50 greatest plays of the past 100 years (19132013)
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Stage plays can have the power to move us, make us laugh, and speak to the human condition more than most art forms. From Southern gothic character studies such as A Streetcar Named Desire to sprawling epics that encapsulate a specific place and time like Angels in America, the past century has seen some of our most defining stories originate on the stage for the benefit of rapt theatergoers.
Ahead, we've ranked what we believe to be the greatest plays of the past 100 years, with links to where you can purchase them all to read (though we encourage you to seek them out if any are being mounted on the stage in your area).
50. The Weir (1997)
By Conor McPherson
Irishmen in a provincial pub swap ghost stories—until a newcomer from Dublin upstages them with her own haunting tale.
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49. Uncommon Women and Others (1977)
By Wendy Wasserstein
Five Mount Holyoke grads gather for an impromptu reunion in Wasserstein's breakout play, an incisive look at educated women that holds up even better than The Heidi Chronicles.
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48. The Piano Lesson (1987)
By August Wilson
What do you do with your legacy? That question is at the heart of Wilson's 1936-set family drama about an heirloom piano carved with the faces of enslaved ancestors.
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47. Awake and Sing! (1935)
By Clifford Odets
A soulful Depression-era drama about a multigenerational Jewish family in a cramped Bronx apartment.
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46. What the Butler Saw (1969)
By Joe Orton
Set at a psychiatrist's clinic, this bone-dry farce packs in everything from adultery to cross-dressing to "the missing parts of Sir Winston Churchill."
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45. The Women (1936)
By Clare Boothe Luce
An all-female cast paints the town red—jungle red—in Luce's deliciously vicious (and sometimes catty) send-up of Manhattan society.
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44. The Orphans' Home Cycle (1962–2009)
By Horton Foote
Loosely based on the life of Foote's father, this sharply observed nine-play saga traces one small-town Texas man from the turn of the 20th century through the Depression.
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43. The Odd Couple (1965)
By Neil Simon
Simon spins comic gold from a simple premise: A fastidious newspaperman, Felix, moves in with his slovenly divorcé buddy, Oscar. The playwright's signature stage comedy spawned a hit film and TV series.
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42. Journey's End (1928)
By R.C. Sherriff
Sherriff dives into the trenches of World War I for a mesmerizingly claustrophobic study of men in combat. The original London cast included a young Laurence Olivier.
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41. Picnic (1953)
By William Inge
Paul Newman made his Broadway debut in Inge's classically structured play about caddish guys and the middle-American women of all ages who love them in spite of their better judgment.
40. Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970)
By Dario Fo
Fo's political farce—based on a 1969 incident involving a Milan terror suspect—features a lethal bomb, a histrionic judge-impersonating criminal known as the Maniac, and two alternate endings.
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39. The Front Page (1928)
By Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur
Chicago journalists Hecht and MacArthur wrote what they knew: a comedy classic about tabloid reporters naturally inclined to hip-pocket cynicism and rat-a-tat dialogue.
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38. Topdog/Underdog (2001)
By Suzan-Lori Parks
Parks' magnificent two-hander focuses on hypercompetitive African American brothers (initially played by Jeffrey Wright and Don Cheadle) portentously named Lincoln and Booth.
37. Saved (1965)
By Edward Bond
Bond's gritty, oft-censored look at impoverished young Londoners (which includes a notorious baby-stoning scene) influenced shock-and-awe purveyors such as Adam Rapp, Martin McDonagh, and Sarah Kane.
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36. The Dybbuk (1920)
By S. Ansky
On the eve of her wedding, a young woman is possessed by a malevolent spirit. Based on Jewish folklore, the play has become a Yiddish-theater staple.
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35. M. Butterfly (1988)
By David Henry Hwang
Hwang's wistful drama is based on the true story of a French diplomat's romance with a Chinese opera diva—who's actually a man masquerading as a woman.
34. The Bald Soprano (1950)
By Eugène Ionesco
Pity the poor actors who must memorize Ionesco's string of absurdist non sequiturs. "It's not that way. It's over here!"
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33. The Norman Conquests (1973)
By Alan Ayckbourn
There's never been a weekend in the country quite like the one these six bed-hopping characters experience in this madcap comic trilogy.
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32. Machinal (1928)
By Sophie Treadwell
A high point of expressionism, inspired by the true story of a woman executed in the electric chair after murdering her boss-turned-husband.
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31. The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001)
By Martin McDonagh
Tarantino-like dialogue and bloodletting feature prominently in a pitch-black comedy about an inept Irish Republican Army splinter group and the killing of a beloved cat named Wee Thomas.
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30. Marat/Sade (1964)
By Peter Weiss
Weiss crafts a play-within-a-play directed by the notorious Marquis de Sade in Charenton Asylum that questions the catalyst for true revolution.
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29. Noises Off (1982)
By Michael Frayn
Frayn elevates the door-slamming farce to high art in this three-act gem, which reveals the behind-the-scenes tensions in a hapless acting ensemble that continually bungles its cues and misplaces crucial plates of sardines.
28. Present Laughter (1942)
By Noël Coward
Few midlife crises are as uproariously funny as fortysomething actor Garry Essendine's in Coward's typically witty comedy.
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27. Top Girls (1982)
By Caryl Churchill
The Thatcher-era look at women's achievements kicks off with an all-star dinner party including a ninth-century female pope, British explorer Isabella Bird, and Patient Griselda from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
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26. Doubt (2004)
By John Patrick Shanley
Far more nuanced than the 2008 film, Shanley's play centers on the fascinatingly ambiguous bond between a parish priest and an (unseen) altar boy—and the rigid nun on a crusade for what she believes is justice.
25. Six Degrees of Separation (1990)
By John Guare
In a wicked comedy of manners, a young man charms his way into Manhattan society by claiming to be Sidney Poitier's son.
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24. Mother Courage and Her Children (1941)
By Bertolt Brecht
An open response to the start of World War II, Brecht created a complex survival-bent heroine in an antiwar epic set during the 17th-century Thirty Years' War.
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23. Ruined (2008)
By Lynn Nottage
Like Mama Nadi, the savvy brothel owner at the center of this portrait of Congo's civil war, Nottage doesn't choose sides between the government forces and the equally brutal rebels.
22. The Homecoming (1965)
By Harold Pinter
The dialogue pierces in Pinter's account of a young couple's visit to the hubby's all-male family. But the silences are just as explosive.
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21. "Master Harold"... and the Boys (1982)
By Athol Fugard
Once banned in South Africa, Fugard's apartheid-era play depicts a 17-year-old white boy's complicated ties to two middle-aged Black servants.
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20. The Real Thing (1982)
By Tom Stoppard
The erudite Czech-born British wordsmith crafts an ingeniously clever play-within-a-play in which a Stoppard-like playwright reworks scenes from his actual life and his thorny relationships with women.
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19. The Little Foxes (1939)
By Lillian Hellman
Who says women must always be demure little victims? In Hellman's Southern-fried domestic drama, Regina Giddens proves to be far more ruthless than her avaricious brothers in her quest for financial security and the family business.
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18. A View From the Bridge (1955)
By Arthur Miller
In Miller's contemporary Greek tragedy, a Brooklyn longshoreman is driven to jealous distraction when his 17-year-old niece (and ward) falls for a newly arrived immigrant.
17. Look Back in Anger (1956)
By John Osborne
The first of British theater's Angry Young Men, Osborne produced a harshly realistic love triangle involving a working-class lad who marries an upper-middle-class gal despite the scoffing of her haughty best friend.
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16. The Iceman Cometh (1946)
By Eugene O'Neill
Stop us if you've heard this one before: A sober man walks into a bar, Harry Hope's sad-sack saloon in 1912 Greenwich Village. Then O'Neill's confederacy of end-of-their-rope drunks struggle to cling to their delusions.
14. August: Osage County (2007)
By Tracy Letts
Pill-popping Oklahoma matriarch Violet Weston serves as hostess of a memorably snappish family reunion in Letts' barnstorming domestic drama.
13. Glengarry Glen Ross (1984)
By David Mamet
In Mamet's kinetic, foulmouthed play about shady Chicago real estate salesmen, top agent Ricky Roma offers some sound advice: Always be closing.
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12. The Glass Menagerie (1944)
By Tennessee Williams
In this memory play—which launched Williams into the public eye—shrill, smothering Southern belle Amanda Wingfield meddles in the stunted lives of her two misfit adult children.
11. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921)
By Luigi Pirandello
Theater of the absurd has seldom been more cockeyed. Six strangers burst into a theater, interrupt a rehearsal, and demand that the show's director complete the unfinished story of their lives.
10. Our Town (1938)
By Thornton Wilder
A Stage Manager leads a tour of all-American small town Grover's Corners in Wilder's no-frills play. It is typically staged with only tables, chairs, and ladders for a set—and yet it's built for the ages.
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9. A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
By Lorraine Hansberry
A Black family living on Chicago's down-and-out South Side contend with how to improve their lot. In this compelling drama, the options include embracing their African heritage and assimilating into white American culture.
8. Pygmalion (1913)
By George Bernard Shaw
More people know the musical My Fair Lady than Shaw's original play about phonetics professor Henry Higgins and his attempt to pass off Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle as a proper lady. But wouldn't it be loverly if it were otherwise?
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7. Waiting for Godot (1953)
By Samuel Beckett
The Irish playwright's bizarro existentialist classic features philosophizing, slapstick-loving tramps Gogo and Didi passing the time in a barren landscape where "time has stopped."
6. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1993–94)
By Tony Kushner
In his seven-hour epic, Kushner (husband of EW columnist Mark Harris) grapples with gay identity in the midst of the AIDS crisis and depicts characters both straight and gay, fictional and real (including deeply closeted McCarthyist lawyer Roy Cohn).
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5. Fences (1985)
By August Wilson
Wilson's 1950s-set drama is a memorable portrait of Negro League ballplayer-turned-trash collector Troy Maxson. He's a bundle of contradictions, demanding that his sons live practical, responsible lives even though he himself is a philanderer given to flights of fancy.
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4. Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956)
By Eugene O'Neill
O'Neill recounts a fateful summer evening at the Tyrone family's seaside home, where members of the clan battle their addictions (to alcohol and morphine) as well as one another.
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3. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)
By Edward Albee
The worst house party ever. In Albee's explosive play, which returned to Broadway in 2012 for a Tony-winning revival, an embittered, long-married academic couple host a much younger prof and his wife for an evening of brandy and verbal abuse. The older pair are named George and Martha—making them the first couple of American dysfunction.
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2. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
By Tennessee Williams
Blanche DuBois, a fading Southern beauty with delusions of grandeur, may depend on the kindness of strangers—but she falls under the sway of her brutish, brooding brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski in Williams' searing tragedy. Marlon Brando, mumble-mouthed and T-shirted, made an indelible impression as the first Stanley on stage and on film, but the role still packs a punch today.
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1. Death of a Salesman (1949)
By Arthur Miller
Attention must be paid. In the decades since its debut, Miller's drama about aging middle-class Everyman Willy Loman has become a classic evocation of the dark side of the American dream. Willy struggles to compete in an economy that prizes youth and innovation over old-fashioned relationships. Weighed down by disappointment and false pride, he sees little hope of redemption in his two underachieving sons, whom he's taught to value superficial popularity over genuine accomplishment. In our Kardashian-saturated era, it's a message that seems even more urgent today.
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