If you haven't seen Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive yet, just wait: As the most popular regional theatre play of the 1998-99 season, with 26 stagings in the U.S. this coming year, chances are it'll be steering into your town.
Theatre Communications Group, the service organization of more than 330 American, Equity-affiliated or professional regional theatres, announced a list of the Top 10 most-produced scripts around the country through next summer.
Excluding Shakespeare and holiday productions, they are:
1. How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel (26 productions).
2. The Last Night of Ballyhoo by Alfred Uhry (20).
3. Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by Moises Kaufman (16).
4. Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin (10).
5. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams (9).
6. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (8).
7. Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years by Emily Mann (8).
8. The Old Settler by John Henry Redwood (7).
9. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (7).
10. Always...Patsy Cline by Ted Swindley, based on a book by Ellis Nassour (7).
Results were reported in the October Season Preview issue of American Theatre magazine, on sale now. -- By Kenneth Jones