The Tonys: An Honor in Decline : They don’t even give a fair picture of the New York theater season

It’s Tony time again. Tonight at 9, millions of Americans will gather around their TV sets to watch the 43rd annual Antoinette Perry Awards, broadcast from Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre and emceed by Angela Lansbury.

Let’s roll that one again. Tonight at 9, after “Murder, She Wrote,” millions of Americans will say: “Want to watch the Tonys for a little while?” After two or three awards, millions of Americans will remember that they’ve got to get up early in the morning.

This has been the viewing pattern for the Tony Awards even when the Broadway theater has had a good season. This year, the cupboard was virtually bare, and the show’s TV producer, Don Mischer, will have to go heavy on production values to disguise it.

Take musicals--the theater form that Broadway invented. The Tony Award for Best Musical used to go to a new show, like “Fiddler on the Roof” or “West Side Story.” The leading contender for the best musical of 1989 is “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.” It features numbers from “West Side Story” and “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Another contender is “Black and Blue.” This is a tribute to the Cotton Club and the great blues singers of the past. Another backward-looking show. In more plentiful seasons, it and the Robbins show would have been called revivals.

The third contender is “Starmites.” This isn’t something you sprinkle on Fruit Loops. It is an officially certified Broadway musical, running at a new cabaret theater called the Criterion. Variety says that its plot concerns “a fantasy-fixated teen-age girl dreaming she’s an exiled intergalactic princess, who becomes involved with a quartet of boyish space troopers.” Variety adds that it is “silly, heavy and dull.”

Usually there are four contenders for Best Musical. This year, there were only three. Why? Probably because “Legs Diamond” might have received the fourth nomination, and everybody would have burst out laughing.

There won’t be an award for Best Book or Best Score this year, either. So much for the Broadway musical at the end of the ‘80s. Now let’s look at the Best Play category. This used to be won by plays like “Death of a Salesman” and “Streetcar Named Desire” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” The play with the most nominations this year (seven) is . . . “Lend Me a Tenor.”

Perhaps you haven’t heard of “Lend Me a Tenor.” It concerns a fellow who has to go on stage and pretend to be an opera singer. Heyy, Abbott.

Actually it’s more likely that this year’s Best Play will be Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Heidi Chronicles.” It is rueful and charming, and it is about something: woman’s liberation as it has worked out in practice since the ‘60s. It’s not a heavyweight play, but it’s a nice middleweight one, and it’s good to have it on Broadway.

Where did “Heidi” come from? Off-Off-Broadway: Playwrights Horizons. It also had a workshop at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. That’s typical these days. Years ago, plays were written directly for Broadway. Today almost all Broadway “product”--the word is now used without irony or apology--comes from someplace else.

There are two ways to look at this change. Critics tend to say it means that Broadway has lost its position as the creative center of the American theater--that it has become a kind of shopping mall for whatever good, bad or indifferent stuff a producer has the money to bring in, from “Nicholas Nickleby” to “Moose Murders.”

Alternately, you could say that nothing has changed, really; that Broadway is still our theater’s summit, the place where all American plays want to go. In this reading, the rest of the theater world is a test track for Broadway: a proving ground to see whether a show has got the stamina to make it in the big time. If it doesn’t get to Broadway, this proves it didn’t have the stuff.

You wouldn’t give a yearling calf a blue ribbon for being a prize bull, would you? No. It would be equally silly to give a Tony Award to some nice little show from Playwrights Horizons or the Seattle Rep--that is, until it attracts enough investor interest to be able to afford a production on 45th Street.

This second point of view is the one held by the League of American Theaters and Producers, the trade association that is the muscle behind the Tony Awards. Formerly the League of New York Theaters and Producers, this group represents the owners and major users of the 39 Times Square-area theaters known collectively as Broadway.

The league doesn’t own the Tony Awards. They were invented and are awarded in the name of the American Theatre Wing, the volunteer group that sponsored the Stage Door Canteen in World War II. (The late Antoinette Perry--”Tony”--was the Theatre Wing’s guiding force in those days.)

But the league does have a powerful say in the administration of the Tony Awards, particularly since the Tonys became a network TV show in 1967--the only national TV broadcast that honors the theater. That “the theater” should be equated with the Broadway theater is obviously to the league’s interest, and that is the subtext behind the show.

Unfortunately, it also limits to the heart of the show--the awards themselves--to the current Broadway season. This can be embarrassing when the season is as paltry as it was this year--only 19 new shows (plus 10 revivals). Not much of an ad for “the theater.” Certainly not much of an ad for the New York theater. American resident theater, which probably produces 200 new scripts a year, gets at least a token nod from the Tonys, in the form of a special award to a particular resident theater--this year, the Hartford Stage. (Last year it was South Coast Repertory.)

But Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway get no recognition at all. This is particularly embarrassing in the case of new plays--embarrassing, not to Off-Broadway, but to the prestige of the Tonys as a symbol of excellence in the theater.

It’s easier for a serious movie to win an Oscar than it is for a serious play to win a Tony. Either the investor interest isn’t there (today’s investors want to see a return right away) or the production is doing perfectly well in a smaller theater and doesn’t particularly want to transfer.

A.R. Gurney’s “The Cocktail Hour,” for instance, has run all season at an uptown house, the Promenade, before a clientele that in the old days would have supported it on Broadway--but at today’s prices can’t afford to.

The same thing happened two seasons ago with Horton Foote’s “The Widow Claire” at the downtown branch of Circle in the Square, a superbly underwritten play by an American master.

Non-Broadway plays are eligible for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and often win it. (Indeed, this is getting to be the rule.) Absurdly, they aren’t eligible for a Tony. But a trifle like “Lend Me a Tenor” is.

Playwright Peter Stone addressed the issue in a recent edition of the Theatre Development Fund’s magazine, Sightlines.

“The major playwrights of America are not functioning on Broadway,” he writes. “Broadway is not user-friendly to serious plays any more.”

Stone notes that serious plays are being written and performed all over the country and all over the city too. But these don’t get “the same attention as they would on Broadway, because it’s to the interest of the real-estate people, who are now the major producers on Broadway, to maintain their geographic integrity.”

“That’s where their investments lie,” Stone continues. “So they’re desperately hanging onto this Broadway label, as promoted by their Tony Awards. That the major plays written in this country are not eligible for the excellence award in the theater is becoming ludicrous.”

Ludicrous and dangerous to the reputation of the Tony Awards and that of the American Theatre Wing. The wing’s original intention was to honor excellence in the American theater--as defined in 1947. The definition has changed, but the Tonys haven’t, and the chickens may come home to roost on CBS tonight.

As for us, we plan to honor the American theater by taking in a play.