I was opening a week's mail—a grim task for a theater critic in August. The current openings, aside from that overstuffed surprise box called the Fringe Festival, were mostly the kind of assignments that make even the interns dig in their heels. And the announcements for the upcoming season were—well, they were no surprise box. There was the usual (small) number of plays by writers whose next work one might look forward to, and the usual (rather smaller) number by unknown quantities whose work might be anything. And there was, of course, the usual large majority of plays by writers, and directors, and composers that nobody in the world cares two pins about, including some who the world (if the theater is a world) had hoped would never be back from that alien, barren planet called sitcom. But they do come back—they like draping a frill of artistic prestige around their piles of money—and some theaters, inexplicably, like having them. The TV hacks gain no real prestige from their return; instead the theater loses credibility. Our larger nonprofit institutions, though, never seem to grasp this point. The whole system gets to look more and more like an agents' marketplace, and less and less... More >>>