Need Good Plays!

[Theshizznigg]

Hello Chicks and Chickies.
Haven't posted in a while because I have been so busy, etc. Life as you all know gets in the way of our finest intentions.
Anyways, I've just started in my colleges, drama program, and I have been advised to read as many plays as possible. The more thought provoking the better in there opinion. Nothing like the live horse on stage being eaten by the void, or stuff like that. But something that promotes interest, vibe, and all that good stuff.
Thus I thought since the average member of this forum are usually well read people, they might also be fans of other entertainments, like the theatre, and curiously with that thought in mind, may have read or seen one or two plays which they found brilliant, or otherwise provocative.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Shizz.

"Of all the antfarms in the world, she had to drop this one."
- Odds Oddities # 3

[motherhubbard]

Eugene O'Neal is the best. I loved The Iceman Cometh and A Long Days Journey into Night.

[Scheherazade]

Eugene O'Neal is the best. I loved The Iceman Cometh and A Long Days Journey into Night.Haven't read anything by O'Neal; I really should.

How about The Crucible by Miller?

Look Back in Anger by Osborne?

[Charles Darnay]

Something by Beckett?

[AuntShecky]

I would suggest something accessible to start with. If you're going to read O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh will prepare you for the much-heavier Long Day's Journey, though the former is extremely thought-provoking and life-affirming in its own seemingly cynical way.
Don't forget comedies -- Kaufmann and Hart, for instance.
I like Edward Albee but have difficulty understanding some of his plays. Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, esp.
Death of a Salesman. Samuel Beckett (except we get him once removed unless we read Waiting for Godot et al in the original French.) Students may respond to Inherit the Wind by Lawrence and Lee; evolution is still a hot topic on these shores.
Great question, by the way!
Auntie

[stlukesguild]

Well... if we are talking modern/contemporary work I would surely recommend Friederich Durrenmatt's The Physicists .

[dmoretta]

My recommendations are:

Waiting for Godot
Night of the Iguana
Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolf?
The Fantasticks
Man of La Mancha
Lysistrata
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Beyond the Horizon
Fences
Piano lesson
Death of a Salesman
A Streetcar Named Desire
Major Barbara
The importance of Being Earnest
The Cherry Orchard
Oedipus Rex

[motherhubbard]

My recommendations are:

Waiting for Godot
Night of the Iguana
Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolf?
The Fantasticks
Man of La Mancha
Lysistrata
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Beyond the Horizon
Fences
Piano lesson
Death of a Salesman
A Streetcar Named Desire
Major Barbara
The importance of Being Earnest
The Cherry Orchard
Oedipus Rex

wonderful list and welcome to the forum!

[Mark F.]

My favourite plays are :

King Lear by Shakespeare
Endgame and Waiting for Godot by Beckett
The Crucible by Miller

[Logos]

Just a few here that come to mind :lol: While Galsworthy was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, he was also a noted playwright: There are a few of his plays on site already, check back in a few days, I'm in the process of adding *many* more :D

http://www.online-literature.com/john-galsworthy/

Henrik Ibsen wrote many plays that are still studied and produced today including A Doll's House:
http://www.online-literature.com/ibsen/

Anton Chekhov wrote some notable plays:
http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/

Not sure how good it is? but James Joyce's Exiles is on site:
http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/exiles/

Oscar Wilde: many of his are popular:
http://www.online-literature.com/wilde/

George Bernard Shaw:
http://www.online-literature.com/george_bernard_shaw/

Aristophanes:
http://www.online-literature.com/aristophanes/

Jean Baptiste Poquelin Moliere wrote many:
http://www.online-literature.com/moliere/

Alexander Pushkin's Boris Godunov:
http://www.online-literature.com/alexander-pushkin/boris-godunov/1/

Not on site but Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle (http://people.stu.ca/~hunt/p2s/22230102/finlwebs/chalk/cccguide.htm) is an excellent play too.

[blp]

The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter

[vili]

I would recommend Tom Stoppard. Most of his output is available in those collected volumes with orange covers.

[Niamh]

Eugene O'Neal is the best. I loved The Iceman Cometh and A Long Days Journey into Night.

I second a long days journey into night.
Right here is a nice longish list for you!
Caucasian chalk circle- Brecht
The cherry orchard-Chechov
Streetcar names desire-Williams
Massacre of paris-Marlowe
A school for scandal-R.B.Sheridan
Playboy of the western world-Synge
The Crucible-Miller
The Inspector General-Gogol
Translations-Friel
Observe the sons of ulster marching towards the somme-MacGuinness
Oedipus- Sophocles
Waiting for Godot-Beckett
The Shadow of a gunman- O'Casey
Cathleen Ni Houlihan-Yeats

[Nossa]

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Ghosts and A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde (actually, any of his plays is a great read)
Plays Unpleasant by G.B. Shaw
The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
The Room by Harold Pinter
All My Sons by Arthur Miller
These are the few that came to my mind..:D

[blp]

Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco

[loe]

My favorite play is: Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?

And I also love the plays by Tennessee Williams (especially The Night of the Iguana), Eugene O'Neill and George Bernard Shaw.

Greetings

[Nightshade]

Well Logos beat me to it mostly....Orwell and shaw are great choice IMO J.M Barrie (http://www.online-literature.com/barrie/) although I dont know how 'thought provoking'he is I just love what every woman knows its always makes me laugh.
Marlowe's (http://www.online-literature.com/marlowe/) Faustus.
But Im not really that good with plays... but its seems alot of other people here are :D

[Mark F.]

Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco

Ionesco's Bald Soprano is worth reading as well.

[Theshizznigg]

Thank you everyone for your input.
Now all I have top do is get ahold of some of the plays through our library, and I should be in business.
Please keep on adding, the bigger the list, the wider the variety, etc.
Shizz.

"I like Psychology, and I look good in a tweed suit, with a pipe."
- Shizz. (I mentioned this in my psychology class today, much to the amusment of my fellow actors.)

[subterranean]

Graham Greene's :thumbs_up

You can check the book The Collected Plays by Graham Greene. My favs are Yes and No and For Whom the Bell Chimes. The complete witts!

[Cellomaster2238]

I am surprised that no one has said this yet, but how about reading some (or all of) Shakespeare.

[Telegram Sam]

Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape packs a punch, though I've never read Waiting for Godot which several people have recommended. Also Chekhov's Cherry Orchard and Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest are personal favorites. And Shakespeare's kind of a given... I'd be pretty surprised if you weren't already familiar. But I'd recommend King Lear anyway. Great play.

Looks like I'm late to the party on recommending all of those, though... but I may as well voice my agreement.

[Niamh]

you can find some of these plays available right here on the site. Go to the authors name as check all searchable texts. That way you can read some of them online, without having to worry about going to the library(and paying late fees!)

[Pensive]

I would recommend Pygmalion and Major Barbara by G.B. Shaw.

[Niamh]

if you can get your hands on it there is a great one woman play called marsinah accuses by Rathna Sarumpaet. Its a wonderfully moving play, written to remember the tragedy of what happened to Marsinah in Indonesia.
heres a link to an extract of the text.
Marsinah Accuses (http://www.insideindonesia.org/edit55/mars.htm)

[*Classic*Charm*]

Like everyone else said: erything written by Miller, Shaw, and Wilde

[ballb]

"The Resistable Rise Of Arturo Ui" by Brecht would certainly be on my list.

[mtpspur]

I second or third The Importance of Being Earnest. Might even enjoy Neil Simon's The Odd Couple for a (modern?) play by way of contrast. I hesitate to recommend Our Town but the ghost of my eighth grade English would rise up in fury if I pretended it did not exist. (Wasn't my cup of tea--I like the Waltons/Seventh Heaven style stories in small doses.)

[aabbcc]

During my formal education (included this last year of it I have left), I was required to read, for Literature class, the following plays (excluded some works of national literature whose titles would not mean much to you):

Sophocles: Antigone and Oedipus Rex
Aeschyles: Prometheus Bound
Euripides: Electra
Plautus: Aululalia
Shakespeare, W.: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream and two works of personal choice (which then pretty much the entire class ended up doing Othello and Macbeth)
Calderon de la Barca, P.: Life is a dream
Racine, J.: Fedra
Moliere: Misanthrope and one work of personal choice (again, we pretty much all ended up doing the same thing, Le Malade Imaginaire)
Goldoni, C.: La Locandiera
Schiller, F.: The Robbers
Ibsen, H.: Doll's House and Hedda Gabler
Pirandello, L.: Six Characters in Search of an Author
Brecht, B.: Mother Courage and Her Children
Ionesco, E.: La Cantatrice Chauve and The Chairs
Beckett, S.: Waiting for Godot
+ one work of personal choice by modern European dramatist

If I am to count literature assigned in English (which we studied as foreign language), then add O. Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and A. Miller's The Crucible to the list; and we also studied innumerable works, at least in excerpts, of classical antiquity in Latin and Greek classes (I attend classical school).

Even though the list is rudimentary and includes in sé just as much as you can put in without it becoming a list for Drama class instead for Literature class, I personally think it is an awesome list to start with, for it gives sort of 'skeleton' which you further can build on (of course, you should include classics of the genre of your national literature as well).
I must admit that personally I have not read an awful lot more than that list, but the work out of school which I liked the best was Lj. Razumovskaja's play named Dear Elena Sergeevna, which I wholeheartedly recommend (I even once got a chance to see a theatre play by it, in Croatia, and I loved it).

I love theatre though I cannot boast with regular attendance of theatre performances (I probably go to theatre to see a play as rarely as once in two months, I tend to be more of concert/ballet person when it comes to that), but when I do attend them, I enjoy them immensely.

I also think it would be advisable to check online reading lists by various theatre schools, there might be some potentially interesting material there.

Good luck with your work. :)

[mortalterror]

Reading the complete Shakespeare is a must, not just Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo, etc. One of my favorite characters of all time is Falstaff, and you have to go to Henry IV parts I and II to get him.

Then there's Jean Racine, who I actually enjoy more than Shakespeare. Instead of reading Phaedra which everyone says is his best play, try Andromache instead, or Iphigenia, or Athaliah.

You can't go wrong with the Oedipus cycle of Sophocles, the Orestea of Aeschylus, and probably Medea, or the Bachae of Euripedes. Sophocles is great for plot. Euripedes is great for character. And Aeschylus combines much of the other two with the finest lyricism outside of Shakespeare.

Read Lysistrata by Aristophanes. His plays read much like ancient South Park and are a riot.

Fuente Ovejuna by Lope De Vega is outstanding. Life is a Dream by Calderon de la Barca is just as good.

Victor Hugo's Hernani is one of the better Romantic plays.

Waiting for Godot, Six Characters in Search of An Author, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Fences, The Crucible, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Death of a Salesman are all terrific modern plays.