Big plays

www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/theater/theaterspecial/01ishe.html?ref=arts

Charles Isherwood on the trend in Tony Award winners (The History Boys, The Coast of Utopia, August: Osage County) toward larger-cast dramas. The first two came from London's subsidized NT.
Not all American plays have to have casts of two.
Corporate underwriting? The collaborative model used by August Wilson? Co-productions by regional theaters? Solutions, or just pie-in-the-sky?
But then theater is ALWAYS in crisis, and yet theater has kept going for, oh, 2,500 years ...