Best Script of a Play: A Plea to the American Theatre Wing
Photo by Little Fang | The company of Liberation
On May 5th, Uzo Aduba and Darren Criss announced the nominees for the 79th Annual Tony Awards. Included amongst the nominees were 46 creatives working on 16 plays, new and revived. On June 7th, the American Theatre Wing will award twenty-four categories from Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical to Best Sound Design of a Play. Yet one honor remains conspicuously absent - Best Script of a Play.
Arguably, there are many categories that need to be added to provide a holistic picture of the current commercial theatrical landscape: Best Chorus, Best Pyrotechnics, Best Video/Projections to name a few. These awards should exist. The performers in Broadway choruses are talented, dedicated, and ineligible to receive the laurels that lead and featured performers do. Pyrotechnics and video design are becoming a key part of how musicals and plays are realized on stage, and designers are using them in fun and innovative ways. However, these awards exist for neither plays nor musicals. Writers of musicals are awarded through Best Original Score or Best Book of a Musical, depending on their discipline. But there is no specific award for the best written play.
There is precedence, though sparse, for the Tony Awards honoring the scripts of plays. From 1947 to 1965, nine people or teams were awarded the Tony Award for Best Author. These awards were not distinguished between musicals and plays. In 1949, Arthur Miller shared his award for Death of a Salesman with Samuel and Bella Spewack for their work on Kiss Me, Kate. In the eight years the award was presented, only Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, and the writing team Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan won for plays. The award was retired after the 1965 ceremony, and in 1971 Best Book of a Musical was introduced as a replacement. Many awards that were previously one category (direction, costumes, lighting, revival, and scenic design) were split into play and musical specific categories in the 1960s, but Best Author morphed into a musical exclusive award.
On the Tony Awards’ website, authors are listed next to plays, but not musicals. This implies that Best Play is currently functioning as a surrogate Best Script of a Play award. But these awards deserve to be split into separate categories for the same reason that book, score, and overall musical are split. For the same reason choreography and direction are split. For the same reason score and orchestrations are split. Sometimes, one part of a production works and another part doesn’t. A play could have the best direction, but not be the best play. Why can’t it have the best script? Best Musical functions as Best Production of a New Musical – it goes to the show that was overall the best. Plays should be able to be awarded in the same discrete categories as musicals. The art of playwriting deserves a moment separate from the overall production.
Long before book musicals were popularized in the 1920s, Americans were writing plays. Many states banned plays during the American Revolutionary War in order to focus attention on the war effort. Part of FDR’s New Deal was the Federal Theatre Project, which funded the writing and performance of new plays across the nation from 1935 to 1939. Theatre has been part of the USA’s public and political discourse since the very beginning of its history.
The American Theatre Wing claims to, “honor theatre that impacts the American experience.” The bevy of awards given to musicals that have seeped into public culture show that the Tony Awards do often get it right: Hamilton was a national phenomenon and received awards commensurate with its success and notoriety. But by ignoring playwrights, the Wing is failing to fairly award a storied art form. Theatre Communications Group, a national organization that connects theaters across the country and publishes American Theatre magazine, has over 650 member theaters in 44 states, the majority of which present a combination of plays and musicals. Both of these theatrical forms reflect the American experience, and the writers of both deserve to be lauded for their achievements.
Musicals have an easier chance to spread their popularity, especially in the age of streaming music. People who have never set foot in a theatre can listen to the entire score of Rent. Plays, rarely recorded and even more infrequently broadcast, are often accessible only to those who can get to a theatre. Awarding plays with national honors like Tonys and Pulitzers asserts the importance of non-musical theatre in the public consciousness. In order to equitably assess the differences and award the work done by brilliant living playwrights, we must award well written plays on the same stage as we award well written musicals.
I thought I wanted to be an actor because of the performances on the Tony broadcasts. I took vocal lessons and auditioned for most of my high school’s plays. It wasn’t until my junior year, finding my voice in a creative writing class, that I began to seriously consider writing for the stage. I took a playwriting elective at a summer program (where I was enrolled as an actor) and kept writing the pieces I began long after the program ended. Instead of performing a story someone else had written, I could create characters that dealt with the issues I was dealing with or observing. I applied to college intending to study playwriting, and am now two weeks away from my masters degree. Playwriting was always where my theatrical star lay, but a lack of recognition for the craft made it hard to imagine as a child. Maybe I would have understood my dreams sooner if I’d seen playwriting awarded at the Tonys.
The Tony Awards are the American theatre’s annual night to assert the importance of its art form. People across the country watch, from theatre professors at MFA programs to kids who have just discovered that they love being a part of live performances. Setting the categories that are awarded shapes those kids’ dreams. By expanding the awards to include a distinct prize for playwriting, the American Theatre Wing would be showing young theatre aficionados across the country that writing for the stage is not only possible, it’s important.
Writer: Pallas M. Gutierrez
Editor-in-Chief: Karlye Whitt
