The Pulitzer Prize for Drama was awarded to a show that was not one of the three nominated by the jury, and the chairman of the jury is pissed. LA Times theater critic Charles McNulty has written an angry editorial denouncing the Pulitzer board for overridding its jury and bestowing the prize on Next to Normal. Maybe you've heard of it; it's a critically-acclaimed Broadway musical. But are you familiar with jury selections The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity and Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo? Not so much. To be fair, the third jury pick, In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), premiered in NYC, but wow was that overrated.
This is the third time in five years that the Pulitzer board has overridden its jury, and McNulty's just sick of it. In the editorial, he lashed out at the Pulitzer board for their "geographical myopia, a vision of the American theater that starts in Times Square and ends just a short taxi ride away is especially disheartening. Does anyone really believe that Next to Normal would have been chosen had it been submitted when it was at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.?"
The Times reports that several Pulitzer Prize board members saw Next to Normal last Thursday, the night before the board made its surprise vote. Maybe that sounds suspicious, but it turns out there's a perfectly normal, boring explanation. Sig Gissler, the administrator of the prizes, explains that after the first round of voting, none of the jury-nominated plays got a majority, so the board dipped into the original pool of 70 plays and musicals that had been submitted for consideration. More than three-fourths of the board members voted to nominate Next to Normal, and the rest is history. And now we know more about the Pulitzer prize voting process than we ever dreamed possible.
Times theater critic Ben Brantley also weighed in on the imbroglio, noting the Pulitzers "can be read as an index of solid bourgeois tastes over the years but not much more."
