There is always a best. Informed opinion may differ as to what that is, of course. But to sponsor an award, to authorize jurors to search out the best and then to announce that none of their recommendations measure up to some hypothetical benchmark, is a slap in the face not only to their work but to the art they represent.

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That's what the Pulitzer Prize Board has done in declining to give a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for drama. The jurors, chaired by Linda Winer, theater critic for Newsday, named three finalists: Adam Rapp's "Red Light in Winter," Christopher Durang's "Miss Witherspoon" and Rolin Jones' "The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow."

The other jurors were drama critics Chris Jones and Anne Marie Welsh of the Chicago Tribune and San Diego Union-Tribune, and, in a departure from what has been usual over the years, playwright Anna Deavere Smith and Kimberly W. Benston, an English professor from Haverford College.

But the 19-member Pulitzer Prize Board (mainly journalists, which is why they appoint jurors who know their field) threw out the jurors' recommendations.

Naturally, there has been controversy, suggested by the reactions from a Los Angeles Times story by Diane Haithman. Such controversy is not new.

In the early years of the Pulitzers, the drama award was bedeviled by the requirement of "uplift," which meant that much of American theater's genius for social criticism and tragedy was beyond the pale. The New York Drama Critics Circle Award was founded in 1936 specifically to redress this balance. The uproar that greeted the Pulitzer Board's refusal to honor the 1963 jury's recommendation of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" finally led to the removal of that moral test.

But its influence has lingered. The 2006 board defends itself by saying this year's action is not unusual, noting that the drama award has been omitted 15 times since it was begun in 1918. But surely this disproportionate percentage of the 58 omissions in all categories just proves how historically uncomfortable the Pulitzer board has been with the unsettling nature of theater.

Still, this is only the second time the drama award has been omitted in 20 years; the other was 1997. So why this year?

I called Jeffrey Eric Jenkins, editor of the definitive "Best Plays" theater annual, founded in 1920 by Burns Mantle. (Disclosure: I'm on the "Best Plays" editorial board.) Jenkins pointed out that Rapp's play about a hooker and AIDS is grim stuff. "He's America's Emile Zola," he said. So the board probably objected to it right off. Then, the Durang and Jones plays had long closed, and the Pulitzer board is not full of people who regularly go off-Broadway and might have seen them.

That's why you have specialist jurors, right?

"These are three worthy plays," said Jenkins, who thinks they will all end up among the year's 10 best plays honored in his book. "Any one could have been a winner."

There was a technical oddity in that the Pulitzers just changed their drama year from the traditional March-February, which made little sense, to the calendar year, which makes even less. So this year there were just 10 months of plays to choose from. In contrast, the "Best Plays" theatrical year runs June-May, like the Tony Awards.

Jenkins does agree that this was "a really difficult year," echoing Winer's comment that there was no obvious Pulitzer favorite.

So what? It's not that the history of the Pulitzer Prize in drama is filled with masterpieces. To say that there was nothing this year to measure up to "Dinner With Friends" (2000) or "The Young Man From Atlanta" (1995) is absurd.

For one thing, it probably ignores the huge outpouring of new work all around the country. Pulitzer practice has been erratic in that plays produced outside New York City may or may not get considered. In 2003, the committee even nominated a play none of them had seen, Nilo Cruz's "Anna in the Tropics," staged at a small theater in Miami, and it won.

We don't know how much this year's jury may have looked beyond New York. Knowing some of them, I suspect they made a good effort. And the fact is that they made three recommendations.

So the offense belongs to the board. And if your theater experience is defined by Broadway, you have no business pretending to hand out an award for the best American play, since so few plays make it to Broadway at all. Perhaps the nature of American theater is just too tumultuous and decentralized for the Pulitzer Board to be able to get a grip on it.

Or maybe all awards are simply arbitrary and erratic -- except when you win one yourself, of course. But in that case, refusing to give a drama award is even more of an insult.