Humbug Awards for Theatrical Folly : On mindless Dasher, on foolish Dancer, on publicity Blitzen!

Why is this man scowling? Because his nephew has just made a dangerous remark: “Merry Christmas.” Not only do such words exhibit light-mindedness, they lead to social discontent. Once you start paying the working man to stay home from the office on Christmas day to be with his family, he’ll start wanting every day to be Christmas. In a responsible society, the phrase would be banned.

Welcome to our annual Humbug awards, memorializing the follies and scams of the past theatrical year. It is meant to be an amusing survey, but the American theater’s largest folly in 1989--a backing away from freedom of speech--wasn’t amusing at all:

True, no American playwright was thrown into jail for his political beliefs, as happened to Czech playwright Vaclav Havel last spring. Havel’s sensational rehabilitation at the end of the year was, in fact, considered a victory for American principles. We wouldn’t dream of making a playwright adhere to a party line.

No. But 1989 was the year when the new chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts retracted a grant for an arts exhibit about AIDS, because it was “political” in content. It was the year when a Southern arts center came close to being permanently defunded by the NEA because one piece in a traveling exhibit struck some people as sacrilegious. It was the year a Washington museum canceled a show by a gay artist because “it might cause a scandal.”

You think those things don’t register when a resident theater starts planning its next season? It’s a strong script, all right, but what if we offend the (insert special-interest group here) and Senator (Blank) gets into it, and we lose our grant? Better stick to Shakespeare.

Our first Humbug of 1989, then, goes to the censor, in all his manifestations, from the blunderbuss bureaucrat at the Ministry of Culture to the sympathetic literary manager who puts his arm around the playwright’s shoulder and sighs: “If it were up to me, we’d do it in a minute . . . but you know our board.”

And above all to the inner censor, the voice that tells a playwright: “Better not: you’ll just turn people off.” By the 1970s there was a whole generation of Soviet playwrights who didn’t find the censor a problem at all. They had ingested prudence with their mother’s milk. And wrote the tamest plays in the history of drama. It could--just--happen here.

A free theater also encourages directors to mess around with the classics, which can take it. Ben Hecht’s and Charles MacArthur’s “The Front Page” is an American classic by now, and TheatreWorks of Palo Alto wanted to do a revival with a woman playing that tough-talking Chicago editor Walter Burns.

A great idea and not that outre . Remember the Herald Examiner’s Aggie Underwood, who used to shoot off a gun in the office to get the staff’s attention? But Helen Hayes and James MacArthur, Charles MacArthur’s heirs, were horrified at the notion, and “Wanda” Burns had to go back to being Walter. Too bad. Wanda might have given “The Front Page” a whole new lease on life.

1989 was also the year that New York Times theater critic Frank Rich came under increasing fire from what is known as the New York theater community for “abusing his powers”--i.e., failing to produce sufficiently supportive reviews.

It was acknowledged that Rich could analyze a play, and that he knew how to write, but he was panning stuff that wasn’t all that bad, and was at least serious, for gosh sake. Playwright David Hare, author of “The Secret Rapture,” accused Rich of being a sort of cultural war criminal, as lethal as a Stalinist censor.

It made for great headlines, especially the one in Variety--”RUFFLED HARE AIRS RICH BITCH.” It was also humbug--an attempt to punish a writer for refusing to follow a party line. Critics aren’t spokesmen for a trade association. If Rich is smart and can write, he’s doing his job.

So much for the thought police. Another of the year’s tackier trends might be called Xerox theater. Dress up an affordable young performer as a great star of yesteryear, make up a meaningless story about him, throw in some songs, and call the thing “Durante” or “Groucho” or “W.C.”

Presto, you’ve got the best of both worlds--this one and the next one. When some spoilsport critic says that it’s not the real thing, reply that of course it’s not the real thing, who said it was? It’s just an impression.

Or, maybe, a tribute . That’s what Nick Edenetti calls his “Sinatra” show. Sinatra, as it happens, is still with us, and is threatening to take Edenetti to court. One can’t help feeling that Groucho might have done the same. Thanks to the VCR, the great stars of the recent past are available to us in our living rooms. In the theater, let’s get some new stars.

That’s not the same as transplanting an old star in a new medium and trusting that his charisma will carry him through. Somebody thought it would be a great idea to cast Rudolf Nureyev as the King in “The King and I.” The only triumph here was one of billing. Can anyone remember when the star of a Rodgers and Hammerstein show got bigger type than the name of the show?

As usual, it was a great year for theater publicity. The Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival practically gave itself a Nobel Prize for providing a specially signed performance of “The Merchant of Venice” for the hearing handicapped--the ninth straight season that they’d done this. One show a year. Think of it.

Equally altruistic was the press release from Laya Gelff Associates: “In the wake of Hurricane Hugo, Ed Metzger has been invited to perform his one-man show, ‘Albert Einstein: The Practical Bohemian,’ at The Citadel in Charleston, S. C.” We hope Ed helped them clean up.

“Oh, Calcutta!” announced that it had finally run out of steam on Broadway, after having given 5,959 performances, largely to foreign tourists with binoculars. But on the second page of the press release, its producer, Ms. Di Dia, said that the world had not seen the end of “Oh, Calcutta”--there would be a Latin American production. How about a Central American production?

“All About Love” at Chippendale’s issued a press release not only inviting the critics to attend, but imploring them to attend, adding winsomely--”We’ll be your best friends if you do.” We’ve already got a best friend.

The Alliance Repertory Theatre of Burbank, trying to bring some attention to its one-act play festival, offered drama critics “free limousine service to the theater.” Limousine service, right. We saw “The Godfather.”

Speaking of critics, we got this note from Sid Cohn, the singing insurance agent: “Dear Mr. Sullivan, I am enclosing a review of my performance at the Gardenia Supper Club. I confess that I wrote this review myself in hopes of getting it published, but to no avail . . . “ Go in peace, Sid, we all make mistakes.

Especially the conductor of this column, who as usual receives the last and best of the 1989 Humbugs for such solecisms as attributing Miss Prism’s remark about “vibrations” to Lady Bracknell--an error very few readers picked up on. We also mistook the boys’ school in the Taper’s “Stand-Up Tragedy” for a high school when it was really a grammar school. Reader Patrick de Santis did pick up on that one: “Dan, who was the last 18-year-old high school senior you knew ‘about to enter into puberty’ ?” Good point.

May we all be sharper in 1990.