Your post is only half complete and I wonder why you decided to not include the second half. It is true that "Stations" and "Black Elk Speaks" brought great recognition and acclaim to their respective theater companies, but (and here's the part you left out) they also left those two companies nearly bankrupt in the end. To this day neither company has fully recovered from the experience and it's been nearly three decades. (Ask yourself: why has neither attempted anything like that again? Ask the old guard about the trials that followed: you'll get an earful.)

Their ordeals have been cautionary tales to every local theater company since. Both "Stations" and "Black Elk" spent far more than the "at least half the $10,000 First Prize" of the TATE and that was back in the '80s. To achieve the same recognition today would require more cash than that, and to achieve it without going belly-up in the process would require much, much more.

Face it: The TATE is a token amount of money, an almost empty gesture. Every theater group in town is awash in debt and the temptation, no doubt, will be there to use the money to settle old debts rather than start a new venture that will, in the end, add to the existing monetary problem. Will any company really be foolish enough to try a new venture? I don't know, but perhaps they should listen to what I've heard over the years. Every person I have spoken to who was involved in either show says the same thing: "Great show, but it was a big mistake."

Unless a person (or persons) are willing to seriously fund local theater, this drop-in-the-bucket will result in a slightly better set in a future production, or an extra musician in the "orchestra", or maybe one ad in the Tulsa World, but most likely it will just be used to relieve, just a bit, the mounting debt that faces all the companies every day.