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By any standard, these companies have demonstrated their importance not just to their own communities but to the commercial theater. And they have reaped the most significant rewards: profit and honor. Three of the most successful musicals of the 1970s—Grease, A Chorus Line and Annie—originated off-Broadway or in the regionals. Eleven of the last twelve Pulitzer Prizes for Drama have gone to plays initially produced off-Broadway or in the regionals. Three of those prizewinners emerged from the Public Theater, two from the Mark Taper Forum, two from Jon Tory's Actors Theater in Louisville.
This year's winner was Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart, a mordant comedy with a Mississippi drawl. The tale of her play's peregrinations helps illustrate the new and winding road to Broadway. Crimes was first staged in 1979 at the Actors Theater in Louisville, then soon afterward at the California Actors Theater in Los Gatos, St. Louis' Loretto Hilton and the Center Stage in Baltimore—all to uniformly rave reviews. Next, the Manhattan Theater Club decided to put it on. Meanwhile, Independent Producer Burt Sugarman bought the movie rights, reportedly for $1 million. While the play was scoring again at the Manhattan Theater Club, Warner Theater Productions and the Producer Circle secured it for Broadway.
For a playwright who has already won a Pulitzer and a fat movie contract, how much voltage is left in finally seeing her name go up in lights on Broadway? Says Henley, 29: "Broadway is still a great place to be." A run on Broadway, adds Gordon Davidson, "is still the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for young playwrights." The same holds true for performers who may have attained higher profiles—and fees—in other media. Richard Thomas, who appeared on Broadway as a child actor before going on to The Waltons and other television roles, recently took over the lead in Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July. "Coming out of television and being reaccepted on Broadway confirmed my legitimacy," he says. "For an actor, if you can please a Broadway crowd, you've made it."
But unlike earlier hopefuls who yearned to conquer Broadway, today's young playwrights often find, as Davidson notes, that "Broadway needs them more than they need it. Broadway can't generate its own plays; the costs are too high, the risk too big. So producers look for plays developed at regional theaters —or rather, they watch for the New York critics' reviews of regional plays. Critics are still important to this kind of drama, and it helps to know that the man who'll be reviewing your new show already likes it." Mason says the same thing, but accentuates the negative: "Unless you can count on a rave from Frank Rich of the New York Times, you're in trouble."
Perhaps you are in trouble if you need to count on a critic's rave in the first place. Then you are playing the Broadway game. Says Joe Papp: "As long as we do plays on our own terms, it's fine if they move to Broadway. We get recognition and money. The danger comes when a repertory company starts planning for Broadway."