No Exit (1944) is a play by French philosopher, writer, and critic Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was drafted into the French army during World War II and spent nearly a year as a German prisoner of war. He then wrote and debuted No Exit in Paris while the city was still under German occupation and control. No Exit is comprised of one act which takes place in a single room in the afterlife, which the characters... Read No Exit Summary

Noises Off by Michael Frayn was originally performed and published in 1982. It ran in English theaters until 1987, was revived in 2000, and began running in the United States in 2001. Frayn’s career as a professional playwright began in 1970, and Noises Off brought him significant critical and commercial success. It was followed many other successful plays, including the Tony-award-winning Copenhagen (1998). Noises Off won the London Evening Standard Award and the Laurence Olivier... Read Noises Off Summary

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Our Town (1938) is a three-act play written by American playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder served in both World War I and World War II and wrote honestly about life in America. He wrote several plays but considered Our Town to be his best work. It was performed for the first time in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1938. Wilder received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Our Town, and the play is widely considered to be... Read Our Town Summary

Phaedra is one of the 10 surviving Roman tragedies attributed to Lucius Annaeus Seneca. It was probably composed in the first half of the first century CE, during the time when the Julio-Claudian Dynasty was in power in Rome. Considered one of Seneca’s most influential plays, Phaedra tells the story of Phaedra’s disastrous and unrequited passion for her stepson Hippolytus, loosely drawing on Euripides’s much earlier Greek tragedy, Hippolytus. The play explores themes such as... Read Phaedra Summary

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When William Inge’s play Picnic opened on Broadway in 1953, it received much popular and critical acclaim. In the post-World War II era, in the face of rising paranoia and fear of communism, the televisions that had become fixtures in American homes broadcast idealized portrayals of small-town family life with shows such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952), Make Room for Daddy (1953), Leave it to Beaver (1957), and The Donna Reed Show... Read Picnic Summary

Prometheus Unbound (1820) is a four-act lyrical drama by Percy Bysshe Shelley, a celebrated English Romantic poet best known for his poems like “Ozymandias” (1818) and “Ode to the West Wind” (1819). The work is adapted from the play cycle Prometheus Bound (456 BCE), Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Bearer, traditionally attributed to the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus. Shelley rewrites the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods for humans and was severely... Read Prometheus Unbound Summary

David Auburn’s play, Proof, premiered in 1999 in New Jersey before moving to New York for an Off-Broadway run and a successful transfer to Broadway in 2000. The original Broadway cast starred Mary Louise Parker as Catherine, and subsequently attracted several other famous women to play the role. Proof received extensive critical acclaim, winning a Drama Desk Award for Best New Play in 2000 and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony Award for Best... Read Proof Summary

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw was first published in 1914, with an updated version published in 1941. The play was Shaw’s most popular and most critically acclaimed work. It inspired the heavily romanticized musical and movie adaptation My Fair Lady, which won both a Tony for Best Musical and an Oscar for Best Picture.Shaw began his career as a novelist, but his novels were largely unsuccessful. After he moved from Dublin to London, he shifted... Read Pygmalion Summary

R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) is a play by Karel Čapek. Čapek was a Czech writer who produced work in many genres, including journalism, essays, plays, short stories, novels, and translations of French poetry. R.U.R. premiered in 1921 at Prague’s National Theater. It is based on a short story by Karel Čapek and his brother Josef Čapek called “The System,” which was published in 1908. Čapek categorized R.U.R. as a collective drama, but it is generally... Read R.U.R. Summary

Saint Joan is a play by playwright George Bernard Shaw that premiered in 1923. The play tells the story of the 15th-century French historical figure Joan of Arc, who was formally canonized as a catholic saint in 1920. The play was a critical success, and, shortly after its premiere, Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. Shaw includes a lengthy preface before the script of the play where he compares the medieval... Read Saint Joan Summary

Seven Guitars, which premiered in 1995 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and transferred to Broadway in 1996, is the seventh play in August Wilson’s American Century Cycle, also known as the Pittsburgh Cycle. This series, consisting of ten plays that are each set in a different decade of the 20th century, explore the lives of African Americans during each era. With the exclusion Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), which takes place in 1920s Chicago... Read Seven Guitars Summary

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Six Characters in Search of an Author by Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello was published in 1921 in a collection of plays called Naked Masks. The play was first performed in Italian; Edward Storer translated it into English in 1922, and it was first performed in London’s West End and New York City later that year. The play’s avant-garde and meta-theatrical elements make it a precursor to the Theatre of the Absurd, and Pirandello’s work inspired... Read Six Characters in Search of an Author Summary

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Spring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy is an 1891 bildungsroman by the German playwright Frank Wedekind. The play chronicles a group of teenagers struggling to navigate puberty in the sexually repressive environment of fin-de-siècle provincial Germany. In its indictment of repressive bourgeois mores, the play addresses topics that prevented it from being performed until 1906, including gay relationships, masturbation, suicide, and rape. This foundational work of Modern theater is notable for the amorality of its teenage... Read Spring Awakening Summary

Suddenly Last Summer (1958) is a one-act play by American playwright Tennessee Williams. It was originally staged with another Williams drama (Something Unspoken) in a double bill known as Garden District and met with mixed reviews upon its Broadway premiere. This may have been due to the content of the play, which includes pedophilia, cannibalism, and relationships between men (considered scandalous at the time). Indeed, Williams reportedly modeled Suddenly Last Summer and its two-monologue structure... Read Suddenly, Last Summer Summary

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, originally published in 1979, is a musical play by Hugh Wheeler with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The play follows murderous barber Sweeney Todd, who seeks revenge against the corrupt Judge Turpin for wrongfully incarcerating him in order to steal Todd’s wife. Wheeler and Sondheim use this tale to examine the exploitation and retaliation of the working class, the perils of obsession, and the tension between tenderness and... Read Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street Summary