The Play's the Thing

Tonight is the Tony Awards broadcast.  And in its honor, here's a gem of a video.  From the 1987 Tonys,, this is a tribute to 40 years of Tony-winning Best Plays, and the special treat is that includes many of the original actors from those plays.  Thanks to Shelly Goldstein for coming across this.

Also, given that each play is only given about 15 seconds, and maybe one or two lines, it shows how effective even that can be, and how shameful the Tony TV producers have been over the more-recent years to give the Best Play nominees almost no air time.
 
The video's description says 17 minutes.  The tribute, however, runs about 12 minutes – the remaining five are for the presentation of that year’s Best Play.

There's no reason not to give away the winner -- this is from 30 years ago, ago -- but I won't be specific.  What I will say, though, is that the author wrote one of my favorite plays and movies, which got an Oscar nomination as Best Picture despite being so small compared to most such-nominees, A Thousand Clowns.  If you know who wrote that, then you'll know the winner here.  If you didn't, you can guess and see if you're right  (P.S. They made a movie of this winning Best Play, as well, with Walter Matthau and Ossie Davis.)