Playtime

Nothing thrills me quite the way live theater does. The first play I ever saw was a high school adaptation of the movie David and Lisa. With no standard of comparison, I thought it was great, even though the student actors kept waving to their friends in the audience. Things got better when I saw my first musical in 1972, a national touring company production of Godspell. I was in awe of the cast's ability to memorize all those lines, and I experienced the visceral thrill of real people on a real stage, so much more powerful than anything I'd seen on TV or at the movies.

I've seen A Chorus Line in four states, Wait Until Dark in three. The latter was a rare case of the movie being better than the play, but I'm a pretty indiscriminate theatergoer. Two of the best performances I saw were by Hardy Rawls in Death of a Salesman and Maria Fazio in The Hot L Baltimore, and they were both non-professionals(!) -- drama majors at Florida Atlantic University. Moving to New York in the 1970s meant real Broadway shows and lots of autographs, and I mean back when shows were still affordable. I saw more than I can count today – A Chorus Line at the Shubert, its original home, Evita (Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin), Sweeney Todd (Angela Lansbury), Whose Life is It, Anyway? (Mary Tyler Moore, Tom Conti – two separate productions), Fifth of July (Judd Hirsch), The Elephant Man (Bruce Davison), The King and I (Yul Brynner!), Mummenschanz (an amazing mime troupe), Da (Barnard Hughes), and on and on.

The worst production I ever saw was A Chorus Line at a dinner theater in Wichita, Kansas, where the stage-long set of dance mirrors was made of Mylar. The funniest play I saw was The Producers, in Seattle. I had low expectations because the movie was a classic, but that night I almost wet myself laughing. The only play I ever shed a tear over, actually more than one, was also in Seattle -- Hair.

For this list, I've focused only on favorite plays I've read, not seen (except for the ones I'll point out). Reading plays is great fun for me because I like dialogue anyway, and I've noticed plays seem to have a lot of it. Remember, I'm rating these strictly by how much I enjoyed reading them. I mean, really, if this were an objective list, would Hamlet really come in at #14?

15.  Saint Joan (George Bernard Shaw): I'd never read Shaw before and couldn't get over how funny it was. This was the most flesh-and-blood Joan I'd ever met.

14.  Hamlet (that guy): My favorite of all his plays, the one I keep going back to and seeing new things. The most fascinating, complex character in all theater. In his book The Heart of Hamlet, critic Bernard Grebanier maintains that the melancholy Dane wasn't at all conflicted and knew exactly what he was going to do from the start. Who knew?

13.  The Piano Lesson (August Wilson): This is the fourth entry in Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, a series of ten plays set during a different decade of the twentieth century and focusing on the lives of black Americans. This is my favorite play in the cycle, dealing with the conflict between a brother and sister over the family piano, an heirloom they both share. This play won several major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

12.  Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller): This is so powerful and never seems to age. I only saw it performed once live, and I sure wish I could have seen Brian Dennehy when he played Willy Loman – especially when he broke character one night to chew out an audience member for talking on a cell phone (or maybe she came in late and was making too much noise in one of the front rows, I can't remember now). My question is, how do you get back into character after that?

11.  The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee Williams): This and Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? were the first two plays I ever read. I read it and knew that if I ever became an actor, I'd want to play Tom Wingfield, Amanda's son and Laura's younger brother. The character really spoke to me. I never became an actor, but I still reread the play and dream. It's my favorite Williams, up there with Streetcar, only heartbreaking and more poignant.

10.  Buried Child (Sam Shepard): In my next life, I want to be a good-looking movie star and important American playwright like Shepard. His plays are powerful and yet contain much humor, and this is the one that really connected with me and freaked me out, moreso than True West, which I believe is his most celebrated.

9.  The Nerd (Larry Shue): This is just the funniest play I've ever read. I mean I laughed out loud so much that I became concerned for my breathing. One day I hope to see this one on the stage.

8.  Biloxi Blues (Neil Simon): The Odd Couple is, I'm guessing, everyone's favorite Simon play. It was mine, too. In fact, as a kid I once stole two library books, and Odd Couple was one of them. (Yes, I confess! I wanted to learn how to write comedy, but I was deranged from drinking too much Yoo-Hoo at bedtime!) But I always go back to Biloxi Blues, maybe because I enjoy military humor in small doses. Sgt. Merwin J. Toomey is a zany character, a true original, and Christopher Walken did him justice in the film version. Favorite moment: when Wykowski reads Jerome's diary aloud for the other guys in the barracks to hear.

7.  The Norman Conquests (Alan Ayckbourn): Six characters, one weekend, different rooms in one house – this trilogy of plays from the early 1970s is both hilarious and touching, but for me mostly hilarious. I saw it on public television later that decade. Tom Conti as frisky Norman was perfect, as if the role had been written for him. The plays read as well as they play.

6.  The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (Edward Albee): Two words: Albee. Bestiality. But not in a lurid or exploitative way. A man has fallen in love with a goat, and his wife and son try to wrap their heads around the idea. I hadn't read plays for a while, and this one brought me back. It's funny, but, in the final scene, truly shocking. Just think of Gene Wilder and the sheep in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) – only elevate it to the realm of art as you might expect Albee to do.

5.  Trifles (Susan Glaspell): This is the only one-act play on the list, but it's as fascinating and powerful as any of the others. First performed in 1916, it's about the murder of a farmer and how the evidence at the crime scene points to his wife as the suspect. But what makes the play intriguing and so ahead of its time isn't the crime itself, which has happened prior to the start of the story. In fact, neither the farmer (in flashback) nor his wife is ever seen. It's how two female neighbors in the farmer's kitchen, and not the male lawmen elsewhere in the house combing for clues, figure out what happened simply by noticing things the men never would have (“trifles,” as one man puts it). They approach the situation through the mindset of the wife herself – how would she have acted, what would she have thought? This play has long been a favorite of feminist readers, and it's easy to see why. Everyone would enjoy it

 

4.  Sleuth (Anthony Shaffer): An insanely clever mystery that takes the whole convention of detective thrillers (think Agatha Christie) and turns it upside down. I must have read this one half a dozen times in a row. A British, middle-aged writer of detective fiction invites a young Italian hairdresser over for drinks. The hairdresser, we learn, is having an affair with the writer's wife. The writer doesn't want to kill him; instead, he's devised a way to get his wife out of his hair for good. Whatever your expectations, shelve them, because you won't know where this is going. As perfect as the ending is, it's the midpoint twist that will send you reeling. (Skip the movie – the first one, as I haven't seen the second – not only because it's inferior to the play, but because there's one scene that can only really work on the stage and is, I believe, unfilmable. I can't be the only one to have noticed this. I wish you knew both the play and the film so I could tell you and see if you agree.)

3.  Our Town (Thornton Wilder): I probably don't need to add anything to what you already know. Just that it's as good to read as it is to watch; it's minimalist theater in its purest form. I'm sure that's why high school drama departments like it so much. That must be the reason, because, with no disrespect intended, I can't imagine young people being able to grasp the enormity of what's being said here. It couldn't have been written without the wisdom and perspective of someone considerably older, and I know that when I was 16 I never could have appreciated what Wilder was saying.

2.  The Collection (Harold Pinter): Pinter's two most celebrated plays, The Homecoming and The Birthday Party, elude me, frankly. I'm much more in tune with this one, with its cryptic-but-only-for-a-while plot, devastating dialogue, and the silences Pinter is so famous for. It's just four characters and two sets, and the low-level suspense that occurs is totally transfixing. Plus, there's a phone booth, and I like phone booths.

1.  Antigone (Sophocles): I'm convinced this is the most important play ever written, and it's one that should be read not just by humans in general, but particularly by anyone in power and especially anyone who seeks to subvert that power in the name of justice. The Thebes' civil war has ended, and two brothers who fought on opposite sides are dead. Creon, Thebes' new ruler, will make a hero of Eteocles, who fought for the state, while the other, the rebel Polyneices, will remain on the battlefield, unburied, as a mark of shame. Antigone and Ismene are their sisters. Antigone plans to bury Polyneices' body, defying Creon's order, even though Ismene tries to talk her out of it. Antigone is the greatest hero in the theater, and Antigone is the one play I hope you read if you haven't already. (I like the Richard Emil Braun translation myself.

OK, and now a big shout-out to Anton Chekhov, who didn't make the list only because I was unable to decide among his four major plays and I couldn't bring myself to declare a four-way tie. For years I couldn't crack Chekhov, because he himself said they were comedies, and I could never see any humor in them (or even a plot). I still wouldn't exactly call them chucklefests, but I did come to love them, and not through a play but rather a film – Louis Malle's Vanya on 42^nd Street. Explaining what makes this film so original and memorable would take more space than I want to give it (in fairness to the 15 plays already noted), but let's just say it convinced this jaded viewer that Chekhov is indeed one of the great playwrights. The film is a contemporary interpretation of Uncle Vanya, and I was lured in my the promise of Julianne Moore, an actress I kinda sorta like a little. I like his short stories even more than the plays – way more, actually. These are stories Jesus would have written if all those crowds had just given him some quiet time. Chekhov reminds me of Christ because of his awesome compassion and empathy for the human condition. I guess he's my favorite writer, period.

Well, shoot. I've written too much after I said I wouldn't. Just as well I don't write short stories.