FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Press contact: Diane Levinson (212-575-9265 x208)

September 3, 2008

It's a Broadway Hit!

(Also Off, Off-Off, and around the United States)

Best Plays Theater Yearbook 2006-2007

(New York, NY) -- The 88th edition of The Best Plays Theater Yearbook, released today by Limelight Editions ($49.95, 562 pages), recounts the exciting 2006-2007 theater season, which marked the US premiere of Tom Stoppard's challenging epic, The Coast of Utopia. It was also the season when pedophilia (Blackbird), midlife crisis (The Scene), casualties of war (Dying City), adolescent sexuality (Spring Awakening) and political corruption (Frost/Nixon) kept theatergoers riveted to their seats. More than a dozen of the country's finest theater writers consider these and other Best Plays from the 2006-2007 theater season in essays sure to provoke comment and controversy.

Under series editor Jeffrey Eric Jenkins, the current edition honors 10 New York-based dramatic works and three plays from the resident theater while providing a collection of viewpoints on the season under review. It also offers an extensive compendium of facts, figures and historical context about the theater season in New York and around the United States. The index alone--which runs 82 pages and contains more than 13,000 items--makes this theater reference a must for libraries of every type.

Publication of The Best Plays Theater Yearbook continues a tradition dating to 1920, when Burns Mantle founded the annual series on United States theater. National reviewers have written recently of Best Plays that it provides "consummate analysis of directions in modern theater"; that "no theater enthusiast should be without it"; that it offers "stylish commentary" on the original productions and the plays' literary merit; and that it "remains the smartest, most comprehensive . . . survey of American theater."

The Best Plays of 2006-2007 were chosen from Broadway, Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway productions of new plays that opened between June 1, 2006 and May 31, 2007. The choices were made by Jenkins after consultation with the Best Plays editorial board, Robert Brustein, Tish Dace, Christine Dolen, Sylviane Gold, Robert Hurwitt, John Istel, Chris Jones, Charles McNulty, Julius Novick, Christopher Rawson, Alisa Solomon, Jeffrey Sweet, Anne Marie Welsh, Linda Winer and Charles Wright. The United States resident theater is represented in new-production statistics and in essays by Hurwitt, Martin F. Kohn and George Hatza on plays recognized by the American Theatre Critics Association in its Steinberg New Play Award and Citations competition. Jenkins surveys the season on and Off Broadway, and Garrett Eisler covers the Off Off Broadway scene.

The Best Plays of 2006-2007 (in alphabetical order): Blackbird by David Harrower (essayist, David Cote); The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl (essayist, Anne Marie Welsh); The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard (essayist, Charles Wright); Dying City by Christopher Shinn (essayist, Charles Isherwood); Frost/Nixon by Peter Morgan (essayist, Charles McNulty); The Pain and the Itch by Bruce Norris (essayist, John Istel); Passing Strange by Stew and Heidi Rodewald (essayist, Alisa Solomon); Radio Golf by August Wilson (essayist, Christopher Rawson); The Scene by Theresa Rebeck (essayist, Chris Jones); Spring Awakening by Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik (essayist, Michael Feingold). Each of the Best Plays of 2006-2007 is illustrated by photographic highlights from the honored production.

The Best Plays Theater Yearbook 2006-2007 is generously supported

by the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust

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