The Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play is presented by the Drama Desk, a committee of New York City theatre critics, writers, and editors. It honors performances by actors in supporting roles in productions staged on Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, and for legitimate not-for-profit theaters.
It was not until the 21st Annual Drama Desk Awards in 1975 that a specific category for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play was created. That year's recipient was Frank Langella in Seascape, who won over Louis Beachner in The National Health, Larry Blyden in Absurd Person Singular, David Dukes in Love for Love and Rules of the Game, Philip Locke in Sherlock Holmes, and Richard Williams in Black Picture Show.
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“A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.”
—Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980)
“It’s true, as Marya Mannes says: “No one believes [a woman’s] time to be sacred. A man at his desk in a room with a closed door is a man at work. A woman at a desk in any room is available.””
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“The theater is a baffling business, and a shockingly wasteful one when you consider that people who have proven their worth, who have appeared in or been responsible for successful plays, who have given outstanding performances, can still, in the full tide of their energy, be forced, through lack of opportunity, to sit idle season after season, their enthusiasm, their morale, their very talent dwindling to slow gray death. Of finances we will not even speak; it is too sad a tale.”
—Ilka Chase (1905–1978)
“... an actor is exactly as big as his imagination.”
—Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865–1932)
“Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children’s play, or as manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in “playing” chess or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfillment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for.”
—Northrop Frye (1912–1991)