Certain plays have left an indelible mark on the world of theatre. These works have shaped the evolution of drama, influenced countless artists, and continue to captivate audiences with their emotional depth, complex characters, and universal themes. From timeless Tony Award® winners to Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpieces, here are 10 of the best theatrical plays in the Dramatists Play Service catalog.
Sara Krulwich, 2014 Broadway production
You Can’t Take It With You by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman
The family of Martin Vanderhof lives “just around the corner from Columbia University—but don’t go looking for it.” Grandpa, as Martin is more commonly known, is the paterfamilias of a large and extended family: His daughter, Penny, who fancies herself a romance novelist; her husband, Paul, an amateur fireworks expert; their daughter, Alice, an attractive and loving girl who is still embarrassed by her family’s eccentricities—which include a xylophone player/leftist leaflet printer, an untalented ballerina, a couple on relief, and a ballet master exiled from Soviet Russia. When Alice falls for her boss, Tony, a handsome scion of Wall Street, she fears that their two families—so unlike in manner, politics, and finances—will never come together. During a disastrous dinner party, Alice’s worst fears are confirmed. Her prospective in-laws are humiliated in a party game, fireworks explode in the basement, and the house is raided by the FBI. Frustrated and upset, Alice intends to run away to the country, until Grandpa and Co.—playing the role of Cupid—manage not only to bring the happy couple together, but to set Tony’s father straight about the true priorities in life. After all, why be obsessed by money? You can’t take it with you.
Winner of the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
J. Urdaneta, 2014 Walnut Street Theatre production
Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring
Drama critic Mortimer Brewster’s engagement announcement is upended when he discovers a corpse in his elderly aunts’ window seat. Mortimer rushes to tell Abby and Martha before they stumble upon the body themselves, only to learn that the two old women aren’t just aware of the dead man in their parlor, they killed him! Between his aunts’ penchant for poisoning wine, a brother who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, and another brother using plastic surgery to hide from the police—not to mention Mortimer’s own hesitancy about marriage—it’ll be a miracle if Mortimer makes it to his wedding. Arsenic and Old Lace is a classic black comedy about the only thing more deadly than poison: family.
Sara Krulwich, 2012 Broadway production
Harvey by Mary Chase
Elwood P. Dowd insists on including his friend Harvey in all of his sister Veta’s social gatherings. Trouble is, Harvey is an imaginary six-and-a-half-foot-tall rabbit. To avoid future embarassment for her family—and especially for her daughter, Myrtle Mae—Veta decides to have Elwood committed to a sanitarium. At the sanitarium, a frantic Veta explains to the staff that her years of living with Elwood’s hallucination have caused her to see Harvey also, and so the doctors mistakenly commit her instead of her mild-mannered brother. The truth comes out, however; Veta is freed, and the search is on for Elwood, who eventually arrives at the sanitarium of his own volition, looking for Harvey. But it seems that Elwood and his invisible companion have had a strange influence on more than one of the doctors. Only at the end does Veta realize that maybe Harvey isn’t so bad after all.
Johan Persson, 2022 West End production
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Amanda Wingfield is a faded remnant of Southern gentility who now lives in a dingy St. Louis apartment with her son, Tom, and her daughter, Laura, who has a physical handicap and debilitating shyness. The father has left home; Tom supports his mother and sister with a shoe-factory job he finds unbearable. When Amanda convinces Tom to bring home from his workplace a “gentleman caller” for Laura, the illusions that Tom, Amanda, and Laura have each created in order to make life bearable collapse about them.
Sara Krulwich, 2012 Broadway production
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
The play reveals to the very depths the character of Blanche DuBois, a woman whose life has been undermined by her romantic illusions, which lead her to reject—so far as possible—the realities of life with which she is faced and which she consistently ignores. The pressure brought to bear upon her by her sister, with whom she goes to live in New Orleans, intensified by the earthy and extremely “normal” young husband of the latter, leads to a revelation of her tragic self-delusion and, in the end, to madness.
Winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Brigitte Lacombe, 2012 Broadway production
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
The story revolves around the last days of Willy Loman, a failing salesman, who cannot understand how he failed to win success and happiness. Through a series of tragic soul-searching revelations of the life he has lived with his wife, his sons, and his business associates, we discover how his quest for the “American Dream” kept him blind to the people who truly loved him. A thrilling work of deep and revealing beauty that remains one of the most profound classic dramas of the American theatre.
Winner of the 1949 Tony Award® for Best Play and the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Richard Termine, 2019 Off-Broadway production
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Widely considered a masterpiece, this timeless classic challenges American ideas of power, intolerance, and justice. In the Puritan community of Salem, Massachusetts, a servant girl accuses a farmer’s wife of witchcraft. One accusation spirals into many, uncovering a web of bigotry and deceit that changes their lives forever. Among the most produced plays since its 1953 debut, The Crucible is both a gripping historical drama and an evergreen parable of contemporary society.
Winner of the 1953 Tony Award® for Best Play
Sara Krulwich, 2018 Lincoln Center production
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
The New York World-Telegram describes: “Godot cannot be compared to any other theater work, because its purpose is so different. Two dilapidated bums fill their days as painlessly as they can. They wait for Godot, a personage who will explain their interminable insignificance, or put an end to it. They are resourceful, with quarrels and their dependence on each other, as children are. They pass the time ‘which would have passed anyway.’ A brutal man of means comes by, leading a weakling slave who does his bidding like a mechanical doll. Later on he comes back, blind, and his slave is mute, but the relationship is unchanged. Every day a child comes from the unknown Godot, and evasively puts the big arrival off until tomorrow…It is a tragic view. Yet, in performance, most of it is brilliant, bitter comedy…It is a portrait of the dogged resilience of a man’s spirit in the face of little hope.”
Sara Krulwich, 2016 Broadway production
Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill
As told by New York Journal-American: “In the space of one day, from morning until midnight, we are given the tortured family background which created the elusive yet magnificent talent of the author. The characters come to life with an almost frightening fidelity; it is doubtful if any work in the theatre has ever been written with such first-person authority. The proceedings take place in the living room of a summer house in 1912. In short order we learn that the father, although well off, is a confirmed miser; one son is a drunk, the younger one is tubercular and the mother is a drug addict. Then we begin to learn the reasons for this excessive bad fortune. The mother’s addiction resulted from the father’s penury in sending her to a second-rate doctor; the elder boy drinks from sheer frustration; the old man has never been able to get over his magnified respect for money induced by an impoverished childhood. Even the illness of the younger son, quite obviously the author, is being treated by the cheapest local physician, and the father is planning to send him to a state sanatorium where he will hopefully expire inexpensively. This sounds like a preponderance of tragedy for any household, and so it must have been, but it is revealed in such terms of stark honesty that no one can ever doubt its stature as an autobiographical document. The people speak in the everyday language of our neighbors; their emotions rise and fall with the absurd devotion to trivialities which provoke so many quarrels; these are dimensional characters trying desperately to keep their doomed household together.”
Winner of the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Sara Krulwich, 2012 Broadway production
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
George, a professor at a small college, and his wife, Martha, have just returned home, drunk from a Saturday night party. Martha announces, amidst general profanity, that she has invited a young couple—an opportunistic new professor at the college and his shatteringly naïve new bride—to stop by for a nightcap. When they arrive the charade begins. The drinks flow and suddenly inhibitions melt. It becomes clear that Martha is determined to seduce the young professor, and George couldn’t care less. But underneath the edgy banter, which is crossfired between both couples, lurks an undercurrent of tragedy and despair. George and Martha’s inhuman bitterness toward one another is provoked by the enormous personal sadness that they have pledged to keep to themselves: a secret that has seemingly been the foundation for their relationship. In the end, the mystery in which the distressed George and Martha have taken refuge is exposed, once and for all revealing the degrading mess they have made of their lives.
Winner of the 1963 Tony Award® for Best Play
