The Best American Plays of the Last 25 Years

Suzan-Lori Parks

The New York Times put out a special section yesterday naming the twenty-five best American plays of the last twenty-five years. If that seems arbitrary, it was set in motion by the first revival of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, which debuted in 1993, thus these are the best since then.

The Times theater critics selected the plays. They get cute about the method of election, and it does seem like they have checked off certain boxes: plays about African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and homosexuals. Only seven of the plays are written by white men about white people. Ten are written or co-written by women, and six are by African Americans. This is a complete reversal of Broadway before the 1970s or so, when plays were written mostly by white men about white characters. But then again, many of the plays selected didn't play on Broadway. None of them originated there.

I have either seen or read eight of them, so I have some reading to do. For those I have seen in person, I agree with all but one.  My favorite of the period is August: Osage Country, Tracy Letts' scathing take on a dysfunctional family in Oklahoma. As pointed out in the piece, the family reunion plot is a reliable one, but Letts overloads the bitterness and anger that watching it is like watching an electrical fire. I have to quote Elisabeth Vincentelli's reaction to the end of Act II, because I had the exact same feeling: "When Barbara, the oldest and most conflicted sibling, ends a disastrous dinner by screaming to her mother, “You don’t get it, do you? I’M RUNNING THINGS NOW!” at the very end of Act II, it is one of the most satisfying exclamation points in modern theater. You simply could not wait to see what happened after that second intermission."

I also recall having a great time with Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, which was about his mother. I have a copy of the play, so I'd like to read it again. Also seen by me is Ruined, by Lynn Nottage, Clybourne Park, by Bruce Norris, The Wolves, by Sarah deLappe, and The Realistic Joneses, by Will Eno. That last one I saw on Broadway and didn't care for it, finding its oddities unjustified and silly for silly's sake.

Of those I read, I count Annie Baker's The Flick, about three ushers in a movie theater. It prompted walkouts because it runs three hours, much of it simply ushers cleaning up. I've also read. The only other one I read was their number one choice: Top Dog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks. I'm sorry to say I read it so long ago that I don't remember much about it, which says more about my memory that the play itself.

The list includes a couple of plays that have firmly embedded themselves in our culture: Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, which has been performed by almost every female star in the firmament, and The Laramie Project, by Moises Kaufman, which is about the martyred Matthew Shepard, a gay youth who was killed and left to die on a barbed-wire fence in Wyoming.

Another documentary-style piece on the list is Anne Deveare Smith's one-woman show, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, commissioned and written following the riots after the Rodney King verdict. Others veer far from realism, such as Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, about survivors of an apocalypse mounting a traveling show re-enacting Simpsons' episodes, and another credited only to The Wooster Group, an experimental theater group, House/Lights.

More conventional entries (at least in structure) are Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner, Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth, Stephen Karam's The Humans, and Richard Nelson's tetralogy, The Apple Plays. There are a few I know nothing about, such as Steven Adly Guirgis' Jesus Hopped the A Train, and Kristoffer Diaz's The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.

There also had to be a play by August Wilson, whose cycle of ten plays about the African American experience in the 20th century is one of the great achievements in American literature. But the choice is not the better-known Fences, it is Seven Guitars, which I haven't seen nor read.

Another thing I noticed is that five Pulitzer-Prize winners are on the list, which suggests that that organization is fairly in line with the general critical consensus (unlike other awards, which will remain unspoken).

Some of these plays have reviews on the blog: August Osage County, Clybourne Park, Ruined, The Wolves, The Flick, and The Realistic Joneses. I'll try to read and comment on the other 21 plays over the next few months, either by reading them or finding film versions.. I'm looking forward to making new discoveries, and revisiting old favorites. What's clear about this list, no matter how it was chosen, is that it is a fair representation of American history, both of the last twenty-five years and before.