If you can't see 'em, read 'em

Dwight Garner's article in the New York Times describes the pleasures of reading the Tony Best Play-nominated scripts if you live in, say, a backwater like Spokane and can't travel to what Variety still refers to as the Rialto to see the plays in performance.

Bobo is pleased to say that he's done a lot better than Garner in reading and/or seeing the Tony-winning scripts of the past five years. Bobo's also midway through reading reasons to be pretty and has God of Carnage about to arrive in his mailbox. (The LaBute just seems like more of the same; a local playwright once took classes with LaBute and reports him to be, well, not nice; given his obsession with others' physical appearance and his own ... well, I can believe the "not nice" report and reasons strikes me, so far, as just more of the same from LaBute.

Pulitzer short list: no Labute

In the N.Y. Post, Michael Riedel boosts Neil LaBute and bashes Lin-Manuel Miranda.
The gist: Lynn Nottage's *Ruined* (about rape victims in the Congo) and Gina Gionfriddo's *Becky Shaw* (drunken disorderliness among thirtysomethings) seem to be Pulitzer front runners, with LaBute's "reasons to be pretty" and Miranda's "In the Heights" losing ground - and Yasmina Reza's "God of Carnage" ineligible.

*Playbill* presents nothin' but the facts, ma'am, here.
See the same publication's prognostications here.

[ photo: Lynn Nottage ]