TT: Why can’t straight plays make it on Broadway?

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I offer a hard-boiled answer to a heartfelt question. Here’s an excerpt.
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Nina Raine’s “Tribes,” which opened Off Broadway earlier this month, is a superb new play about a dysfunctional family whose youngest member is deaf. Beautifully staged by David Cromer, it was hailed by the critics, myself included, and has extended its run through September.
This was the last sentence of my review: “Why can’t we have plays like this on Broadway?”
Everybody in the theater business knows that it’s become dismayingly hard to open a commercial production of a new play on Broadway….
Now turn back the clock and look at this partial list of new plays that ran on Broadway during the 1961-62 season: Tad Mosel’s “All the Way Home,” Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker,” Paddy Chayefsky’s “Gideon,” Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons,” William Gibson’s “The Miracle Worker,” Tennessee Williams’ “The Night of the Iguana,” Ossie Davis’ “Purlie Victorious,” Eugène Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros,” Terence Rattigan’s “Ross,” Shelagh Delaney’s “A Taste of Honey,” Herb Gardner’s “A Thousand Clowns” and the original production of Gore Vidal’s “The Best Man.”
So what happened in the past half-century? Did playgoers get stupid? Is everybody staying home to watch TV? Maybe–but something else is going on. The best-remembered new play to hit Broadway in 1962 was Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” It was budgeted at $47,000, the equivalent of $361,000 in today’s dollars. By contrast, the 2009 Broadway revival of Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” cost $3 million to produce….
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Read the whole thing here.