Should an Author be judged by their Best Plays or their entire body of work?

Yes.

Well, if you really wanted to get scientific, you could score each one out of 10 and calculate the average, with each play weighted equally? Art is subjective, and there's no real answer, but when someone's written as many godawful plays as Mamet, I think that needs to be taken into consideration.

In film, there's a theory that when a prolific director is "done," their last few works are never as good as their earlier work. It doesn't always carry over to theatre, but Mamet definitely qualifies, and to a lesser extent so do John Guare, Terrence McNally, Richard Greenberg, Theresa Rebeck, Richard Rodgers, Neil Simon, John Kander, and even Sondheim, to name a few. There's something to be said for the Jerry Hermans and Tommy Tunes of the world who "quit while they're ahead."

Updated On: 6/20/19 at 11:56 PM

Here's an idea: let's judge everyone by what celebrates their greatness. There are writers of singular masterpieces, and there are prolific writers for whom the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Picasso is credited with 50,000 works of art, Da Vinci with 15. Do you really need to judge them on the same terms?

SomethingPeculiar said: "Well, if you really wanted to get scientific, you could score each one out of 10 and calculate the average, with each play weighted equally?"

I know you're offering this suggestion with a dash of irony, but wouldn't it make more sense to score each work (perhaps with negative scores possible for particularly egregious entries) and add them up rather than compute an average? If one author wrote five true masterpieces (each with a score of ten), and another author wrote just one, they'd have the same average, but surely we'd want to judge the first author more highly than the second.

Take, for example, David Mamet, who changed the American theatre landscape with American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Oleanna, but almost everything he's written in the 21st century has been a critical and commercial failure.

Oh, Mamet's an easy one to judge. I absolutely hate every play I've either read and/or seen by him. Zero value. And his latest sounds like he's hit a new low, which doesn't surprise me at all.

We all unanimously consider Neil Simon an excellent playwright even though he’s had his share of clunkers. Even with these, his work in them was still praised.

I saw the tryout of Proposals in DC and loved it. I was shocked it only ran a couple of months on Broadway. I also really enjoyed The Dinner Party. That cast was sublime.

You could ask the same regarding musical composers. Jule Styne, Cy Coleman and Charles Strouse had LOADS of flops. Do we judge them solely based on their hit/flop ratio? Not really.

There's too much bias involved in a question like this. With any playwright, composer, etc. I like I will downplay their lesser works and for those I dislike, I'm more likely to count those lesser works against them.

I think it has to be a combination of both. Like, one great show doesn't shield someone from criticism but it can show what they're capable of. And a lot of bad shows establish a pattern, whether that's lack of genius, being unable to adapt commercial properties, laziness, etc.