A REAL NO-WIN SITUATION : This Year’s Pulitzer Prize Drama Is Offstage

It’s stupid, I know, to take theater prizes too seriously. They have been handing them out ever since the Greeks, half the time to the wrong shows. No matter. It’s the thought that counts.

What ticks me off is when they don’t give them out. The most recent example was the decision of the Pulitzer Prize board not to award a prize for drama this season, even though its three-member jury had unanimously recommended the prize go to Robert Wilson’s “the CIVIL warS,” as produced at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston.

Why? Don’t ask. I did, and was advised by Pulitzer Prize Secretary Robert C. Christopher that Pulitzer deliberations are by tradition “confidential.” Christopher said he was aware of the irony of the word, given that the publishers and journalists on the board are professionally committed to the public’s “right-to-know.” It does look a little mealy-mouthed, at that.

However, it also leaves an observer free to do some second guessing. This isn’t the first time that the Pulitzer board has overridden the advice of its drama jury. (This year’s panelists were Mel Gussow of the New York Times, Bernard Weiner of the San Francisco Chronicle and Edwin Wilson of the Wall Street Journal.)

The most notorious case happened in 1963. The jurors--John Gassner and John Mason Brown--wanted to give the award to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” The Pulitzer board thought it wasn’t uplifting enough. Verdict: no award. Gassner and Brown resigned, calling the decision “a farce.” Another example came in 1924. The drama jury voted for George Kelly’s “The Show Off,” a play still revived today. The Pulitzer board gave the award to something called “Halfway to Heaven.” This caused a minor scandal, inasmuch as its author was a professor at Columbia, the university that oversees the Pulitzers. Again, the drama jury resigned.

This year’s decision may not be a farce or a scandal, but it was a fumble. Unquestionably, the board is within its rights to reject the advice of its jurors. But to hire a panel of qualified experts and to dismiss their best judgment looks cavalier--like a king dismissing a counselor for not giving him pleasing advice.

And on what grounds? The Pulitzer board doesn’t seem to have favored another play over “the CIVIL warS.” It simply didn’t want to touch Wilson’s piece. Why?

Maybe out of a general suspicion of avant-garde theater. Maybe because the piece hadn’t played New York, where every Pulitzer play had heretofore been seen. Maybe because of the uproar when “the CIVIL warS” couldn’t get financed for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival. Maybe because the author of its text, Heiner Mueller, was from East Berlin. Maybe because this wasn’t the entire “CIVIL warS”--which would take 12 hours--but just a three-hour section.

And maybe because it was getting late and everyone was feeling grouchy. Well, there is no arguing with low blood sugar. But one can argue with the other reasons:

The first important Pulitzer Prize for drama (1920) went to an avant-garde play named “Beyond the Horizon” by a new writer named Eugene O’Neill. Pulitzer Prize plays aren’t required to play in New York anymore, and jurors are actively encouraged to consider regional-theater premieres. The Olympics flap was over money, not artistry. Mueller may be German, but Wilson--the piece’s auteur --is from Texas. Three hours is twice as long as the running time of the 1983 Pulitzer play, “ ‘night, Mother.”

These aren’t necessarily reasons for giving the Pulitzer to “the CIVIL warS.” But they are reasons why the Pulitzer jury shouldn’t have been overruled except for a very strong cause. The experts in this case had come to a clear decision. The laymen--and it’s fair to call the members of the Pulitzer board that: Did anyone get there on the strength of what he knows about theater?--got cold feet. So they adjourned the trial.

Too bad. Wilson could have used a Pulitzer; he is a major theater artist, more honored abroad than he is here. Moreover, the Pulitzer could have used Wilson; its reputation for safe-and-sane choices in the arts area needs enlivening.

Instead, we are left with no award--and with the implication that the American theatrical season was a dud as far as new plays are concerned. Here the Pulitzer jurors can be faulted as well, for not having given the Pulitzer board one or two alternative choices. Wallace Shawn’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon” or Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” would have been feasible alternatives, each challenging and sharply written and each there to be seen at New York’s Public Theater.

Instead, the jury rather mischievously brought up Woody Allen’s film script for “Hannah and Her Sisters.” Perhaps there should be a Pulitzer for films, at that. (Colleague Sheila Benson takes the subject up on Page 19 in today’s Calendar.) First, though, the Pulitzer for drama should get squared away. Its basic principle: Hire good people for the jury and listen to them unless there’s some important reason not to.

In fact, this is the practice in regard to the Pulitzers for music. I asked a member of the Pulitzer board why there almost never seems to be a conflict with the decision of the music jurors. “We don’t consider ourselves that literate about music,” he said. Ah.