Problems with the New Barrymore Awards: Part I

Next Monday, the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia will host the 2009 Barrymore Awards for Excellence in Theatre. However, the unprecedented clustering of nominations for this year's awards points out the problems with the new method of nominating. See Part II for how these problems render the Awards unable to fulfill their stated goal of recognizing excellence.

In the past five seasons (2004-2008) of the Barrymore Awards, only five productions earned 10 or more nominations.

This year alone, four productions garnered more than 10 nominations, even though a greater number of participating companies made more shows eligible than ever before. Two of them—Cinderella and Something Intangible—equaled the total of 13 given to Sweeney Todd in 2005. The Producers and Scorched scored 12 apiece, bringing the total for the top-four vote getters to 50 out of 113 possible nominations. In the musical theatre categories, two productions captured 25 nods, and five took 44 of the 51 nominations possible in this genre.

Furthermore, this clustering of nominations extended to whole award categories: the Wilma’s production of Scorched and People’s Light’s staging of the musical Cinderella each saw four female performers nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress (in a play and musical, respectively); likewise, the Arden’s production of Something Intangible raked in three best actor nods.

Something doesn’t add up. While some might contend that a handful of shows emerged as clearly superior candidates in a mediocre season (despite notable oversights like Blackbird and Hamlet, among others), I’d argue that the clustering effect around these (and a few other) productions resulted from changes implemented this year to the Barrymore Awards voting system.

Out with the Old: How the nominating used to work

To understand what happened requires some background on the Barrymore Awards’ history. Started by the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia during the 1994-95 season, the Alliance first used nominators selected from the theatre community to decide the awards. In 2000, the Alliance switched from this simple system to a two-tiered approach of 40 to 50 nominators and 10 to 17 judges, the latter handpicked theatre professionals who formed a unit possessing hundreds of years of theatre-producing and theatre-going experience amongst them.

This now-discarded two-tiered system randomly assigned six nominators to see each eligible production within the first three days of its opening night. Within 24 hours, each filled out a ballot, giving either a “thumbs-up” or “thumbs-down” for every applicable category (such as “outstanding music direction”).

If a minimum three out of the six nominators gave a thumbs-up in any one category, then that production became eligible for nomination in every category. To determine which aspects of a show (if any) should receive a nomination, all of the judges now went and viewed that particular production. At the end of the season, the judges—who had seen every eligible production—then voted on the awards. The top five ballot-getters received nominations, with the winner determined by which show/performer/designer garnered the most of the judges’ votes.

In with the New: From differential expertise to random voters

For the 2008-09 season, Margie Silvante, the Theatre Alliance’s new Executive Director, decided to eliminate the two-tiered system of nominators and judges, and replace it with a cadre of “voters”. Armed with a metrics-based standard of quantification, her new system randomly assigned 8 voters (out of a pool of 62) to see each show, with each voter weighing in upon 12 to 20 productions out of the 130 eligible for consideration.

Within 24 hours after seeing an eligible show, each voter logged onto a website to post their scores for each of the applicable awards (for instance, “outstanding actor in a play”). The website’s ballot ranged from 0-20 (poor) to 86-100 (outstanding), and each voter cast a specific number score for each possible award, using these categories like “poor” as rough-and-ready standards to guide their scoring. Under this new system, the top five scores in any award determined the nominations, with the top-point scorer ultimately winning the award (to be announced at the ceremony on October 5).

In early 2008, Silvante announced these changes at a mid-season meeting of nominators and judges and stressed her desire to reintroduce integrity into the process and eliminate the prejudice of some judges. I had witnessed this bias at an earlier meeting when then-judge Alan Blumenthal admitted to Walnut Street Theatre’s Artistic Director Bernard Havard the judges’ past prejudice against the Walnut’s productions.

Silvante hoped that her new metrics-based system would eliminate this unfairness and enable greater rigor by introducing a method of quantification that could (in theory) draw upon the commonalities of judgment from a larger and more diverse pool of voters.

Considered Judgment versus The Wow Effect

But rather than produce greater integrity and rigor, the new process instead yielded a clustering of nominations unseen in previous years. Two competing hypotheses can explain this phenomenon; neither have anything to do with artistic merit.

To understand what happened, consider the new system’s process of assigning voters. Out of 62 randomly assigned voters, the chance that any eight of them saw a single show comes to 1 in 136 trillion. The chance that any single group of eight voters reunited to see another production amounts to 1 in 1.8 x 10²⁷ . (The actual number is slightly less because of the cap put on the possible number of shows assigned to each individual voter.)

Under the old system, the chance that any grouping of judges not only all saw the same productions but saw every eligible production: 100 percent. The judges could compare performances, and thereby ensured a level of measured reflection and quality control that this new system lacks.

The new system, by contrast, requires that each voter post a score within 24 hours, without recourse to reflection, and without the frame of reference that seeing every other eligible production affords. As such, the evaluative process each voter employs must contend with his or her first impression of a performance and whatever overwhelming emotions—both positive or negative—the production has elicited.

Because of this time constraint, I would assert that voters, taken as a whole, will tend to over-value an excellent production and fall victim to the “wow effect” just like anyone in the audience. (Other critics have cited this as the number one reason to postpone writing a review until one can fully collect his or her thoughts.)

Certain plays—those heavily indebted to spectacle, or capable of inducing powerful emotions in the audience—could take much greater advantage of this wow effect. The final unraveling of the mystery in Scorched packs an emotionally stunning revelation that few plays equal, and walking out of the theatre, and even for the next 24 hours, the show’s conclusion would still leave one reeling. But a magnificent moment doesn’t necessarily make a magnificent show. And a common error—the fallacy of division—would see voters acceding greater weight to each performance in a show that elicited that effect.

The old two-tiered system of judges and nominators could actually take advantage of this “wow factor’s” bias. The judges would see plays overvalued by the nominators, and by not having to decide the ultimate merit of each production element on the spot, could temper their observations through evaluations of other performances. For the judges, what may have appeared overwhelmingly “outstanding” after a single viewing, could, in a broader sense of what the community offered over an entire season, come into better perspective. (Don’t believe the “wow effect” exists? Judges have said to me on more than one occasion that they “can’t believe the nominators sent them to see such-and-such a show.”)

The Second Hypothesis: Mediocrity rears its non-descript head

Allowing the awards to be determined by the random distribution of voters who only see a handful of shows enables another likely–though far more invidious—possibility for the clustering of awards, which I’ll call the “mediocrity effect.”

While the new system hinges on a set of commonalities distributed evenly among 62 voters that could help quantify their choices, a rough-and-ready metric of five categories cannot eliminate personal judgments in assigning the scores.

Take any two critics seeing the same show. Presumably, Philadelphia Weekly’s J. Cooper Robb and I bring a commonality of background qualities to our roles as theatre critics. Yet, in his best of the season roundup, he called Geoff Sobelle’s performance in Hamlet the year’s best. I thought it decorated with frills that lacked a central unifying quality. In the Barrymore voting system, Robb might have scored Sobelle’s performance a 95, where I would’ve chalked up a 70.

However, under the new system of scoring, Sobelle’s unique interpretation would have lost to any performance that consistently earned a vote of 83, a score that falls below the cutoff for “outstanding.” To give another indication of how this could happened, when I was a nominator, actors (who I won’t name), told me that they had auditioned for the role they now had to vote upon, didn’t agree with the choices made by the performer who was cast, and for that reason, didn’t think it worthy of Barrymore consideration. And rather than eliminate the bias of the judges and restore integrity, this new system makes it possible for disgruntled voters to trash a performer’s rankings entirely.

Moreover, statistics predicts that most rankings will cluster around a norm. (And even if the Awards process eliminated the highest and lowest score—as the Olympics adjusts the points for diving—this would actually further encourage regression to an average score.) Unfortunately, this new system of voting actually makes it possible that this “norm” enshrines mediocrity at the expense of more superlative work.

What the new system ultimately makes possible

I don’t write these comments to discredit any of the voters, many of whose opinions I respect, but to point out what types of outcomes a particular set of boundaries will make more likely. And knowing that all systems of measurement possess flaws that mandate trade-offs, I will not pretend that all of the voters can completely avoid well-established observational biases. I would instead opt to select systems that minimize the impact of each bias in turn.

And this all goes back to the way the voters are assigned. The new system only produces a 1.8 in 10²⁷ chance that the same 8 voters ever reunited to evaluate a show again. In all likelihood, the voters who cast their vote for Something Intangible never evaluated another show as a unit. Furthermore, the parameters of this new system encourage the “wow effect” and the “mediocrity effect” in such a way that not only makes each error possible, but exacerbates the likelihood of each of them occurring.

Because the new system lacks a method of self-correction or quality control (that the judges provided in years past), it further exacerbates the effects of each error. Hence, you get clustering: either around shows that wowed voters or that contained enough reasonably good elements as to ensure a high average, though not an outstanding one.

In either case, the less-than-24-hour reflections of 8 individuals who hadn’t seen all the contenders (and not the same 8 people for any single award) decided each and every award this year.

In a system with dual levels of quality control and far greater numbers of variables provided by the judges seeing every eligible production, this clustering effect would not be a statistical probability but would only happen for a show that was truly phenomenal. Hence, under the old system, only five shows in five years garnered 10 or more nominations, as opposed to 4 productions this year alone receiving that many. By contrast, the new system encourages the clustering of awards not out of any reason of artistic merit, but out of sheer probability alone.

Oh well, back to the drawing board.

See Parts II and III for more.

My original review of Sarah Ruhl's "In the Other Room," in reading at the Wilma Theatre

Just so no one makes any mistakes about this, the Wilma held a staged reading of Sarah Ruhl's new play In the Other Room during the first week of January, 2009. Berkeley Rep had commissioned Ruhl to write a play about the history of the vibrator.

The Broad Street Review ran my article about the reading, then took it down in response to complaints from the Wilma. The controversy led first to the Wilma Papers, and later to my article The Case for Cantankerous Critics.

Over two dozen Broad Street Review readers commented upon the first article. Scroll down, as their responses are here.

For the record, I was the first person to comment critically upon Ruhl's new play. And despite the controvery, and a young woman who threatened me with (admittedly, laughable) violence, that's what has always mattered to me.

Here's what I had to say:

Quick question to the Philadelphia theatre community: How does a staged reading at the Wilma offers a better night of theatre than most of the full productions I’ve seen this season?

Like reading a play at home without the intermediacy of a production, a staged reading can’t destroy my direct sense of a play by interfering with what my imagination can too often do better. (Though stage manager Patreshettarlini Adams did use the one prop to a delicious effect, and when you get to the full title of the play, you’ll know the prop.) As for the actors working under Blanka Zizka’s direction, the almost all-equity cast impressed, and personally, I would rather see Julianna Zinkel or Sarah Sanford give a staged reading than watch most other Philadelphia actresses perform.

But Sarah Ruhl’s recently penned script In the Next Room (or, The Vibrator Play), is, of course, what made the entire evening. Berkeley Repertory—where the play will receive its world premiere next month—commissioned Ruhl to write a play about the history of the vibrator, a device first used for medical purposes to release up “pent-up emotions in the womb” by inducing “paroxysms” (orgasms) in hysterical women. Taking advantage of the new age of electricity, scientists in the 1880’s invented this new marvel—as Wilma literary manager Walter Bilderback so eloquently put it—“because the doctors and nurses hands and fingers kept getting tired.”

In Ruhl’s play, the inventor is the appropriately named Dr. Givings (Ross Manson), who assisted by a former midwife (Mary McCool as Annie), operates a clinic in a prosperous spa town outside of New York. He’s visited by patients like Sabrina Daldry (Sanford), whose husband (Ben Lloyd) has brought her in to cure her “women’s problems.” Givings prescription: daily releases of nerves that result in the most number of simulated orgasms I’ve ever seen (or would want to see) on stage.

Givings wife Catherine (Zinkel) becomes jealous, initially at the bonding between their baby and the wet-nurse Elizabeth (Miriam Hyman), later at her husband’s greater interest in providing relief to these women than providing attention for her. So she attempts to seduce the young painter Leo (Luigi Sottile)—the rare case of a man having vibrator-requiring hysteria—in order to provoke some sort of emotional response from her husband. Meanwhile, Sabrina becomes attracted to Annie (even asking for the device-free “Annie method” in therapy), and it leads to a situation that the stage direction describe as “we wonder if we’re about to witness three women play with a vibrator.”

However, that line is the best joke of the play, and through most of the “treatments” (applications of the device), the audience laughter made it very difficult to hear the lines of Ruhl’s incredibly hilarious first act. The women, especially McCool’s deadpan “I’ll wash my hands now,” and Sanford’s childlike innocence about her paroxysms, diminish any suggestive quality, and keep the awkward clinical situation just uncomfortable enough that if we didn’t laugh, we’d feel grossed out.

And for a play almost entirely about women’s needs for intimacy, their jealousy, awkwardness about asking for what they want, and family neuroses, I loved it. However, these issues only provide a spring board for the richly-integrated, deeper questions about race and class, the strange patriarchy of religion (cleverly asking at one point “why does Jesus get eaten when women breastfeed”), sexual politics inside the family, and the value of love versus sex. Her play operates and engages intellectually and emotionally, and Ruhl’s brilliance explodes the hysteria surrounding these themes with humor, making all of it entertaining, and best of all, palatable to both imbibe and discuss.

But surprisingly, the conclusions Ruhl draws are reactionary in their tone (far more so than the daddy-clinging that drove the theme and plot of her recent Eurydice). Catherine’s jealousy turns her into a sexually frustrated housewife who questions her husband’s adequacy. She begs him to use the device on her (he won’t, finding it unseemly to “experiment” on his own wife), and when she breaks into his operating theatre and tries it herself (with Sabrina’s assistance), it makes her “excitable” and she begins craving the feeling like an addiction.

In fairness, Ruhl’s got plenty of evidence that back this up. Though scientists began using the vibrator-induced orgasm as a “cure-all” for hysteria, commercial applications quickly followed, as the device became a popular amenity at luxury resorts (imagine seeing one in your hotel room), and the fifth home appliance to become electrified. But Ruhl’s theme—mostly delivered through Leo, the only fully rounded male character—is clear: after showing us where this road to pleasure leads, she puts her clear stamp of judgment on the lure of easy sexual pleasure versus the fruits of relationships built on compromises.

Describing the difference between an electrified lamp and a candle that flickers, Leo tells Catherine “A light without flame isn’t divine, and like having relations with a prostitute, without love, without the heart, bodies are means to an end.” And how does Ruhl end the play? By asserting contra women’s magazines and bedroom feminism, that women really want an emotional connection, and the best way to keep your wife from becoming hysterical is simple: pay her some attention and respect, and most importantly, love her, you idiot.

Strangely enough, Ibsen made the same point in A Doll’s House, written during the same period in which Ruhl set her new play. I realize that Ruhl had to completely infantilize her female characters (except the wise, noble, African-American, which in one instance, invokes a racist stereotype still common in our time) in order to get the humor of the innocence in using a vibrator. However, Ibsen’s Nora did not evince this level of childishness in order for her to become “liberated.”

And here I’m starting to see a reactionary pattern. In her recent Eurydice, Ruhl engenders a similar effect, as Eurydice, rather than return to her tumultuous and uncertain relationship with Orpheus, clings to the safe, easy, constant love that her father (as protector) gives her in the underworld. What next, a Stepford Wives style play where the robots gain consciousness but discover they’re happier in their delusions?

Is it possible that the hottest female playwright in the country has gotten there by embracing fathers, prioritizing love, infantilizing women, and dismissing (the now passé) liberating form of feminism? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely unhappy about this development, and while I liked the similar women-centered scripts of the Wilma’s recent Age of Arousal and Eurydice better, the subject matter, themes, and wit of In the Other Room make this play far more stage worthy. I can’t think of any audience member—except perhaps the extremest of Puritans—who wouldn’t find something to enjoy in this play.

Though Ruhl’s latest play is not without its faults, the Wilma should take a chance on producing it next season. They easily could have charged money for just a staged reading.

Review of Athol Fugard's "My Children, My Africa!" at Philadelphia Theatre Review

An interesting (overheard) anecdote proved the persistent relevance of Athol Fugard’s My Children, My Africa! Two rows in front of me, expressing nothing less than pure dread at the prospect, an audience member explained to her friend how Democratic Senator Tim Johnson had a stroke that day, and that (oh no!) the Republicans might regain power in the Senate. She spoke of this as if no political future could bode worse for her, even after she just sat through the first act of a play taking place amidst the violence and subjugation of apartheid South Africa. I wanted to laugh out loud, but remembered the first lines spoken by the idealist teacher Mr. M in Fugard’s play.

“I know it’s necessary to remind each of you exactly what a debate is.”

But Fugard’s characters fail to heed his advice, and a clash of ideas slowly and menacingly escalates into a tense battle of wills on The Wilma Theater stage. Mr. M (Glynn Turman) seeks to enact gradual, peaceful political change by entering his best student Thami (Yaegel Welch) in a pairs-based literature challenge with Isabel (Meghan Heimbecker), a top student from a neighboring whites-only school.

However, while Isabel sees opportunity and friendship in this attempt to raise consciousness, Thami slowly comes to realize this type of social reform will only ensure that even his grandchildren “will not know what freedom is.”

While the play is heavy handed, Blanka Zizka’s direction takes a different tact all together. She composes the first act softly, keeping the level of emotion consistent with the (oft) esoteric discourse. In Act II, she allows the play to fill with the anger and emotion of the characters, creating a contrast between the two halves. But Act I is too light, too cerebral in approach to the violence and turbulence of Act II, tarnishing the production’s unity.

Save Heimbecker’s even keel, the actors mirror this approach in a long, almost dreamy fuse through act one that allows them to burst outward with emotion in act two.

Welch exhibits a truly dynamic range in his performance, equaling the ebb and flow of his character’s torn spirit. However, he continually slouches, and as a result, is never convincing in any of the different positions or emotions he espouses.

A contrast mars Turman’s performance as well. In the first act, he’s full of hope and enthusiasm that too easily spirals downward after his betrayal. Here he’s too restrained, and as a result, his defiance becomes a defeat and then a death wish.

This choice, whether Zizka’s or Turman’s squares against the play’s ending of hope, diminishing the flash of brilliance in Matt Saunders’ set that represents the result of Mr. M’s lifetime commitment to the peaceful achievement of freedom.

However, not much can detract from a realization that fully enables the awesome power of Fugard’s play. And in this, the Wilma succeeds grandly, bringing to life the conflict between enlightening debate and political demagoguery, between constructive solutions and senselessness, and between the hope that results from the former of these, and the persistent ignorance and hatred spawned by the latter.