Last year, when the League of Off-Broadway Theatres and Producers announced nominations for their Lucille Lortel Awards, they included a directing nod for Daniel Fish’s work on Paradise Park. The next day, the league revoked Fish’s nomination, saying it had really been meant for Passing Strange’s Annie Dorsen.

Awk-ward. Everyone involved was left to stare at the ground, shuffling their feet and avoiding eye contact until the uncomfortable moment had passed.

I don’t want that harsh fate to befall the hard-working artists who received Non-Equity Jeff Award nominations yesterday for their work on Bailiwick’s The Christmas Schooner. But it would appear that, like the Off-Broadway league, the Jeff committee made a mistake on this one. Schooner has appeared almost every holiday season for over a decade. Commentators on yesterday’s Jeff post questioned how it could be eligible this year, so I looked up the rules.

The Jeffs’ press release states that Schooner was “eligible for judging this year under the Jeffs’ 7-year rule.” But that doesn’t jibe with the committee’s published guidelines. Here’s the relevant passage from the Jeffs’ rulebook:

A revival is not eligible to be judged if it opens less than seven (7) years from the closing date of the previous production of the same work at the same theatre or by essentially the same company.

Seems pretty clear that seven years should have gone by between productions for Schooner to eligible. But apparently the Jeff committee’s interpretation of its own rule is that perennials become newly eligible every seven years, no matter how many times the company has remounted them in between. I asked the committee’s Media Chair Jeffrey Marks for clarification, and he responded via email: “Revivals have to wait seven years before being eligible again for judging…This is consistent for many shows remounted, and most theatres and artists know they have to wait seven years to produce it (or a new version) to be Jeff Awards eligible.”

Even allowing for the Jeff committee’s apparently loose interpretation, I can’t figure out why this would be Schooner’s year; according to the Jeffs’ database, Schooner’s single previous nomination went to Tom Higgins for actor in a supporting role–musical, at the Equity Awards in 1998. What’s done is done, and I wish the Schooner nominees best of luck at the Park West on June 8; fully 13 years after its maiden voyage, the Schooner is getting a spiritual backpayment with their five nominations. But if the Jeff committee was applying its own rules with any consistency, they wouldn’t have been eligible.