Best Plays for High School Students to Read
IF YOU'RE PLANNING to continue as a student of theatre in college — whether as a major or in elective classes — there is some homework you could be doing now. The best way to prep for your next life adventure is to get a solid foundation in the main topic: dramatic literature. And the best style to do that is to see and read key plays from theatre history before you make it on campus.
Why? Because familiarity with plays will actuate your inventiveness, boost your conviction, and print your professors. That'due south what this list is for — to aid you select which plays to read first from the thousands (millions?) that accept been written. Individually, each work on the list demonstrates the power of dramatic storytelling through a playwright's unique phonation and theatrical sensibility. Collectively, they outline a history of Western drama characterized by enduring classics and lively experimentation.
Seeing a production on phase is ideal, simply even and so you tin stretch your mind by reading the script afterwards you've seen it performed — just to run into the choices made in the production that you might non accept imagined. Video recordings are an option as well, though plays on film and Television are usually adapted significantly due to the different demands of live and recorded performances.
Any method you choose — read alone or aloud in groups, attend a live performance, view a video — the main point is this: The future of theatre belongs to those who pursue it. Equally Thornton Wilder explained, if you don't read, picket, and study in your teens and 20s, you'll have nil to say in your 30s, and those should be the prime number years of your creative life in whatever career you choose.
Hither's our list. (Plus, make sure to check out twenty more plays you should read earlier college.)
NOTE: Some of these plays comprise adult language and other mature content themes.
ANCIENT Greece
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
This play has provided a model for Western drama for more than 2,000 years via Aristotle'sPoetics, as well as numerous productions.
Antigone by Sophocles
Antigone introduces the theatre of protest and has been produced at pivotal moments in history past theatre companies around the world to make political statements about individual struggles confronting unjust governance.
THE RENAISSANCE
Tartuffe by Molière
Religious hypocrites, hypochondriacs, misers, insecure lovers, and more find themselves in the bullseye of Molière's satiric wit. InTartuffe, a scoundrel disguised as a religious purist aims to dupe his benefactor, ally the man'southward daughter, and take all his worldly possessions … until the King of France steps in.
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
This famous exploration of introspection, identity, and action features a handful of central roles that have attracted the best actors of their day and ofttimes defined their careers.
Romeo and Juliet past William Shakespeare
Star-crossed lovers, street fights, elopement, and schemes of deception drive this tale of young love destroyed past feuding factions to its distressing and biting stop. (Virtually of these roles, by the mode, are perfect for teenage actors.)
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Role history, function tragedy — this tale of conspiracy and assassination pits political power against patriotism, and award confronting friendship.
A Midsummer Dark's Dream by William Shakespeare
Six pairs of lovers, two worlds, and the fairy kingdom collide in a romantic romp that demonstrates love is guided by forces we know not of.
THE Mod ERA: REALISM
A Doll's Firm by Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen's plays ushered in a new era of socially and politically minded drama, and considering of his accent on grapheme, these plays remain relevant today. In this work, Nora, her family unit, and the final door slam offered a theatrical camaraderie for the burgeoning feminist movement, though Ibsen insisted he wrote a humanist play.
A Raisin in the Lord's day by Lorraine Hansberry
This play answers the question asked by poet Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred?" Read it to detect the power of hope and belief in the face of adversity as an African-American family confronts their doubts and rises above insidious schemes of racist neighbors.
Fences by August Wilson
Fences is part of Wilson'due south 10-play cycle focusing on the African-American experience in the 20th century. The "Pittsburgh Cycle" features one play per decade, andFences focuses on a dysfunctional family unit in the 1950s struggling with hope, duty, honour, and expose, Wilson'south major themes.
THE MODERN ERA: EXPERIMENTATION
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Our Town has become 1 of the about-often produced plays in the world — in high schools and colleges, on Broadway, and on film. With minimal scenery and direct address from the Stage Director, this play broke all the rules to break anybody'southward heart.
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Williams played with conventions of realism by having a middle-anile man reflect upon decisive moments in his younger days. The four characters in this lyrical drama accept become icons in American culture: Tom, Amanda, Laura, and the Admirer Caller.
Death of a Salesman past Arthur Miller
Miller mixes expressionist techniques — fantasy and retentiveness — with explosive confrontations and the unfulfilled hopes of a family unit torn apart by their disability to transcend personal disappointments and forgive past indiscretions.
The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco
This play breaks the dramatic mold completely. With its dizzy mockery of the eye class, this absurdist classic of the mid-20th century reads like a Monty Python script.
Vinegar Tom past Caryl Churchill
Churchill uses "epic theatre" techniques of Bertolt Brecht — such every bit songs sung by characters in modern dress — to dramatize the struggles of 17th century women (and 1 cat) defendant of witchcraft.
CONTEMPORARY: MILLENNIAL
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes by Tony Kushner
No play made a greater splash in late-20th century American culture than this two-part marathon.Part 1: Millennium Approaches interweaves stories of seven characters, ghosts, fantasy figures, and an angel.Function 2: Perestroika continues the characters' defiant struggles to notice a way forward in the historic period of AIDS.
How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel
This play is a disturbing tale of a woman coming to terms with her babyhood and teenage relationship — personal and sexual — with her Uncle Peck. In this Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, the elder Li'l Fleck looks back on her driving lessons equally a manner of dealing with the incestuous acts of her uncle.
Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl
Ruhl updates the classic Greek myth in which Orpheus travels to Hades to bring his deceased lover Eurydice back to the country of the living. On the way back, however, Orpheus turns around to see Eurydice, which seals her fate in the Underworld for the rest of eternity.
Ruined past Lynn Nottage
This play was inspired by stories the playwright collected from women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Set in Mama Nadi's bar, this Pulitzer Prize-winning drama depicts harrowing struggles to survive in a war-torn nation every bit divided loyalties threaten the women Mama Nadi has promised to protect.
Spring Awakening past Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater
Yes, it'southward important to know musicals, too. Based on an 1891 German drama, this ane explores the tumult of teenage sexuality. The original play was banned for decades in Germany, but the American rock musical won eight Tony Awards in 2007.
Yous may want to contend that this list is arbitrary, and of course information technology is, in the sense that nosotros could have substituted other plays for some of the titles here, and another writer might have prepared an altogether different list. Information technology doesn't matter. If the object is to give yourself a adept grounding in the traditions and styles of Western theatre, this listing or a similar i recommended by your theatre teacher will practise that.
I hopes you volition be reading and seeing plays for the rest of your life. These twenty are a good place to go started.
This story appeared in the January 2014 impress consequence ofDramatics. Subscribe today to our print mag.
Source: https://dramatics.org/required-reading/
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