The American Theatre Wing created the Tony Awards, named in recognition of actress-producer Antoinette Perry, in 1947 to honor excellence in Broadway musicals and plays. All My Sons, written by Arthur Miller, was awarded Best Play at the inaugural ceremony in 1947. Best Musical wasn’t awarded until 1949, when it was given to Kiss Me, Kate, written by Bella and Samuel Spewack.
Since then, several playwrights have earned multiple Best Play Tony Awards. Below is a look at four of the most accomplished in that regard.
Tom Stoppard
British writer Tom Stoppard is among the most accomplished playwrights in history. While others have surpassed his seven Best Play nominations, he is the all-time leader with four awards. Seven others, including the three listed below, have each won the award twice. Neil Simon and August Wilson rank first and second in total nominations with 10 and nine, respectively.
Born in the Czech Republic in 1937, Stoppard worked as a journalist before beginning to write plays in the 1960s. Stoppard’s first play, A Walk on Water, was shown on TV in 1963 and debuted on London stages under the title Enter a Free Man in 1968. Before that, however, he wrote the now critically acclaimed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which was first performed in 1966 at the Edinburgh Festival. It transferred to Broadway the following year and, in 1968, received the Tony Award for Best Play.
Stoppard won Best Play again in 1976 and 1984 with Travesties and The Real Thing, respectively, making him three for three in Best Play nominations. He later received nominations for Arcadia (1995) and The Invention of Love (2001), and he won his fourth Best Play honor for The Coast of Utopia, a three-part play that revolves around a group of Russian émigré intellectuals in the 19th century, in 2007. His play Rock ‘n’ Roll garnered a Best Play nomination in 2008.
Stoppard, who was knighted in 1997, has also written several TV and radio plays and contributed to the screenplays of Anna Karenina and Shakespeare in Love.
Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller has been nominated for Best Play five times and won the award for Death of a Salesman (1949) The Crucible (1953). He also received nominations for The Price (1968), Broken Glass (1994), and The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (2000). Miller was born in New York in 1915 and began writing plays while studying at the University of Michigan. He wrote 20 full-length dramas, many of which promoted awareness for important social causes, and several one-act plays before his death in 2005.
Death of a Salesman, which also received the Pulitzer Prize for drama, is the play for which Miller is best known and among the most iconic plays in American theater. The original production, which ran from February 1949 to November 1950 at the Morosco Theatre, tells the story of traveling salesman Willie Loman and touches on key themes such as capitalism and masculinity.
The Crucible, meanwhile, is based on the 1692 Salem witch trials. Miller’s other notable plays include After the Fall and A View from the Bridge. He also wrote the screenplay for The Misfits (1961), which starred his then wife Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable.
Edward Albee
Edward Albee has been nominated for Best Play six times and had to wait almost four decades between victories. He first won in 1963 for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This play, Albee’s first full-length feature, opened on Broadway in October 1962 and ran for 664 performances until closing in May 1964. The story revolves around a married couple, George and Martha, who conflict over their marital issues while involving their guests, a young couple named Nick and Honey. It was largely revered for its nuanced and symbolic writing.
“Albee’s experimentation in allegory, metaphorical clichés, grotesque parody, hysterical humor, brilliant wit, literary allusion, religious undercurrents, Freudian reversals, irony on irony, here for the first time appear as an organic whole in a mature and completely satisfying dramatic work,” wrote Anne Paolucci in From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee.
Albee received Best Play nominations for The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1964), Tiny Alice (1965), A Delicate Balance (1967), and Seascape (1975) before finally winning again for The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (2002).
Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner is an American author whose work has spanned several genres, including plays, musicals, operas, and film. He has only been nominated twice for Best Play but won each time, first in 1993 for Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and then in 1994 for Angels in America: Perestroika. He is also one of only two playwrights in history to win back-to-back Tony Awards. Interestingly, Terrance McNally did so immediately after Kushner with Love! Valour! Compassion (1995) and Master Class (1996).
Kushner’s other plays include Homebody/Kabul and A Bright Room Called Day. He also wrote the screenplays for Steven Spielberg’s Munich, Lincoln, and West Side Story.