Selection: Bookfilter's 2019 Holiday Book Guide for Theatre Lovers
Selection: Playbill's 45 Books from 2019 for Theatre Lovers

In the long run:
A cultural history of Broadway's hit plays

by Jordan Schildcrout
In the Long Run: A Cultural History of Broadway’s Hit Plays presents in-depth analysis of 15 plays that ran over 1,000 performances, examining what made each so popular in its time—and then, in many cases, fall into obscurity.

Covering 100 years of theatre history, the book also traces the long-running Broadway play as a distinct cultural phenomenon that rises and falls from 1918 to 2018. Each chapter focuses on the longest-running plays of a particular decade, synthesizing historical research and dramaturgical analysis to explain how these plays function as works of theatrical art, cultural commodities, and reflections of the values, conflicts, and fantasies of their times.

In examining “the long run” both in relation to particular plays and the larger history of Broadway, In the Long Run explores the nature of time in this ephemeral art form, the tensions between commerce and art, between popularity and prestige, and the changing position of the Broadway play within American popular culture.


From the Introduction

Once upon a time, Broadway produced hit plays. Not just plays that earned rave reviews and awards or “did well” at the box office. Broadway produced plays that ran for years and played to millions of people, and they did so because, in one way or another, they spoke to their cultural moment and captured the attention of a public beyond the usual theatergoing audience. In many cases, critics did not care much for these plays, and in some cases they were outright hostile toward them, even attacking the audiences who enjoyed them. In the long run, most of these plays did not withstand the test of time, all but disappearing, rarely revived, and certainly not studied with any seriousness by scholars and students of the dramatic arts. But, as one commentator remarked upon the 2000th performance of the critically derided Abie’s Irish Rose, “A thing which can grasp the attention of so wide an audience cannot be dismissed with a careless sneer, however lacking in aesthetic value it may be.” The long-running hits of Broadway merit our appreciation and understanding, and whether we think about the American theatre as art, culture, or enterprise—and especially for those who think about it as all three—a journey into a century’s worth of hit plays can create a vibrant alternate history of the American play as part of popular culture.

The plays

Lightnin' (1918)
Abie's Irish Rose (1922)
Tobacco Road (1933)
Life With Father (1939)
The Voice of the Turtle (1943)
Harvey (1944)
Born Yesterday (1946)
The Seven Year Itch (1952)
The Teahouse of the August Moon (1953)
Mary, Mary (1961)
Barefoot in the Park (1963)
Gemini (1977)
Deathtrap (1978)
Torch Song Trilogy (1982)
Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983)