest in August Wilson’s [1945-2005] 20th century chronicle of the African-American experience, in a vibrant production with a strong cast of Wilson regulars. And Stephen Sondheim’s [1930-2021] long-awaited new musical, Bounce, will open here in June [30 June-10 August 2003]. “New York is a place to celebrate new work rather than to originate or nurture it,” says Falls. “That’s our responsibility.”

2  Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, Ore.

The name is misleading. Although the company began as an all-Shakespeare troupe back in 1935, the Bard’s works now constitute less than half of its increasingly eclectic season. OSF is one of the few U.S. companies left that hew to the classic repertory format. Its 70 to 75 actors take various roles in 11 works that play in rotation from February to November. And since visitors generally travel to this Oregon resort town to see several shows at a time, the Romeo and Juliets and Hedda Gablers can be supplemented with more unconventional fare such as the two parts of David Edgar’s Continental Divide (one of them, Mothers Against . . .) and, in July, Nilo Cruz’s Lorca in a Green Dress [12 July-2 November 2003]. “We’re willing to take a chance on plays that other theaters aren’t interested in,” says artistic director Libby Appel [b. 1937], “because we have the audience for it.”

3  American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, Mass.

Robert Brustein [1927-2023], the longtime artistic director of this adventurous company [1979-2002], turned over the reins this season to Robert Woodruff [b. 1947], a veteran avant-garde director from New York City. Woodruff responded by bringing in a Who’s Who of theater innovators, including Peter Sellars [b. 1957] and Andrei Serban [Romanian-born American, b. 1943], whose quirky take on Shakespeare’s Pericles [10 May-27 Jun 2003] . . ., is currently onstage. Another highlight of the season: Woodruff’s staging of Highway Ulysses [1-22 March 2002], an update of the Ulysses myth, with text and music by Rinde Eckert [b. 1951], about a man on a freaky cross-country trek in search of his son. Even when the journey wandered, Woodruff’s teeming, haunted stage kept you enthralled.

4  Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis

One of the legendary American regional companies has been quietly tending its garden for years, with 32,000 subscribers (among the highest in the nation) who brave the frigid Minnesota winters to see high-quality productions of the classics. But the Guthrie has also launched a program for developing new work, and last summer staged the world premiere of Arthur Miller’s [1915-2005] latest play, Resurrection Blues [world première at the Guthrie, 9 August-8 September 2002] . . ., Artistic director Joe Dowling [b. 1948; artistic director of the Guthrie, 1995-2015], who once ran Dublin’s Abbey Theater [1979-85] and directed a Broadway revival of Tartuffe this season [9 January-23 February 2003, for the Roundabout Theatre Company], says that the audience in Minneapolis is “one of the most sophisticated I’ve ever worked with.”

5  South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, Calif.

In Southern California, enterprising regional theaters are nearly as plentiful as orange groves — among them, San Diego’s Globe and the La Jolla Playhouse — but the little engine that could in Orange County gets the nod. Run by two former San Francisco college buddies — Martin Benson and David Emmes [both now over 90; left the leadership of SCR in 2011], who founded the company as a traveling troupe in 1964 — the South Coast Rep has helped nurture such playwrights as Richard Greenberg and David Henry Hwang [b. 1957] (Golden Child [10 January-9 February 1997; commissioned by SCR and co-produced with the New York Shakespeare Festival/The Public Theater]). This spring the theater, along with Baltimore’s Center Stage, staged the premiere of Lynn Nottage’s [b. 1964] Intimate Apparel [SCR: 11 April-18 May 2003] . . ., about a black seamstress in turn-of-the-century New York City who makes corsets for rich ladies — and a mail-order match for herself with a laborer on the Panama Canal. It’s a lovingly rendered slice of the American story that seems to glow especially bright in the heart of Reagan country.

[Richard Zoglin (b. 1948) wrote about entertainment for Time for over 30 years starting in 1983 as a staff writer and in 1996 as the theater reviewer.  He’s the author of three books: Elvis in Vegas: How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (Simon & Schuster, 2019); Hope: Entertainer of the Century—that’s Bob Hope, of course—(Simon & Schuster, 2014); and Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America (Bloomsbury, 2008).  He’s now an op-ed contributor to the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.]