And The Nominees Are...
This month, we're going to look at the four playwrights being recognized on Broadway as nominees of the 2000 Tony Award for Best New Play. We are going to look at each of these authors, what they've done, where they've been, and I'm going to give my pick and my prediction. These four playwrights are all extremely devoted to the theatre in their own way. Sam Shepard, for instance, has appeared in numerous film adaptations of plays, and Arthur Miller has devoted over sixty years to the creation of new plays for the American stage. Broadway, and all of theatre, couldn't be more blessed than to have these four individuals among its ranks of playwrights.
Easily the sentimental favorite, Arthur Miller was nominated for his newest play, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, which is an intense look inside the mind of Lyman Felt, a bigamist who is discovered as his two families gather at the hospital following a car crash. In 1949, Miller captured the spotlight and earned his way into the ranks of American playwrights such as Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill with the Broadway production of Death of a Salesman, and along with his previous hit, All My Sons, which had opened two years earlier, he became one of the leading playwrights of his time.
Miller was born in 1915, grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and went to college at the University of Michigan, from where he graduated in 1938. Since his career began, he has earned honorary doctorates from Harvard University and Oxford University. Shaped by the Depression and his experiences in the political turmoil of the 1950's, and a great deal of his plays contain metaphors, as well as exploring the inner workings of the characters' minds in fresh, exciting, and innovative ways. Other successful plays include A View from the Bridge, recently turned into an opera by William Bolcom (with Miller himself assisting with the libretto,) The Crucible, and The Last Yankee.
Miller's awards include four Tony's, including a 1999 Award for Lifetime Achievement, a Pulitzer Prize (for Death of a Salesman), an Obie, a BBC Best Play Award, two Drama Critics Circle Awards, an Olivier Award for Best Play, the George Foster Peabody Award, a Gold Medal for Drama from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Creative Arts Award from Brandeis University, the Literary Lion Award from the New York Public Library, the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award, the Alger Meadows Award, and the Pell Award for Excellence.
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