Crisis.

The commercial theater in the United States reached a point of creative and financial crisis in the early 1970s. In a sense, theater as a vital and expanding art form had been on the wane throughout the 1960s, despite many excellent new plays and commercial hits. The finest American dramatists — Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller in particular — had long since peaked (during the 1950s). Edward Albee, who had ignited audiences with his shattering confrontational dramas in the early 1960s, was having trouble sustaining that reputation. The heyday of the musical had passed, too; there had been few memorable musicals after about 1965. Theater in the late 1960s had been sustained by a public appetite for previously taboo sexual material and for absurdism, but the novelty had worn off by 1970. That year saw the smallest number of productions on Broadway in its...