I frequently extol the virtues of Cincinnati’s theaters. They are a subset, of course, of a vibrant arts scene — one that a friend of mine often says “fights above its weight class.” While we don’t have the number of theaters or arts organizations found in larger cities, our theaters offer high quality and a broad spectrum; there isn’t a category of playmaking that’s absent. A good way to affirm this is to compare popular plays staged here and elsewhere during a specific season.
The best reference is the annual list of “most produced plays” that appears in American Theatre magazine. The 2015-2016 roundup was assembled from a total of 2,159 productions at 386 nonprofit regional theaters for the 12 months beginning Sept. 1, 2015. To be included, shows needed to be fully produced with at least a week of performances. To avoid skewing the results,
Shakespeare’s plays are excluded, but the Bard is, as usual, America’s most-produced playwright, with 99 productions this season.
How does Cincinnati stack up compared with the rest of America? Of this season’s 10 most-produced plays, we have seen or will see six. Rick Elice’s Peter and the Starcatcher, a Peter Pan reboot, is near the top of the heap, in second place with 16 productions. It tied for fourth last season with seven stagings, including one at the Cincinnati Playhouse in March. John Patrick Shanley’s Outside Mullingar, the story of a thorny Irish romance, placed second a year ago with 10 productions, one of which was by Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati in May. It’s in third place this season at 11 more theaters.
Perhaps due to the heightened awareness caused by the publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, the stage version of its “predecessor,” To Kill a Mockingbird, is a popular work this season, in third place with nine productions. The Playhouse is one of those (March 2016); it was previously staged there in the fall of 1993. Tied for third place this year is Jonathan Tolins’ one-man comedy, Buyer & Cellar, which just finished a bravura staging at ETC.
Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike was a hit last season, in first place by a big margin with 27 productions, including one at the Playhouse last spring; this year the Chekhov spoof checks in at No. 5 with eight productions.
Laura Eason’s literary lover story,
Sex with Strangers , is one of four shows with seven productions, all tied for sixth place to round out the Top 10; the Playhouse’s production just closed on Oct. 25. Also in this four-way tie is August Wilson’s
Fences , a show Playhouse audiences saw way back in 1990.What are we missing? Well, most notably is the show in first place, Ayad Akhtar’s
Disgraced , at 18 theaters. The 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner is about a dinner party awash in contentious conversation about politics and religion among an ex-Muslim, an African American, a Jew and a WASP. Akhtar, a Pakistani-American born in New York City, is only the third playwright of color to top
American Theatre ’s list. The other two, Yasmina Reza and Lynn Nottage, have had their works staged in Cincinnati: Reza’s
Art at the Playhouse in 2001, and Nottage’s
Intimate Apparel at ETC in 2005.
Two other plays, tied with seven productions, are being staged at seven theaters. One is Anne Washburn’s dark comedy, Mr. Burns, a post-electric play: A group of survivors recall an episode of The Simpsons shortly after a global catastrophe, seven years later and then after 75 years. The other, Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird, a comic remix of Chekhov’s The Seagull, explores the never-ending battle between young and old, past and present. My guess is that its title makes it less likely to have a production here in sometimes-prudish Cincinnati. But maybe Know Theatre will consider it?
Bottom line: If you see theater in Cincinnati, you’ll find a lot of shows that audiences around the country are enjoying — sometimes before they get popular elsewhere.
CONTACT RICK PENDER: rpender@citybeat.com
This article appears in Nov 11-17, 2015.
