Under the chestnuts

 

Maybe we’ve been missing the point.
 

First, let’s look at the results of the 2008-09 survey: it pretty much contains, with a few exceptions, the same familiar titles. There was a little bit of shuffling in the order of the most popular titles, and just a few shows coming and going. The Disney version of    Beauty and the Beast repeated at the top of the most popular musicals list, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the most-produced non-musical play.
 

Two musicals that were in last year’s top ten—   Bye Bye Birdie and Disney’s High School Musical—dropped out. They were replaced by You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and The Music Man, both of which have had their top ten tickets punched many times before.
 

The non-musical plays list was just a little more volatile, with four titles departing and three new arrivals (because of ties, the top ten is sometimes actually eleven or twelve). New to this year’s list are    Noises Off, Alice in Wonderland, and Twelve Angry Men. These are all fine plays and musicals, is what we usually say at this point in our report on the annual survey. But can’t we do something else? The repertory is a stagnant pool.

 

The top ten lists are only part of the story, though. What’s striking about the production survey results is what they show about the extraordinary breadth of the repertory. The 850 member schools that participated in the 2008-09 survey listed 1,139 different titles, plus another couple hundred productions of student-written and other unpublished work. With so many titles in play, it doesn’t take a lot of productions to break into the top ten, and it shouldn’t be surprising that the safe, conservative choices rise to the top. (Beauty and the Beast, the most-produced musical, was staged by only 3.5 percent of the reporting schools.) Another factor is the play survey’s function as a self-fulfilling prophecy: some directors choose to do shows because they’re on the top ten list, which sustains their position in the next year’s survey.
 

What the lists of most-produced plays and musicals conceal are the other 1,129 titles. Underneath the layer of chestnuts at the top is a rich smorgasbord of adventurous, interesting choices. Among the shows that will probably never make the most-produced list, but nevertheless were seen on stages in North American high schools last year: August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Setzuan, Frank Galati’s adaptation of Grapes of Wrath, Federico Garcia Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba, Yasmina Reza’s Art, William Inge’s Bus Stop, Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmann, Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, and fifteen Shakespeare plays. Among musicals: Rent, Urinetown, Ragtime, The Producers, Working, Sunday in the Park with George, Company, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
 

Put another way: for every twenty productions of Arsenic and Old Lace—which is a fine play, don’t get us wrong, but let’s give it a break—there are twenty schools doing fresh, interesting, challenging material that their audiences have never seen.
 

A bit of housekeeping: Two titles on the full-length plays list were the beneficiaries of a change in tabulation methodology that’s worth noting. In past years, each version of a show with multiple adaptations was counted as a separate title. Under new rules adopted this year, productions of various adaptations of the same source material—like Alice in Wonderland, which has been adapted by at least six different writers—are tabulated together. Similarly, different versions of a work offered by the same writer and publisher—like Twelve Angry Men, which is also produced under the titles Twelve Angry Women and Twelve Angry Jurors—are treated as a single title.
 

Without this change, incidentally, the 2008-09 survey results would have looked even more like last year’s list.

 

And finally, we feel obliged to point out that Thespian Playworks alumnus Jonathan Rand’s campaign to become the only working writer of short plays in the world made some additional progress this year. He added a new title, his fifth, to the list of most-produced one-acts.
 

The Thespian Society, with about 3,900 affiliated high schools and middle schools, has conducted this survey of most popular plays and musicals every year since 1937.