New Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2006 (Contemporary Plawrights Series) by D.L. Lepidus

I go to the theater approximately four or five times a week, and I read two or three hundred plays a year — I’m a drama nut. The plays in this anthology are the best ones I could find by new playwrights, produced during the 2005–2006 theater season. Well, you might What is a “new playwright”? Many of the plays I either read or see each year are by not-so-new authors, as most professional theater companies have long-standing relationships with certain playwrights — which all too often turns them into private clubs, new members need not apply — as far as new playwrights are concerned. Still, somehow, new playwrights manage to get their work produced. There are literally hundreds of new plays produced by professional and semi-professional theaters each year, God love ’em, and somehow new playwrights are in this number. I define a “new playwright” as a writer who is still at the stage where he or she is struggling for recognition and production. There is an “A-List” of playwrights for whose latest opus theaters often the Albees, the McNallys, the Shanleys, and so forth. The playwrights whose work I have included in this book are not among these big names. Maybe someday they will be, who’s to tell? All of them, though, are fresh new voices whose work has thrilled and entertained audiences both nationally and in New York.Herein, you will find dramas, comedies, realism, non-realism — a cornucopia of contemporary American playwriting talent. The comedies include John Cariani’s Almost, Maine and Kenny Finkle’s Indoor/Outdoor, both of which enjoyed modestly successful Off-Broadway runs. Almost, Maine is an evening of ten-minute plays about the denizens of a rural Maine town so small it makes Tuna, Texas, look like a thriving metropolis — all played by an intrepid handful of actors. Indoor/Outdoor is a charming comedy about a cute young female and her trials and tribulations with the man she lives with. The female is a cat named Samantha, and Finkle tells her story from birth to death in a way that will make you laugh, will charm you, and will move you — even if you hate cats.Another delightful comedy herein is Michael Golamco’s Cowboy Versus Samurai — produced Off-Broadway by the National Asian American Theatre Co. (NAATCO) — about the only three Asian-Americans living in a small town in Wyoming. Golamco explores issues of identity amongst Asian Americans in a most humorous way, and even dares to borrow a famous plot device from Cyrano de Bergerac to do so.Six Years by Sharr White was produced at Actors Theatre of Louisville’s famed Humana Festival. It’s a drama about what Tom Brokaw has dubbed The Greatest Generation. The play focuses on a marriage as it develops over many years, starting just after the end of World War II and ending during the Vietnam era. I found it wonderfully written and incredibly moving.War in Paramus also takes place during the Vietnam era, and it tells the story of an American family. It’s wonderful production was directed by Austin Pendleton at Abingdon Theatre Co., often a source of the plays I have chosen for the anthologies I have edited for Smith and Kraus. Another such source in the past has been Urban Stages, a New York City Off-Broadway group, which this year provided Bulrusher by Eisa Davis, a poignant, often poetic play about a mixed-race orphan girl living in a small town in California.Finally, last but not least, I have chosen In the Continuum, an award-winning drama by Dania Gurira and Nikkole Salter, who performed it both at New York City’s Primary Stages and in its Off-Broadway commercial transfer to the Perry Street Theatre. In it, the authors/actresses played a disparate group of American and African black women, dealing with the tragedy of AIDS.I hope you enjoy these wonderful new plays. — D. L. Lepidus