Plays Flashcards
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Eugene O’Neill
Tyrone family, consisting of parents James and Mary and their sons Edmund and Jamie. The “Long Day” refers to the setting of the play, which takes place during one day. The play is semi-autobiographical.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Edward Albee
Two couples at a tiny New England liberal arts college drunkenly go at each other from the wee hours of the morning until almost dawn. Their weapons are their words, and what words they are.
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller
New York / Willy Loman / Descent into senility
Oedipus Rex
Sophocles
Story of Oedipus
Angels in America
Tony Kushner
AIDS / Homophobia
The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams
Wingfield Family / Semi-autobiographical / Williams’ breakthrough play
Look Back in Anger
John Osborne
Young angry British 20th century men
Jimmy and Allison Porter
A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry
First black woman to get a Broadway play / Title comes from “Harlem” by Langston Hughes / Black family in Chicago tries to move up in the world
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett
two tramps on a mostly barren plain waiting for someone named, obviously, Godot. When he doesn’t show in the first act, they do it again with variations in the second. Are they waiting for some sort of perverse God? Is Beckett simply depicting the mundane realities of daily existence in the play? Both?
The Bald Soprano
Eugene Ionesco
French playwright / The life of the complacent bourgeois—and by extension the worlds of many theatergoers—got put through an absurdist prism in this French classic that simultaneously blew the roof off the houses where drawing-room comedies had traditionally taken place.
Hedda Gabler
Henrik Ibsen
Suicide by woman in bad marriage
A Doll’s House
Henrik Ibsen
Feminist play / main character Nora leaves toxic relationship / controversial
Machinal
Sophie Treadwell
For the heroine of this sometimes-harrowing play, life moves from an office job to marriage to the electric chair with cruel intensity.
Fences
August Wilson
Troy Maxson, 1950s negro league baseball pitcher / Pittsburgh Cycle
Uncle Vanya
Anton Chekhov (doctor)
elderly professor and his glamorous, much younger second wife, Yelena
The Seagull
Chekhov
First of Chekhov’s Big 4 / romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the famous middlebrow story writer Boris Trigorin, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Treplev.
Chekhov’s Gun used here
Tartuffe
Moliere
indictment of members of Louis XIV’s court
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Tom Stoppard
Meanwhile, in Hamlet…
Candida
George Bernard Shaw
young poet who thinks he needs to “rescue” a woman away from her clergyman husband,
The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde
farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae to escape burdensome social obligations in Victorian England
A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams
Blanche DuBois / Stella and Stan Kowalski / a former Southern belle who, after encountering a series of personal losses, leaves her privileged background to move into a shabby apartment in New Orleans rented by her younger sister and brother-in-law.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Tennessee Williams
Set in the “plantation home in the Mississippi Delta” of Big Daddy Pollitt, a wealthy cotton tycoon, the play examines the relationships among members of Big Daddy’s family, primarily between his son Brick and Maggie the “Cat”, Brick’s wife.
The Crucible
Arthur Miller
Salem Witch trials / McCarthyism / Abigail Williams
The Cherry Orchard
Chekov’s Last Play
Rise of middle class / end of Russian serfdom / Rich family auctions off estate to son of their former serf / Cherry orchard gets cut down
Woyzeck
Georg Buchner
German / Woyzeck deals with the dehumanising effects of doctors and the military on a young man’s life. It is often seen as ‘working class’ tragedy, though it can also be viewed as having another dimension, portraying the ‘perennial tragedy of human jealousy’
Ah, Wilderness!
Eugene O’Neill
O’Neill’s only well-known comedy.
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
William Inge
family conflicts during the early 1920s in a small Oklahoma town.
American Buffalo
David Mamet
Don, who owns the junk shop where the entire play takes place, has sold a buffalo nickel to a customer for $90 but now suspects it is worth considerably more.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrel (MUSICAL)
Sweet Bird of Youth
Tennessee Williams;
Children of a Lesser God
