The American Way – George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, 1939 ★

Letting Freedom Ring...a Bit Tinnily

Sometimes a work of art tries too hard to say all the right things, only to make its points to the point of banality. Such is the fate of this drama meant to prepare the country for the start of World War II.

A historically significant but dramatically leaden presentation of the national experience over 43 years, “The American Way” is a departure for playwrights George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart in its deadly earnestness. Almost bereft of humor, it pivots from flag-waver to tragedy without giving an audience a chance to catch their breaths.

Broadway – Brooks Atkinson, 1970 ★½

A Dreary Look at a Gaudy Street

The Great White Way has played host to countless tragedies and comedies. Only a small minority ever appear on stage. You would think 70 years of that would automatically make for exciting reading.

Think again.

Brooks Atkinson was not only a veteran of many decades when he wrote this thick history about the Manhattan midtown mecca for theatrical entertainment. He was himself a Broadway institution, having given his name to a theater on West 47^th Street. That he knew and loved so many of those he wrote about is part of the problem.

R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) – Karel Čapek, 1921 ★★★ [Translated by Claudia Novack]

Prometheus Unhinged

A play that famously coined a word for the ages is also a pioneering science fiction work with a vision of a future we are catching up to over a hundred years later.

Just imagine a world where people create artificial devices to do their work, only to find themselves displaced by the same machines faster than you can say “Sarah Connor.”

There was no such word as “robots,” or, to use its original Czech form, roboti, before a young writer named Karel Čapek used it to categorize the menacing non-humans who loom over his play. Karel gave credit to his brother Josef for the word.

Merrily We Roll Along – George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, 1934 ★½

The Backwards Journey of a Heel

The mechanics of stagecraft are fairly basic. Performers recreate moments of life heightened and condensed for dramatic/comic purposes. Events play out as if in real time, without cuts, on a raised platform where another place and time is brought to life for an audience.

But what if one of the critical elements of standard dramaturgy was altered? What if a play moved backwards? What if you start at the ending, and then rewind it all to the beginning?

That is the concept behind Merrily We Roll Along, a serious play by two comedic writers, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Instead of introducing characters, then bringing them to some conflict or crisis, we first see the conflicts play out, then learn about the characters.

The Seagull – Anton Chekhov, 1896 ★★★ [Translation by Ann Dunnigan]

Stop Being So Dramatic

Forming a judgment on any work regarded as a classic by so many can be tricky. Enjoy it, and expose your conformity. Don’t, and acknowledge the possibility you are the problem.

I get the latter feeling whenever I read Chekhov, one of world literature’s most revered names. His drowsy narratives and lifeless characters leave me so cold. Yet the critical elite extol his plays as spellbinding works of deep emotion and unique stagecraft.

This has confused and annoyed me for quite a while. Yet re-reading his first multi-act and most famous play, The Seagull, something clicked. Not so much that I enjoyed it (I don’t think Chekhov wrote for that purpose), but at least I began to suss out why he matters to so many.

Summer And Smoke – Tennessee Williams, 1948 ★★★½

Here's To The Losers

Love isn’t horseshoes; there’s no scoring for landing near the mark. No one knew this better or communicated it more incessantly than Tennessee Williams, whose plays were epics of romantic frustration. One of his accessible and endearing, and at the same time perhaps the most depressing, is this.

Set deep in his classic time and place, the American South in “the first few years” of the 20^th century, Summer And Smoke spotlights a pair of star-crossed next-door neighbors, she a uptight minister’s daughter, he a hedonistic heir to his father’s medical practice. She believes in God, he believes in medicine, but somehow these opposites not only attract but are impelled toward each other.

As Williams takes us from him teasing her in childhood to their adult selves having deep conversations about choosing between self-gratification and social obligation, you begin to wonder: should I root for them to be a couple, or to break free of each other’s spell?

The Three Sisters – Anton Chekhov, 1901 ★★½ [Translation by Ann Dunnigan]

Misery Loves Company

If I have to recommend one Anton Chekhov play, it would probably be this one. If you want consistency, this is a remarkably consistent and harrowing examination of the human condition at its most tragic. If you want wit, you get ample sidelong observations, pithy and quotable.

If you want compelling characters and an involving narrative, well, you do get the best examples of both from him here. But it is Chekhov, after all, at his most dreary. This is the man who inspired the lyric “I’ve found more clouds of gray/Than any Russian play/Could guarantee.”

If that play was The Three Sisters, Ira Gershwin must have been in one hell of a thunderstorm.

Period Of Adjustment – Tennessee Williams, 1960 ★½

Manly Men and Women Stuck with Them

Two youngish couples struggling to find Christmas Eve contentment in Eisenhower-era suburbia may not seem like fertile ground for an outsider’s artist like Tennessee Williams. And it isn’t.

Written both as a send-up and a genuine appreciation for the American middle class, Period Of Adjustment is billed as “a serious comedy,” when it is really neither. Williams has a sense of sarcasm about his characters, but his need to convey their basic goodness dampens any edges he might have had. Maybe on stage the right actors could inject a spark of life, but on the page it makes for a stiff, mawkish read.

Ivanov – Anton Chekhov, 1887 ★★★ [Translation by Ann Dunnigan]

Hell Is Other People

Whether it be garden parties or the bonds of matrimony, social conventions carry oppressive connotations in the plays of Anton Chekhov. This is established in the first and least famous of his multiple-act plays, Ivanov.

Despair is a common thread running through his plays, making them tough for me to enjoy the way others do. But for all its angst and despondency, Ivanov does have some things going for it, like humor and an active plot, that make for a more positive reading experience.

If only the title character wasn’t so much of a pill, even if his character is what makes this a full-blown tragedy.

Mother Courage And Her Children: A Chronicle Of The Thirty Years’ War – Bertolt Brecht, 1941 ★★★ [Translation by Eric Bentley]

How a Character Hijacked a Play

Sometimes a fictional character becomes something bigger than its creator intended. John Milton didn’t want readers coming away from Paradise Lost admiring Satan. Norman Lear expected viewers of “All In The Family” to laugh at Archie Bunker, not sympathize with him.

It is hard to watch a person, however flawed, struggle through life and not feel something akin to affection, even identification.

Bertolt Brecht was annoyed how people took to the main character of this play, Anna Fierling. How could they miss her crass exploitation, her blithe ignorance of war’s cruel folly, her willingness to put her offspring in harm’s way? Instead, they liked her down-to-earth manner and sympathized with her struggle to make ends meet. How bourgeois!

The Cherry Orchard – Anton Chekhov, 1904 ★ [Translation by Ann Dunnigan]

What a Bringdown

Chekhov did comedy like Capone did Valentine’s Day.

Further proof of this comes in the form of The Cherry Orchard, a play so non-comedic it was advertised as a tragedy in its Moscow debut, causing Chekhov to blow up.

Orpheus Descending – Tennessee Williams, 1957 ★★½

Hot for the Hired Help

Some authors test your tolerance for excess. Because they work at a higher pitch than more realistic writers, you know better than complain when that approach comes off as a bit extreme, even for them.

Tennessee Williams didn’t write normal plays, whatever those are. He wrote plays about desperate, decadent people struggling for love trapped in social orders that refuse to understand or accept them. Understand this, and you can see Orpheus Descending for what it is, a template for everything that followed in his glorious career.

For that, it is fascinating and revealing. Never mind it is a hot mess, too.

Uncle Vanya – Anton Chekhov, 1898 ★ [Translation by Ann Dunnigan]

A Play about Nothing

How can one put this gently? Many if not most people of education and culture regard Anton Chekhov as the master of modern drama, and if his Uncle Vanya is any indication, they are all horribly wrong.

Chekhov wrote for an audience that wanted, as he did, the ambiguity of real human experience, that sought a mirror held up to everyday life and molded into something that held its own on stage. He wrote to a specific Russian mindset that understand life was harsh and short.

I get all that. I want to embrace Uncle Vanya because not doing so marks one as a knuckle-dragging philistine. But I can’t. I really hate this play.

Suddenly Last Summer – Tennessee Williams, 1958 ★★★

Insanity is Relative

Tennessee Williams had a knack for giving his plays lovely, off-beat titles. This one has perhaps one of his most evocative and mysterious.

What does it mean, Suddenly Last Summer? What exactly happens? I wondered about this long before I heard of the play, back when it was the title of a sultry, ominous pop hit that seemed always in heavy rotation back in 1983: “It happened one summer/It happened one time/It happened forever/For a short time.”

The Motels didn’t give me much to go on there. For the first three scenes of this one-act play, Tennessee Williams keeps you guessing, too.

Journey’s End – R. C. Sherriff, 1928 ★★★★

Where Poppies Blow

War is hell. A hell of a bore, for one thing. Imagine endless days sitting in a trench somewhere while the rain and muck and rats have at you, trying to think of anything to take your mind off the prospect of sudden, violent death. Maybe even getting numb from it after awhile.

World War I had a reputation for that, on account of the long-static lines of the Western Front and the work of writers who survived, men on both sides including R. C. Sherriff, who ten years after getting wounded in combat wrote a play about both the dying and the waiting.

The Ghost Sonata – August Strindberg, 1907 ★

Doing the Swedish Limbo

One reason August Strindberg appeals so much to scholars is because he was so many different people in the course of his life. He’s like getting to study a half-dozen writers in one.

He started out composing history plays, became a father of modern drama, an authority of that oxymoron called theatrical naturalism, and finally a pioneer of stage expressionism and surrealism.

By the time we get to The Ghost Sonata, he has reinvented himself again, this time as the metaphysically-focused developer of what are known as “chamber plays,” productions performed in a small space by a handful of actors. The ground he covered was varied and impressive; yet the shape of his work is hard to gauge.

A Dream Play – August Strindberg, 1902 [Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge] ★★½

When Sleep is not Rest

Genius and success often make strange bedfellows. For some artists, nothing can be more destructive than commercial or critical acclaim.

Consider August Strindberg. At the dawn of the 20^th century, he was seen by Europe’s intelligentsia as not only comparable to Shakespeare but, as Sean O’Casey exclaimed, “the greatest of them all.” Yet decades of naturalistic dramas left him burnt out. The more success he got, the more he hungered to do something more ambitious.

Thus came into being A Dream Play, one of the oddest works written for stage by a major playwright.

Easter – August Strindberg, 1901 [Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge] ★★★

Strindberg Does 'Porch Pals'

Here’s a happy, heartwarming story about a family under siege featuring a bitter man, his deluded mother, a sister who talks to God, and a straying fiancée; all threatened by an angry town and a creditor who could take their house at any moment.

And no, I’m not being sarcastic about that “happy, heartwarming” part, even if it is a play by that most dour of dramatists, August Strindberg.

The Father – August Strindberg, 1887 [Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge] ★½

Throwing Away the Envelope

What would a battle of the sexes look like if participants were less motivated by sexual desire and more by Nietzschean will to power? The Father sets the struggle of man versus woman, or rather husband versus wife, in exactly that context.

Whether the play is valid, illuminating, or entertaining as presented is a different question. I didn’t find it so, but I was born a century after the intended audience. They found this drama convincing enough to help lift its author, August Strindberg, to international fame.

Miss Julie – August Strindberg, 1888 [Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge] ★★★½

Cupid Is a Ruthless Hunter

Love is nice, but what really counts in this life is power. That cold lesson is transformed into a classic play about what happens when a servant gets too involved with the mistress of the house.

If there is an anti-Ibsen when it comes to preaching the gospels of naturalism and humanism in 19^th-century drama, it is his near-countryman August Strindberg, an ornery Swede who sneered at audiences and critics discoursing upon mankind’s hopeless condition.