Fine Whine

Theresa Rebeck weighs in on Outrageous Fortune, and I for one love her oddly appropriate mistake, calling TDF the "Theatre Defense Fund" (it's "Development," for the record). Throughout, she's fairly self-deprecating about being a whiner, though she lays out plenty of good reasons. Her conclusion, which concurs with several interlocking lines of thinking on the subject:

The problem isn't that playwrights aren't being paid enough. It's that theatres all over America are looking towards New York to tell them what new plays to do. Meanwhile, New York is in thrall to revivals and movie stars. In the past six years, I have served as a Tony voter, which means I have to see everything that's on Broadway every season, and let me tell you something: If I have to watch one more play where everyone is wearing swell costumes and calling each other "darling" my head is going to explode.

Meanwhile, for all the juicy, meaty blogospheric examination of the book, I appreciated Matt Freeman's take perhaps best of all--for its relative sunniness and, I admit it, its brevity.