Newbie question: why do plays have such short runs?

I hope you'll forgive what may seem like a basic question!

Looking at the grosses every week, it seems like musicals often run indefinitely despite mediocre ticket sales, while plays stick to limited runs even when they're doing well. (I'm thinking of shows like Twelfth Night/Richard III, The Glass Menagerie, A Raisin in the Sun, Of Mice and Men.) Why do shows like this not run longer? In the case of some super-limited engagements, do they even have any hope of recouping at all?

I know theatre space must be an issue—if they booked for a fixed time period, it just isn't possible to extend indefinitely when another show is scheduled to come in—but that doesn't explain why they plan for such short runs to begin with. What obvious thing am I missing here? Are plays considered more dependent on particular actors than musicals are?

Thanks in advance for any help, and I apologize again for my newbie ignorance!

Thanks for the insights! I hadn't even thought about visa issues.

Is there a reason plays can't just cycle through different famous actors/performers, like musicals seem to? I'm thinking of After Midnight and Cinderella in particular.

There also is less incentive for them to run long. Musicals nearly always need to run longer to recoup due to the higher cost. It seems to be something that has always existed, more or less. While, after Oklahoma! musical runs became longer and longer (back in previous decades a show was often seen as a big hit if it just ran a solid season,) the same didn't really happen to plays. There were exceptions--Tobacco Road ran ten years or more in the 30s. Life With Father did the same at the end of the decade. Long run plays (the 1000+ performance ones) mostly tend to be comedies and "crowd pleasers"--Barefoot in the Park, Harvey, Cactus Flower, Plaza Suite... Some more serious (more) recent plays have managed pretty long runs--August Osage County, Proof, Children of a Lesser God.

But even in the Golden Age of drama on Broadway (which I'll roughly place between Glass Menagerie in 1945 and 1965) these plays caused tons of national excitement in a way they rarely do now, but still didn't run quite like the equivalent musicals. Streetcar got to 850 or so and was Williams' longest run, for example whereas 850 is still even quite often seen as a disappointing run for a major musical (although this may have all become bloated in hte 80s when there wee such massive long runs with musicals.)

Thank you all for the information! I really appreciate it.

How long does it normally take for a play to recoup? I was having trouble imagining any but the most successful actually making a profit in a limited 12-week run, so maybe that's part of the cause of my confusion. Do they generally need to earn a similar percentage of their gross potential in a given week (compared to musicals), in order to break even, or do their much lower costs more than make up for their lower revenue?

I think musicals universally are just more well received in this time we're living in. People have shorter attention spans these days and musicals keep the pace moving along.

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Plays do have an easier time recouping due to smaller running costs. Even a large cast play, say ten, will have much lower weekly operating costs than a mid size musical with its large cast, significantly larger crew, and musicians. And the producers of these limited runs will go in with a budget that shows potential for recoupment in whatever their allotted run is. They will need to show investors that there is a chance, otherwise nobody would put in money, obviously. So they will say we're going into this theatre with a certain amount of seats and here is out potential weekly gross. They will then show the percentage of that gross they would need to reach to meet their estimated weekly costs, and then the percentage they would need to get over that each week to actually reach recoupment. So it may be they need to reach 40% potential for operating costs and 70% to recoup. That's why you'll find producers courting big stars for limited runs, because they will be hoping to bank on their names to reach whatever their golden numbers are, and of course it's easier to get a star with huge box office appeal to agree to appear for twelve weeks versus a year.

As for the audience, i would say most are drawn to musicals when they come to NYC over plays because it is easier to see a high quality production of a new script at regional companies than it is to see the newest musicals outside of NY or a tour. Look at how many regional productions of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike there have already been this season, not to mention the number if companies who have it as part of their seasons next year.

As a person who lives outside of New York, I can vouch for the "tourists mainly want to see musicals" argument. When people from other places think Broadway, they generally think "Broadway Musical," so naturally that is the sort of thing they will want to see when visiting.

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