It seems somewhat incredible today to think that, their early radical work aside, work which surfaced, if at all, in small regional theatres, both Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams launched and, for some time, largely sustained their careers on Broadway. It was then, as it assuredly is not today, the originator of drama. Broadway openings may have been preceded by out of town try-outs, in which fine tuning, and, occasionally, major surgery was performed, but the Great White Way was assumed to be the midwife of American drama. As midwives go, however, she began to be somewhat pricey, developing expensive habits. Costs rose and nerves started to fray. Over time, managements began to demand some guarantee of success and that could only be achieved by allowing someone else to conduct research and development, increasingly Off-Broadway, Britain and the regional (or, as some, with alarming honesty, preferred to call them, not-for-profit) theatres that were going to burgeon in the 1960s and 1970s. In a sense, then, the title of this chapter is a truism since virtually no new playwright appearing from the 1960s onwards found their first stage on Broadway, which in time became like a rich man employing food tasters. If such flourished the plate was snatched away; if they died it was rejected.

The new theatres, though, were not designed as try-out houses. On the contrary, they served their own constituency, no longer content, like the old theatrical circuit, to recycle Broadway hits. They commissioned plays and, on occasion, nurtured talent (Lanford Wilson, David Mamet, Terrence McNally, August Wilson, among others, benefited from this system).