I’m going to go ahead and decide that I read enough of The Best Plays Theater Yearbook 2004-2005 to note it in the blog. That is, I read all the parts of the book that are reasonable to read, and looked at all the pictures.
The Yearbook consists of ten essays on New York productions, two essays on productions elsewhere in the country, and minute listings for all the shows produced in New York or at major regional theaters. I did, actually, leaf through the listings, but mostly to look at the pictures. It’s essentially a reference book, though, with some essays. I read the essays.
The essays were odd. The best of them was a comparison between the London and New York productions of Michael Frayn’s Democracy. The essay on August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean failed to place the play in the context of the bigger cycle, which would have been interesting, but then there will be lots of books written about that, and soon. The essay on A Number did do a good job of placing it in Caryl Churchill’s oeuvre, but (largely because of the way that Ms. Churchill writes), it did not to a very good job of telling me what the experience of watching the play was like.
That’s the thing that I found odd. These essays were not reviews, with the expected audience of people who are thinking about perhaps buying tickets. They weren’t really analyses, either, with the audience of ... um, other people who analyse theater and its trends and events. I suppose. The audience was not people such as YHB, that would have loved to have seen the shows but are too far away, or cheap, or busy, or whatever to have actually made it to a performance. I think the audience that is intended is people in about ten year’s time, who for no clearly discernible reason are trying to find out what people at the time thought were the theatrical events of the season.
No, I just realized it. The expected audience is artistic directors of moderately large regional theaters, trying to decide which fairly-recent plays to spend the money on producing. Hm. I suppose, then, that the emphasis on particular performances (for instance, that of Cherry Jones and Brian F. O’Byrne in Doubt is meant as a warning to potential directors not to attempt the play without actors of such caliber. Hm.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.