Essay

To be a good actor/director/teacher/person is to be a good reader. Read one play

a week for a year and watch how your craft develops. Seriously.

Can you read 1 play every week? Here's the list:

1. Our Town by Thornton Wilder

2. A Raisin in The Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

3. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

4. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

5. Noises Off by Michael Frayn

6. The History Boys by Alan Bennett

7. Doubt by John Patrick Shanley

8. Antigone by Sophocles

9. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

10. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov

11. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

12. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

13. The Miracle Worker by William Gibson

14. A Doll’s House by Henric Ibsen

15. A Midsummer's Night Dream by William Shakespeare

16. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

17. Uncommon Women and Others by Wendy Wasserstein

18. Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lorie Parks

19. How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel

20. 'night Mother by Marsha Norman

21. The Shape of Things by Neil LaBute

22. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

23. The Crucible by Arthur Miller

24. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard

25. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes by Tony Kushner

26. for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake

Shange

27. Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet

28. Picnic by William Inge

29. The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neil

30. No Exit by Jean-Paul Satre

31. Proof by David Auburn

32. Pygmailion by George Bernard Shaw

33. Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen

34. The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh

35. Tartuffe by Molière

36. The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman

37. The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco

38. The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht

39. Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neil

40. Fences by August Wilson

41. August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

42. True West by Sam Shepard

43. The Homecoming by Harold Pinter

44. Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare

45. Present Laughter by Noel Coward

46. Machinal by Sophie Treadwell

47. M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang

48. The Odd Couple by Neil Simon

49. Top Girls by Caryl Churchill

50. Tea and Sympathy by Robert Anderson

51. The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie

52. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? by Edward Albee

*list taken from www.theaterish.com/new-blog/2014/11/20/1-year-of-plays