Our playwrights get lonely on the cutting edge

A quick perusal of the Pulitzer winners for drama clarifies what we’ve long suspected: Cutting-edge theater rarely carries home the prize.

One could, in fact, construct a more dazzling influential repertory from the names left off the list. No Richard Foreman, Maria Irene Fornes, Adrienne Kennedy, Robert Wilson or Karen Finley. No Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, Anna Deavere Smith or Richard Maxwell. No notion, in other words, that performance work has trumped playwriting in the last few decades, and only scant recognition that the most interesting drama seldom takes the complication-crisis-catharsis expressway anymore.

Let’s also acknowledge that it’s a playwright’s more accessible work that tends to get rewarded. Sam Shepard wins for “Buried Child” rather than “Tooth of Crime.” Donald Margulies wins for “Dinner With Friends” rather than “The Model Apartment.” Neil Simon wins for “Lost in Yonkers” rather than, er, never mind.

The point is that there’s hardly anything surprising about the 2007 Pulitzer going last week to “Rabbit Hole,” David Lindsay-Abaire’s sensitive drama about a married couple’s struggle to resume their lives after the accidental death of their 4-year-old son. Except perhaps that the play wasn’t one of the three nominees put forth by the panel of experts making recommendations to the Pulitzer board. The three lesser-known finalists -- Rinde Eckert’s “Orpheus X,” Eisa Davis’ “Bulrusher” and Quiara Alegria Hudes’ “Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue” -- were passed up in favor of a more mainstream choice. The daring of the committee seems to have been too much for the board.

I admire “Rabbit Hole,” which played at the Geffen last fall, and certainly don’t hold its conventional realistic form against it. Lush with psychological observation and leavened with unexpected humor, the play offers pleasures similar to those of a finely wrought short story. And it is for my money a more deeply inhabited piece than the quirky farces (“Fuddy Meers,” “Kimberly Akimbo,” “Wonder of the World”) that initially brought Lindsay-Abaire attention.

But the award is yet another sign that this isn’t the most welcoming of times for envelope-pushing drama. Broadway is rife with revivals and British imports. And the big regional theaters, established as an alternative to the commercial system, have had a tough time staying true to their mandate. Risk-averse programming that favors the familiar, preferably with a star lead, slick showmanship and a clobbering marketing campaign, isn’t limited to the Great White Way.

To be an up-and-coming playwright today is to be unavoidably part of a grass-roots effort. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Though in a decadently corporate era -- when “branding” is the highest creed not just for soda and cereal manufacturers but for the behind-the-scenes movers and shakers in politics, the arts and even foreign policy -- it’s hard for the not-yet-famous to stay on the radar, let alone pay the rent, secure health insurance and scrounge a few hours a week for creative fulfillment.

It has never been easy, but the current generation of writers finds itself in a double bind. Broadway hasn’t been in its sights for ages. But the larger nonprofits, which should be a reasonable goal, haven’t been too keen to gamble subscribers’ goodwill on a bunch of unknowns who still need a few more years to bake. Trouble is, these artists are having the darnedest time finding a well-stocked kitchen. Without institutional support -- and without a robust alternative that can draw crowds and critics and, yes, possibly even Pulitzers -- it’s no wonder TV and movies have been siphoning so much talent from the stage.

Does the name Young Jean Lee mean anything to you? How about Rinne Groff, Will Eno, Christopher Shinn, Anne Washburn, Adam Bock, Sarah Ruhl, Adam Rapp, Naomi Iizuka, Carlos Murillo, Heather Woodbury? These writers have devoted themselves to the theater in the face of uphill struggle and uncertain rewards. And they’re persevering now in that limbo between emerging and established that must seem particularly fraught when what hinders their progress is the lack of a consistent opportunity to develop their craft before a sizable audience -- feedback that can’t be bettered by any critic.

Yes, many of them have been produced at such bastions of new work as Playwrights Horizons and the Public Theater in New York, the Actors Theatre of Louisville and South Coast Repertory. Shinn and Ruhl (a MacArthur “genius” fellow whose rise has been impressive of late) have even made it to Lincoln Center.

But would it surprise anyone to hear that many of the plays that have stayed with me in the last year were produced at postage-stamp-sized venues and filled with people who looked like they actually wanted to be there? The local groups responsible for these experiences -- Circle X Theatre, the Furious Theatre Company, the Echo Theater Company and the Blank Theatre Company -- might not be able to ensure that their dramatists earn a living wage. But they nonetheless provide them with lifeblood: an engaged audience.

Calling all patrons

THAT’S where you come in. Every society gets the theater it deserves. We don’t need a lecture about the extent of our consumerist depravity. But even the most unrepentant shoppers among us (no peeking at my credit card bills, please) have to grapple with the reality that art isn’t something we greedily purchase, like a pair of Prada shoes. Rather it’s an experience we collectively enter to learn more about those parts of ourselves and each other that aren’t receiving sufficient contemplation elsewhere.

As a professional theatergoer who was once an avid amateur theatergoer, I don’t typically have a cranky reaction to plays that stumble if there’s a sense that the writer is honestly grappling with something. I must have seen scads of mediocre plays at Circle Repertory Company in New York in the 1980s, but my memory of that Greenwich Village theater group has a golden glow. New plays mattered there -- to the playwrights, directors, actors and most especially the audience. What the culturally hungry are after isn’t perfection but truth. Few novelists can match Proust, but that doesn’t stop me from reading Mary Gaitskill. Nor do I skip Richard Greenberg or Craig Lucas because they’re several notches below Chekhov.

What does, however, make me slightly -- OK, acutely -- dyspeptic is when I feel as though I’m being sold a bill of goods that the producer knows is shoddy but thinks won’t cause waves or will please because of the TV personality in the cast or no one cares much one way or the other. Nothing is more enraging than a time waster -- especially at big theater prices.

But what does any of this have to do with “Rabbit Hole” snatching the Pulitzer?

A panel of informed theater critics and professionals found excellence where there was little fanfare. The two plays that premiered in New York, “Bulrusher” (Urban Stages) and “Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue” (Second Stage), weren’t reviewed by the New York Times’ marquee critics (though its chief critic, Ben Brantley, served on the Pulitzer committee), and “Orpheus X,” the work of a playwright-composer maverick who defies quick categorization, premiered at one of the country’s more unabashedly intellectual nonprofits, the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.

We were being urged to pay attention to work that has more difficulty than ever of getting noticed. “Rabbit Hole” is worthy of the Pulitzer. And one can be grateful that the board didn’t skip the drama award, as it did last year (not for the first time). But the unsung badly need a lift right now.

Patronage of adventurous programming is the only answer to skittish, market-centered leadership. Let’s be sure to attend when and if the unheralded finalists make it here.

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