Fifty Plays Every Theatre Student Should Read By Graduation

This list is a response to a Facebook posr that offers “Fifty Classic Plays Every Student Should Read.” An alum “shared” it with me, so I shared it too, complaining about some odd placement and a few of the choices in the list. Then a (small) number of alums asked ME to list 50 plays. Because I can deny my alums nothing and though I have lost my Thursday doing it, for better or worse, here it is.

Students should have read many more plays than these by graduation day, but if they’ve not read all or most of these they should hang their heads in shame.

This list applies to undergraduate theatre students only. English students’ professors might draw up quite different lists, I’m fairly certain, including many of these titles, dropping several, adding others. The list offers Doctor Jack’s fairly informed choices, on it either because they are important and/or representative of their era, or because they influenced the plays written in later eras. Other theatre professors might toss some of my titles, keep others; still other profs may simply sneer at my list. So it goes.

A few provisos: I am limiting the list to Western Drama (as did the list to which I respond). I am stopping in the mid-60s because as an historian I don’t believe that it is possible to accurately judge the writing of the last 50 years. While there are a few women on the list (see 8, 37, 38 & 48), it is male-heavy. In a few cases I have offered female playwright alternatives (see numbers 25 & 27), though in those cases I honestly believe my first choice is the better play. Had I continued the list into the 1970s many more women would have been included as there was a burst of activity when the Women’s Rights Movement began, thank the gods of theatre

The plays are listed in approximately chronological order. And awaaaaay we go!

The List:

1. Aeschylus: The Oresteia (a trilogy, yes, but performed together in ancient Greece)

2-3 Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Antigone

4-5 Euripides, Medea, The Bacchae

6. Aristophanes, Lysistrata

7. Plautus, The Menaechmi

8. Hroswitha, Dulcitius

9. Anonymous (one of my favorite authors), The 2nd Shepherd’s Play

10. Anonymous (s/he again), Everyman

11. Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus

12-21 William Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like it, Twelfth Night, Henry V, The Tempest (and surely, please, more!)

22-23 Molière, Tartuffe, The Misanthrope (again, more please)

24. Racine, Phédre

25. Lope de Vega, Fuenteovejuña (or Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, The Second Celestina)

26. Calderon, Life’s A Dream

27. William Wycherley, The Country Wife (or Aphra Behn, The Rover)

28. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal

29. Georg Büchner, Woyzeck

30. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (again, more please)

31. August Strindberg, Miss Julie

32. Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters (again, more please)

33. Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

34. George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara (again, more please – he wrote so many!)

35. Alfred Jarry Ubu Roi

36. John Millington Synge, The Playboy of the Western World

37. Sophie Treadwell, Machinal

38. Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour

39. Thornton Wilder, Our Town

40. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (again, more please)

41. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage (again, more please)

42. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (again, more please)

43. Eugene Ionesco, The Bald Soprano (again, more please)

44. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (again, more please)

45. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (again, more please)

46. John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

47. Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

48. Harold Pinter, The Homecoming (again, more please)

49. Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (again, more please)

50. Tom Stoppard, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (again, more please)

Addenda:

For those of you who would like a more comprehensive list, I have one here: http://heironimohrkach.blogspot.com/p/suggested-plays.html

on a page in my blog “The History of Theatre According to Dr Jack” that has nearly 300 titles, to approximately 1999. If you intend to go to grad school, particularly to a PhD program in theatre, you should have read most of the plays on that lengthy list before you even begin.

For recent US writers I find interesting or important or both, go here:  http://heironimohrkach.blogspot.com/2014_02_01_archive.html

to my last post, also on “The History of Theatre According to Dr Jack.”

Cheers all, and Ciao tutti!