He’s Put Out Over Judging Playwrights by Output

What a delight to see two feature articles about the theater in the June 2 Sunday Calendar. What a disappointment to read one of them--”Craftsmen of the Stage,” by Steven Oxman.

In all fairness, I am not a fan of this writer. My latest play, “Serious Inquiries Only,” received favorable reviews from everyone except Oxman, the theater and television critic for Variety. Now with that admission out of the way, I must confess that I was disturbed by the patronizing inanity of this article long before I discovered the personal connection.

Oxman informs us that playwrights are like plants. Some are “annual” playwrights; others are “perennial” playwrights. The annual playwright “blossoms beautifully.” The perennial “might not bloom as spectacularly.” Domestic perennial playwrights are rare. Home-grown perennials such as Horton Foote, A.R. Gurney Jr. and Terrence McNally are “not ‘important’ playwrights.” They are “skilled, intricate bricklayers.” I prefer the “bricklayer” comparison, but soon we’re back in the proverbial garden: The perennial “develops a refined polish that the flashiest of annual playwrights can’t touch.”

As I strained to read on, I couldn’t help but wonder how Oxman would classify Eugene O’Neill--a perennial or an annual? Let’s see, he wrote many plays, so that would make him a perennial. Yet he is an “important” playwright, so that would suggest he was an annual. He was less prolific toward the end of his life, though some would say more profound, so perhaps he was a perennial who had metamorphosed into an annual. Or he may have been an annual all along who experienced perennial bursts of creativity.

Is all this sounding a bit silly ... and flowery? Of course it is.

This need to categorize the playwright, to qualify and quantify his or her work based on some botanical measure of fertility, is irrelevant to the elusive and complicated art of the playwright.

Playwrights are not like plants, unless we’re discussing endangered species. Playwrights are writers who are about the work of writing plays, and the process and merit of that work defy such simplistic classifications. Sometimes playwrights are prolific. Sometimes they are dry. Sometimes they are brilliant. Other times they are less than brilliant. Sometimes they write a play in a week, a month--frequently a year or more. They are in fashion, out of fashion, and the best of them don’t give a damn about fashion--their only imperative is to write--and write they do, often in obscurity. Is David Hirson a household name to anyone, including Oxman?

History alone will determine the “important” playwrights among us, not a critic’s criterion of whether one is an “annual” or a “perennial.”

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D. Paul Thomas is an actor, director and playwright who lives in the Hollywood Hills.