Best of Theater 2003
David Edgar, the British author of Nicholas Nickleby, tackles American politics in a dense, sprawling pair of linked plays about a campaign for governor in an unnamed Western state — one play focusing on the Democrats, the other on the Republicans. Ambitious, verbose, untidy (and still being worked on, after a premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival), it is nevertheless an enormously impressive effort to create epic theater out of the intersection of the political and the personal in post-'60s, post-Watergate America.