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Drama Desk Award For Outstanding Play
The Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play is an annual award presented by Drama Desk in recognition of achievements in the theatre among Broadway, Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway productions. The award was initially introduced in 1955 as the Vernon Rice Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre, before being removed from the ceremony between 1960 and 1974. The award later returned in the 1975 ceremony, with its current title. Winners and nominees 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s See also * Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play * Tony Award for Best Play The Tony Award for Best Play (formally, the Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre) is an annual award given to the best new (non-musical) play on Broadway, as determined by Tony Award voters. There was no award in the Tonys' first yea ... References * External links Drama Desk official website {{DEFAULTSORT:Drama Desk Award Play Play ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Drama Desk Award
The Drama Desk Award is an annual prize recognizing excellence in New York theatre. First bestowed in 1955 as the Vernon Rice Award, the prize initially honored Off-Broadway productions, as well as Off-off-Broadway, and those in the vicinity. Following the 1964 renaming as the Drama Desk Awards, Broadway productions were included beginning with the 1968–69 award season. The awards are considered a significant American theater distinction. History The Drama Desk organization was formed in 1949 by a group of New York theater critics, editors, reporters and publishers, in order to make the public aware of the vital issues concerning the theatrical industry. They debuted the presentations of the ''Vernon Rice Awards''. The name honors the '' New York Post'' critic Vernon Rice, who had pioneered Off-Broadway coverage in the New York press. The name was changed for the 1963–1964 awards season to the ''Drama Desk Awards''. In 1974, the Drama Desk became incorporated as a not-for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Absurd Person Singular
''Absurd Person Singular'' is a 1972 play by Alan Ayckbourn. Divided into three acts, it documents the changing fortunes of three married couples. Each act takes place at a Christmas celebration at one of the couples' homes on successive Christmas Eves. Production history The play made its world premiere at the Library Theatre, Scarborough on 26 June 1972 and its London début at the Criterion Theatre on 4 July 1973, transferring to the Vaudeville Theatre in September 1974, completing a run of 973 performances. Its official New York Broadway début was at the Music Box Theatre on 8 October 1974. It ran for 591 performances in its first run on Broadway (through March 1976). It starred Richard Kiley, Geraldine Page, Sandy Dennis, Carole Shelley, Larry Blyden, and Tony Roberts. It was revived on Broadway on 18 October 2005 at the Biltmore Theatre, for 56 performances. In 1994 James Maxwell directed a production for the Royal Exchange, Manchester with Trevor Cooper, Margo Gunn, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee III ( ; March 12, 1928 – September 16, 2016) was an American playwright known for works such as '' The Zoo Story'' (1958), '' The Sandbox'' (1959), '' Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' (1962), '' A Delicate Balance'' (1966), and ''Three Tall Women'' (1994). Some critics have argued that some of his work constitutes an American variant of what Martin Esslin identified and named the Theater of the Absurd. Three of his plays won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and two of his other works won the Tony Award for Best Play. His works are often considered frank examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. His middle period comprised plays that explored the psychology of maturing, marriage, and sexual relationships. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Seascape (play)
''Seascape'' is a two-act play by American playwright Edward Albee. He completed it in 1974, having first developed it in 1967 as a short play named ''Life'', the first half of a projected double bill with another play called ''Death'' (which later became ''All Over''). ''Seascape'' won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Productions The play started on Broadway at the Sam S. Shubert Theatre on January 26, 1975 and closed on March 22, 1975 after 65 performances. Directed by Albee, the cast starred Deborah Kerr (Nancy), Barry Nelson (Charlie), Maureen Anderman (Sarah) and Frank Langella (Leslie). Langella won the 1975 Tony Award, Featured Actor in a Play. The play was nominated for the 1975 Tony Award, Play and Lighting Design (Play or Musical) (James Tilton). The original three-act version of the play ran in Europe. Albee "jettisoned a large section of the play" during the out of town tryout in Baltimore, prior to the Broadway premiere. Albee received his second Pulitzer Pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Terrence McNally
Terrence McNally (November 3, 1938 – March 24, 2020) was an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. Described as "the bard of American theater" and "one of the greatest contemporary playwrights the theater world has yet produced," McNally was the recipient of five Tony Awards. He won the Tony Award for Best Play for ''Love! Valour! Compassion!'' and '' Master Class'' and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for '' Kiss of the Spider Woman'' and ''Ragtime,'' and received the 2019 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1996, and he also received the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 and the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2018, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest recognition of artistic merit in the United States. His other accolades included an Emmy Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, four Drama Desk Awards, two Luci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Ritz (play)
''The Ritz'' is a comedic farce by Terrence McNally. Rita Moreno won a Tony Award for her performance as Googie Gomez in the 1975 Broadway production, which she and many others of the original cast reprised in a 1976 film version directed by Richard Lester. Plot The farce is set in a gay bathhouse in Manhattan, where unsuspecting businessman Gaetano Proclo, a heterosexual, has taken refuge from his homicidal brother-in-law Carmine Vespucci, a mobster. Gaetano stumbles across an assortment of oddball characters, including a rabid chubby chaser, go-go boys, a squeaky-voiced detective, and Googie Gomez, a third-rate entertainer with visions of Broadway glory who mistakes him for a famous producer and whom he mistakes for a man in drag. Further complications arise when Gaetano's wife, Vivian, tracks him down and jumps to all the wrong conclusions about his sexual orientation. Production history Original Broadway production McNally was playwright-in-residence at Yale Universi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Kirkwood, Jr
James is a common English language surname and given name: *James (name), the typically masculine first name James * James (surname), various people with the last name James James or James City may also refer to: People * King James (other), various kings named James * Saint James (other) * James (musician) * James, brother of Jesus Places Canada * James Bay, a large body of water * James, Ontario United Kingdom * James College, a college of the University of York United States * James, Georgia, an unincorporated community * James, Iowa, an unincorporated community * James City, North Carolina * James City County, Virginia ** James City (Virginia Company) ** James City Shire * James City, Pennsylvania * St. James City, Florida Arts, entertainment, and media * ''James'' (2005 film), a Bollywood film * ''James'' (2008 film), an Irish short film * ''James'' (2022 film), an Indian Kannada-language film * James the Red Engine, a character in ''Thomas t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Nichols (playwright)
Peter Richard Nichols (31 July 1927 – 7 September 2019) was an English playwright, screenwriter, director and journalist. Life and career Born in Bristol, England, he was educated at Bristol Grammar School, and served his compulsory National Service as a clerk in Calcutta and later in the British Army's Combined Services Entertainment Unit in Singapore where he entertained the troops alongside John Schlesinger, Stanley Baxter, Peter Vaughan and Kenneth Williams, before going on to study acting at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. He later claimed to have studied acting because there were no dedicated courses for playwrights. While working as a teacher, he began to write television plays that achieved notice. His first play for the stage was ''The Hooded Terror'', part of a season of new plays at the Little Theatre in Bristol. He later wrote '' A Day in the Death of Joe Egg'' for the stage. ''A Day in the Death of Joe Egg'' is a one-set drama in music hall style. '' Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The National Health (play)
''The National Health'' is a 1969 British play by Peter Nichols. Reminiscent of the '' Carry On'' film series, this black comedy with tragic overtones focuses on the appalling conditions in an under-funded National Health Service hospital, which are contrasted comically with a '' Dr. Kildare''-style soap opera airing on the ward television. History Originally titled ''The End Beds'', the play – based on Nichols' time in hospitals where he received treatment for a collapsed lung – originally was written for television, but the playwright received no enthusiastic response from anyone to whom he submitted it. When Kenneth Tynan and Laurence Olivier approached him to write a play for the National Theatre, Nichols offered them the slightly revised work, retitled ''The National Health''. It premiered at The Old Vic in 1969 and proved to be a critical and commercial success, named Best New Play by the ''Evening Standard''. The BBC then asked Nichols if he would adapt the play for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Terence Rattigan
Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan (10 June 191130 November 1977) was a British dramatist and screenwriter. He was one of England's most popular mid-20th-century dramatists. His plays are typically set in an upper-middle-class background.Geoffrey Wansell. ''Terence Rattigan'' (London: Fourth Estate, 1995); He wrote ''The Winslow Boy'' (1946), '' The Browning Version'' (1948), '' The Deep Blue Sea'' (1952) and '' Separate Tables'' (1954), among many others. A troubled homosexual who saw himself as an outsider, Rattigan wrote a number of plays which centred on issues of sexual frustration, failed relationships, or a world of repression and reticence. Early life Terence Rattigan was born in 1911 in South Kensington,Wansell, p. 13. London, of Irish extraction. He had an elder brother, Brian. They were the grandsons of Sir William Henry Rattigan, a notable India-based jurist and later a Liberal Unionist Member of Parliament for North-East Lanarkshire. His father was Frank Rattigan CM ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
In Praise Of Love (play)
''In Praise of Love'', originally entitled ''After Lydia'', is the first part of a 1973 double-bill play by the English playwright Terence Rattigan (the second half being ''Before Dawn'', a burlesque of the opera ''Tosca''). It was the penultimate play he wrote. The play's action was loosely inspired by the true-life relationship between the actor Rex Harrison and his actress wife Kay Kendall. In the play, the couple are transformed into the egotistical left-wing literary critic Sebastian and his East European refugee wife Lydia. During the Second World War, some 30 years previously, Sebastian had served in military intelligence while the part-Jewish Lydia was with the Resistance and then survived on her wits and her feminine charms; each is shown using the aptitude for deception developed then to try to protect the other from the knowledge that Lydia is suffering from a terminal illness. Rounding out the cast are Mark, a best-selling popular novelist and a friend of Sebasti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michel Tremblay
Michel Tremblay (born 25 June 1942) is a French-Canadian novelist and playwright. Tremblay was born in Montreal, Quebec, where he grew up in the French-speaking neighbourhood of Plateau Mont-Royal; at the time of his birth, a neighbourhood with a working-class character and joual dialect - something that would heavily influence his work. Tremblay's first professionally produced play, '' Les Belles-Sœurs'', was written in 1965 and premiered at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert on August 28, 1968. It transformed the old guard of Canadian theatre and introduced joual to the mainstream. It stirred up controversy by portraying the lives of working-class women and attacking the strait-laced, deeply religious society of mid-20th century Quebec. Career and impact The most profound and lasting effects of Tremblay's early plays, including ''Hosanna'' and ''La Duchesse de Langeais'', were the barriers they toppled in Quebec society. Until the Quiet Revolution of the early 1960s, Tremblay saw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
