The One Hit Wonders of 1960-1975
By Andrew White, PhD
Pop quiz:
What do Tad Mosel, Howard Sackler, Charles Gordone,
Paul Zindel and Jason Miller have in common?
A lot, actually. From 1960 to 1975, only Frank Gilroy
(The Subject Was Roses)
and Edward Albee won Pulitzer prizes for drama as
previously-established playwrights. Albee won twice in
that period, with 1967's
A Delicate Balance, and in 1975, when the prize
came back to him for his sea monster play,
Seascape. During the rest of that decade and a
half, only Mosel, Sackler, Gordone, Zindel and Miller won
Pulitzer prizes for original dramas. In four of the years,
the awards committee deemed no American play worthy. All
five men were unknown playwrights who had never had any
kind of Broadway success; in fact, only Miller had ever
had a play produced professionally.
And not one of them ever wrote a successful play again.
Of the five, only Zindel, whose
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon
Marigolds
won the award in 1971, ever got another play on The Great
White Way, with his short-lived
Miss Reardon Drinks a Little. They were the
ultimate one-hit wonders, scaling the heights of
playwriting success, and never returning.
What was going on?
Beginning in 1960, the realization dawned on the theater
world that the salad days of American theater had come to
a crashing end. Eugene O'Neil was dead; Arthur Miller had
settled into repetition, political preaching and failed
experiments in comedy (Miller was just not a funny guy,
but thought he was.) Tennessee Williams' talent had waned
with increased drinking and depression, and every new play
he unveiled was criticized as something he had done better
before or should not have attempted at all. Albee was the
heir apparent to these acknowledged Greatest American
Playwrights, but after
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
( which the Pulitzers snubbed) he was struggling to write
a play that could be simultaneously profound and
watchable. It seemed like no great plays were being
written any more, and no great playwrights were around to
write them.
In 1960 and 1962, the Pulitzers punted and selected
musicals rather than dramas as the best of the American
stage:
Fiorello!
and
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The
truly exciting playwriting seemed to be occuring in Great
Britain and Europe, where Ionesco, John Osborne, Peter
Schafer, Harold Pinter and Samuel Becket were at or near
the peaks of their talent. So the Pulitzers, like the New
York critics and audiences, began searching for The Next
Great American Playwright, with their hopes being
successively pinned to five unknowns: Mosel, for
All the Way Home in 1961; Sackler, for
The Great White Hope
in 1969; Gordone in 1970 for
No Place to Be Somebody; Zindel in 1971; and
Jason Miller for
That Championship Season
in 1973.
Significantly, none of them were committed playwrights.
Miller was as much an actor as an author, and indeed was
more active on screen during his career than at his desk.
So was Gordone, a major figure in the development of Black
theater, who was active as a teacher, director, political
organizer and award-winning character actor. Tad Mosel
(actually George Ault, Jr.) was a television writer who
had great success in that medium, notable as the Emmy
award-winning writer of the PBS dramatic series, "The
Adams Chronicles." He wrote screenplays too, such as "Up
the Down Staircase," which made Sandy Dennis a star.
All the Way Home
was a special project, an adaptation of James Agee's novel
"A Death in the Family" that was a surprise success. Mosel
didn't consider himself primarily a playwright even then.
Sackler and Zindel, on the other hand, tried to stay on
Broadway but failed. Then each found success in another
realm of the arts and was successful. At the time of his
death, Zindel was one of the stars of the teen fiction
world, with more than a dozen published novels to his
credit, one of which, "The Pigman," is a classic of the
genre. Howard Sackler was a successful screen-writer,
adapting his script of
The Great White Hope
for film and penning the screenplays for such successful
films as "Jaws II" and "Grey Lady Down." He is also said
to have written Quint's famous monologue about the
S.S. Indianapolis in the original "Jaws,"
although others attribute it to Robert Shaw, who played
the haunted shark-killer in the film and was himself a
successful playwright.
This group of One Hit Wonders display many of the
characteristics we associate with the breed. Gordone,
Zindel and Miller all drew strongly on autobiographical
material for their single Broadway success; Sackler
adapted the biography of a real historical figure, and
Mosel turned someone else's novel into a play. The five
may simply have lacked inspiration for a second compelling
story. None of them wrote many plays after their Pulitzer
prize-winner, seeming to confirm the theory that the Muse
eluded them. All were versatile and multi-talented enough,
however, to be able to make a good living without
Broadway. Thus none of them felt the urge or dedication to
endure hunger, poverty and ignominy while they labored to
write another classic. Sometimes such desperate and
stubborn playwrights succeed after years of failure.
Sometimes, they just get old, frustrated and hungry. But
neither Mosel, Zindel, Gordone, Sackler nor Miller ever
felt that desperate. Not all of them had that much time to
create another drama: three died relatively young: Zindel
at 66, Miller at 58, Sackler at only 52. (Gordone died in
1995 at the age of 70; Mosel is still alive at 84.)
It may also be that it is expecting too much of any
playwright to deliver a series of successful plays. Those
who have written three or more like Williams, Miller,
O'Neill, Hellman, George S. Kaufman, Elmer Rice, and
Terence NcNally are a very select and remarkable group; we
should not be critical of those who do not reach that
level, or scratch our heads in wonder that a playwright
couldn't "do it again." It is impressive enough for any
writer to do it
once.
The career paths of the One Hit Wonders also convey an
ominous message about the future health of the theater.
Once Broadway success was a popular path to fame and
riches; once promising writers of dialogue and drama would
be drawn to the stage as a first choice and the source of
most prestigious and profitable careers. No longer. The
gold is in movies and television, and most promising
playwrights move to Hollywood long before they have given
their playwriting skills the chance to bloom. This is what
caused the sudden shortage of new playwrights at the
beginning of the 1960s, and while the Pulitzers have
settled into lesser standards, the problem is worse today.
Had they been born a generation or two earlier, we may now
have had many more memorable stage works from the quintet
of Mosel, Zindel, Gordone, Sackler and Miller.
~ Originally published in 2007 in the
Audience Guide
for TACT's production of
That Championship Season.
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