A Dramatic Canon

The following list serves the new writer to the theatre or the seasoned practitioner. The plays come from nearly every country in the world and from every walk of life. Some of the plays are listed for their popular value in certain theatrical cultures; others are aesthetically and technically magnificent and are worth continual scrutiny.

Solidifying any canon is a fool’s errand—canonization should be a collective endeavor. For all intents and purposes, this is my canon—a canon. While the list naturally gives more weight to American dramatists, there has been a considered attempt to offer plays from multiple backgrounds that instruct the budding dramatist. The list is representative only till the year 2016, the death of Edward Albee. More time and distance are needed to evaluate newer material.

-Arranged Alphabetically by Author; then Chronologically by Play Date-

Aeschylus

Seven against Thebes

The Oresteia (Agamemnon, Choephori, and Eumenides)

Prometheus Bound

Ayad Akhtar

                  Disgraced

Edward Albee

                  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

                  Tiny Alice

                  A Delicate Balance

                  All Over

                  Seascape

                  The Lady from Dubuque

                  The Man who had Three Arms

                  Marriage Play

                  Three Tall Women

                  The Play about the Baby         

                  The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?

                  At Home at the Zoo (“Homelife” and “The Zoo Story”

Maxwell Anderson

Winterset

Anne of the Thousand Days

High Tor

The Bad Seed (from the novel by William March)

Anonymous

                  Everyman

The York Crucifixion

The Second Shepherd’s Play

Jean Anouilh

Antigone

Romeo and Jeanette

Ring Round the Moon

The Rehearsal

The Lark

Ornifle, or It’s Later than You Think

Becket, or The Honor of God

S. Ansky

                  The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds

Aristophanes

                  Lysistrata

The Frogs

Fernando Arrabal

                  The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria

Isaac Babel

                  Sunset

Amiri Baraka

                  Dutchman

The Toilet

J. M. Barrie

                  The Admirable Crichton

Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up

Philip Barry

                  Holiday

The Philadelphia Story

Second Threshold

Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais

                  The Barber of Seville, or The Useless Precaution

The Marriage of Figaro, or The Day of Madness

Douglas Carter Beane

                  As Bees in Honey Drown

The Little Dog Laughed

Samuel Beckett

                  Waiting for Godot

                  Endgame

                  Krapp’s Last Tape

                  Happy Days

                  Play

                  Come and Go

                  Not I

                  Rockaby

                  Ohio Impromptu

                  Catastrophe

                  What Where

Brendan Behan

                  The Quare Fellow

The Hostage

Aphra Behn

                  The Rover (The Rover, or The Banish’d Cavaliers and The Second Part of the Rover)

S. N. Behrman

                  Biography

Jacinto Benavente (y Martinez)

                  The Bonds of Interest

Alan Bennett

                  The Madness of George III

Ugo Betti

                  Corruption in the Palace of Justice

Crime on Goat Island

Landslide

Struggle till Dawn

Edward Bond

                  Saved

Dion Boucicault

                  The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana

Bjornstjerne Bjornson

                  Beyond Powers

Robert Bolt

                  A Man for All Seasons

Bertolt Brecht

                  Baal

In the Jungle of Cities

A Man’s a Man

Saint Joan of the Stockyards

Galileo

Mother Courage and Her Children

The Good Person of Setzuan

The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Joseph Brodsky

                  Marbles

Georg Buchner

                  Danton’s Death

Woyzeck

Ed Bullins

                  In New England Winter

Pedro Calderon (de la Barca)

                  Life is a Dream

Albert Camus

                  Caligula

Elias Canetti

                  The Wedding

Karel Capek

                  R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)

Mary Chase

                  Harvey

Paddy Chayefsky

                  Gideon

Anton Chekhov

                  Ivanov

  The Seagull

Uncle Vanya

Three Sisters

The Cherry Orchard

Frank Chin

                  The Year of the Dragon

Caryl Churchill

                  Cloud Nine

Jean Cocteau

                  Orpheus

The Infernal Machine

William Congreve

                  Love for Love

The Way of the World

Pierre Corneille

                  The Cid

Noel Coward

                  Hay Fever

Private Lives

Cavalcade

Design for Living

Present Laughter

Blithe Spirit

Rachel Crothers

                  Susan and God

Mart Crowley

                  A Breeze from the Gulf

Nilo Cruz

                  A Bicycle Country

Two Sisters and a Piano

Lorca in a Green Dress

Anna in the Tropics

Jack Davis

                  No Sugar

Shelagh Delaney

                  A Taste of Honey

Lope Felix de Vega (Carpio)

                  Fuente Ovejuna

John Dryden

                  All for Love, or The World Well Lost

Christopher Durang

                  Titanic

Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You

Beyond Therapy

Friedrich Durrenmatt

                  The Visit

The Physicists

Jose Echegaray (y Eizaguirre)

                  Saint or Madman?

T. S. Eliot

                  Murder in the Cathedral

Ben Elton

                  Gasping

George Etherege

                  The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter

Euripides

                  Alcestis

Medea

Electra

The Trojan Women

Iphigenia at Aulis

Orestes

The Bacchae

George Farquhar

                  The Beaux’ Stratagem

Georges Feydeau

                  A Flea in Her Ear

Clyde Fitch

Barbara Frietchie, the Frederick Girl (from the poem “Barbara Frietchie” by John Greenleaf Whittier)

Dario Fo

                  Accidental Death of an Anarchist

Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin

                  The Minor

Horton Foote

                  Lily Dale

The Young Man from Atlanta

Dividing the Estate

Maria Irene Fornes

                  Fefu and Her Friends

Mud

Michael Frayn

                  Benefactors

Brian Friel

                  Lovers (“Winners” and “Losers”)

Faith Healer

Translations

Dancing at Lughnasa

Max Frisch

                  Andorra

Athol Fugard

                  Blood Knot

Master Harold...and the boys

Charles Fuller

                  Zooman and the Sign

A Soldier’s Play

John Galsworthy     

                  Strife

Griselda Gambaro

                  Information for Foreigners

Jean Genet

                  The Maids

Jean Giraudoux

Amphitryon 38

Intermezzo

Tiger at the Gates

Electra

Ondine

The Madwoman of Chaillot

Susan Glaspell

                  Alison’s House

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

                  Stella

Egmont

Faust (Faust: The Tragedy Part One and Faust: The Tragedy Part Two)

Nikolai Gogol

                  The Inspector-General

William Golding

                  The Brass Butterfly

James Goldman

                  The Lion in Winter

Carlo Goldoni

                  A Servant to Two Masters

Frances Goodrich

                  The Diary of Anne Frank (from The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank; with Albert Hackett)

Nadine Gordimer

                  The First Circle

Maxim Gorky

                  The Lower Depths

Enemies

Philip Kan Gotanda

                  Song for a Nisei Fisherman

The Wash

Yankee Dawg You Die

Yohen

Michael Gow

                  Away

Gunter Grass

                  The Wicked Cooks

Angelina Weld Grimke

                  Rachel

John Guare

                  The House of Blue Leaves

Landscape of the Body

Six Degrees of Separation

Four Baboons Adoring the Sun

A. R. Gurney, Jr.

                  Love Letters

Peter Handke

                  Self-Accusation

Kaspar

Gerhart Hauptmann

                  The Weavers

Vaclav Havel

                  The Garden Party

Joseph Hayes

                  The Desperate Hours (from his novel)

Seamus Heaney

                  The Cure at Troy (from the play Philoktetes by Sopokles)

Ben Hecht

                  The Front Page (with Charles MacArthur)

Lillian Hellman

                  The Children’s Hour

The Little Foxes

Watch on the Rhine

Another Part of the Forest

The Autumn Garden

Ludvig Holberg

                  Jeppe of the Hill, or The Transformed Peasant

Israel Horovitz

                  The Indian Wants the Bronx

                  A Christmas Carol: Scrooge and Marley (from the novella A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens)

Sidney Howard

                  They Knew What They Wanted

The Silver Cord

Tina Howe

                  Approaching Zanzibar

David Henry Hwang

                  FOB

The Dance and the Railroad

M. Butterfly

Golden Child

Yellow Face

Henrik Ibsen

                  Brand

                  Peer Gynt

                  Emperor and Galilean (Caesar’s Apostasy and The Emperor Julian)

                  A Doll’s House

                  Ghosts

                  An Enemy of the People

                  The Wild Duck

                  Rosmersholm

                  The Lady from the Sea

                  Hedda Gabler

                  The Master Builder

                  Little Eyolf

                  John Gabriel Borkman

                  When We Dead Awaken

William Inge

                  Come Back, Little Sheba

Picnic

Bus Stop

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs

Eugene Ionesco

                  The Bald Soprano

The Lesson

The Chairs

Rhinoceros

Exit the King

Alfred Jarry

                  Ubu the King

Elfriede Jelinek

                  Sports Play

                  Rechnitz (The Externinating Angel)

Ben Johnson

                  Every Man in His Humour

Every Man Out of His Humour

Volpone, or The Fox

Kalidasa

                  The Recognition of Sakuntala

Sarah Kane

                  Blasted

Cleansed

Crave

4.48 Psychosis

George S. Kaufman

                  Once in a Lifetime (with Moss Hart)

Dinner at Eight (with Edna Ferber)

Merrily We Roll Along (with Hart)

Stage Door (with Ferber)

You Can’t Take It with You (with Hart)

The Man Who Came to Dinner (with Hart)

The Land is Bright (with Ferber)

Joseph Kesselring

                  Arsenic and Old Lace

Sidney Kingsley

                  The Patriots

Tony Kushner

Angels in America (Millennium Approaches and Perestroika)

Homebody/Kabul

Thomas Kyd

                  The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again

Neil LaBute

                  Bash: Latter-day Plays (“Iphigenia in Orem,” “A Gaggle of Saints,” and “Medea Redux”)

The Shape of Things

The Distance from Here

Some Girl(s)

Pär Lagerkvist

                  The Secret of Heaven

Jerome Lawrence

                  Inherit the Wind (with Robert E. Lee)

Arthur Laurents

                  The Time of the Cuckoo

Mike Leigh

                  Bleak Moments

Ecstasy

Doris Lessing

                  Play with a Tiger

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

                  Emilia Galotti

Nathan the Wise

Tracy Letts

                  August: Osage County

Sinclair Lewis

                  Hobohemia

Howard Lindsay

                  State of the Union (with Russel Crouse)

David Lindsay-Abaire

                  Rabbit Hole

Romulus Linney

                  Sand Mountain (“Sand Mountain Matchmaking” and “Why the Lord Come to Sand Mountain”)

Mario Vargas Llosa

                  La Chunga

Federico Garcia Lorca

                  Blood Wedding

The House of Bernarda Alba

Craig Lucas

Reckless

Prelude to a Kiss

God’s Heart

Stranger

The Dying Gaul

Archibald MacLeish

                  J. B.

David Mamet

                  The Duck Variations

American Buffalo

Edmond

Glengarry Glen Ross

Speed-the-Plow

Oleanna

Patrick Marber

                  Closer

Donald Margulies

Collected Stories

Dinner with Friends

Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux

                  The Triumph of Love

Maurice Maeterlinck

                  The Blue Bird

Christopher Marlowe

                  Tamburlaine (The First Part of Tamburlaine the Great and The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great)

The Jew of Malta, or The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer

The Massacre at Paris

Jane Martin

                  Vital Signs

Keely and Du

Martin McDonagh

                  The Beauty Queen of Leenane

The Lieutenant of Inishmore

The Pillowman

Frank McGuinness

                  Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme

Someone Who’ll Watch over Me

Conor McPherson

                  The Weir

Dublin Carol

Shining City

The Seafarer

Mark Medoff

                  Children of a Lesser god

Menander

                  Dyskolos

Arthur Miller

                  All My Sons

Death of a Salesman

The Crucible

After the Fall

Susan Miller

                  My Left Breast

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin de Moliere

The School for Husbands

The School for Wives

Tartuffe, or The Impostor

Don Juan, or The Feast with the Statue

The Misanthrope, or The Man of Moods in Love

Ferenc Molnar

                  Lilliom

The Swan

Chikamatsu Monzaemon

                  The Love Suicides at Sonezaki

The Battles of Coxinga

The Love Suicides at Amijima

Toni Morrison

                  Dreaming Emmett

Tad Mosel

                  All the Way Home (from the novel A Death in the Family by James Agee)

Heiner Mueller

                  Hamletmachine

Richard Nelson

                  Columbus and the Discovery of Japan

New England

Madame Melville

William Nicholson

                  The Retreat from Moscow

Marsha Norman

                  Getting Out

Circus Valentine

‘night, Mother

Sarah and Abraham

Sean O’Casey

                  Juno and the Paycock

The Plough and the Stars

Clifford Odets

                  Waiting for Lefty

Awake and Sing!

Golden Boy

The Flowering Peach

Eugene O’Neill

The Glencairn Plays (“Bound East for Cardiff,” “In the Zone,” “The Long Voyage Home,” and “Moon of the Caribbees”)

Beyond the Horizon

                  Chris Christophersen

                  “Anna Christie”

                  The Emperor Jones

                  The Hairy Ape

                  Desire under the Elms

                  The Great God Brown

                  Strange Interlude

                  Mourning becomes Electra (Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted)

                  Ah, Wilderness!

                  The Iceman Cometh

                  Hughie

Long Day’s Journey into Night

                  A Moon for the Misbegotten  

                  A Touch of the Poet

                  More Stately Mansions

Deal Orlandersmith

                  Monster

Joe Orton

                  Entertaining Mr. Sloane

Loot

Paul Osborn

                  Morning’s at Seven

John Osborne

                  Look Back in Anger

The Entertainer

Luther

Alexander Ostrovsky

                  The Storm

Suzan-Lori Parks

                  The America Play

In the Blood

John Patrick

                  The Teahouse of the August Moon (from the novel by Vern Sneider)

Octavio Paz

                  Rapaccini’s Daughter (from the short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Harold Pinter

                  The Dumb Waiter

The Caretaker

The Homecoming

Betrayal

Ashes to Ashes

Celebration

Luigi Pirandello

                  Six Characters in Search of an Author

Henry IV

Titus Maccius Plautus

                  The Captives

Bernard Pomerance

                  The Elephant Man

Hal Porter

                  The Professor

Alexander Pushkin

                   A Dramatic Tale, The Comedy of the Distress of the Muscovite State, of Tsar Boris, and of Grishka Otepyev (Boris Gudonov)

David Rabe

                  Hurlyburly

Jean Racine

                  Berenice

Phaedra

Elmer Rice

                  The Adding Machine

Jose Rivera

                  Marisol

Cloud Tectonics

References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot

Romain Rolland

                  The Wolves

Edmond Rostand

                  Cyrano de Bergerac

Nelly Sachs

                  Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel

William Saroyan

                  The Time of Your Life

My Heart’s in the Highlands

Jean-Paul Sartre

                  No Exit

Robert Schenkkhan

The Kentucky Cycle (“Masters of the Trade,” “Courtship of the Morning Star,” “The Homecoming,” “Ties That Bind,” “God’s Great Supper,” “Tall Tales,” “Fire in the Hole,” “Which Side Are You On?,” and “The War on Poverty”)

                  All the Way

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

                  The Robbers

Wallenstein (Wallenstein’s Camp, The Piccolimini, and The Death of Wallenstein)

Maria Stuart

William Tell

Arthur Schnitzler

                  Anatol

La Ronde

Paracelsus

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

                  Medea

Alan Seymour

                  The One Day of the Year

William Shakespeare

                  The Two Gentlemen of Verona

                  The Taming of the Shrew

                  Titus Andronicus

                  The Tragedy of Richard the Third

                  The Comedy of Errors

                  Love’s Labour’s Lost

                  The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet

                  A Midsummer Night’s Dream

                  The Merchant of Venice

                  Much Ado About Nothing

                  The Life of Henry the Fifth

                  The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

                  As You Like It

                  The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

                  Twelfth Night, or What You Will

                  Measure for Measure

                  The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice

                  All’s Well that Ends Well

                  The Tragedy of King Lear

                  Timon of Athens

                  The Tragedy of Macbeth

                  The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra

                  Pericles, Prince of Tyre

                  The Tragedy of Coriolanus

Peter Shaffer

                  Five Finger Exercise

The Royal Hunt of the Sun

Equus

Amadeus

Ntozake Shange

                  For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf

John Patrick Shanley

                  Doubt

Bernard Shaw

                  Mrs. Warren’s Profession

Man and Superman

Pygmalion

Heartbreak House

Saint Joan

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

                  The Rivals

The School for Scandal

Robert E. Sherwood

                  Abe Lincoln in Illinois

Sam Shepard

                  True West

Buried Child

Fool for Love

Simpatico

Eyes for Consuela (from the short story “The Blue Bouquet” by Octavio Paz)

Shudraka

                  The Little Clay Cart

Claude Simon

                  The Separation (from his novel The Grass)

Neil Simon

                  Barefoot in the Park

The Odd Couple

The Prisoner of Second Avenue

Chapter Two

Lost in Yonkers

Jake’s Women

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

                  The Love-Girl and the Innocent

Sophokles

                  Ajax

                  Antigone

                  Oedipus Tyrannos

                  Elektra

                  Philoktetes

                  Oedipus at Kolonus

Aaron Sorkin

                  A Few Good Men

Wole Soyinka

                  Death and the King’s Horseman

Tom Stoppard

Jumpers

Arcadia

August Strindberg

                  The Outlaw

                  Master Olof

                  The Father

                  Miss Julie

                  The Stronger

                  To Damascus (I, II, and III)

                  Easter

                  The Dance of Death (I and II)

                  A Dream Play

                  The Ghost Sonata

                  The Great Highway

John Millington Synge

                  In the Shadow of the Glen

Riders to the Sea

The Playboy of the Western World

Radindranath Tagore

                  Red Oleanders

Publius Terentius Afer (Terence)

                  Phormio

Ernst Toller

                  The Machine-Wreckers

Leo Tolstoy

                  The Power of Darkness

Ivan Turgenev

                  A Month in the Country

Alfred Uhry

                  Driving Miss Daisy

The Last Night of Ballyhoo

John Van Druten

                  Bell, Book, and Candle

I Am a Camera (from The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood)

Gore Vidal

                  The Best Man

                  An Evening with Richard Nixon

                  On the March to the Sea

Paula Vogel

                  The Baltimore Waltz

How I Learned to Drive

The Long Christmas Ride Home

Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse

                  Hadrian

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

                  Death and the Fool

Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist

                  The Broken Jug

Derek Walcott

                  Dream on Monkey Mountain

Wendy Wasserstein

                  The Heidi Chronicles

The Sisters Rosensweig

An American Daughter

John Webster

                  The Duchess of Malfi

Frank Wedekind

                  Spring Awakening

Earth Spirit

Pandora’s Box

King Nicolo, or Such is Life

Death’s Dance

Mac Wellman

                  The Bad Infinity

7 Blowjobs

Patrick White

                  Shepherd on the Rocks

Oscar Wilde

                  Salome

Lady Windermere’s Fan

An Ideal Husband

The Importance of Being Earnest

Thornton Wilder

                  The Long Christmas Dinner

Our Town

The Skin of Our Teeth

The Matchmaker

Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire

Summer and Smoke

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Orpheus Descending

Small Craft Warnings

The Red Devil Battery Sign

August Wilson

                  Fences

The Piano Lesson

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

Jitney

King Hedley II

Lanford Wilson

                  Balm in Gilead

The Hot l Baltimore

Fifth of July

Talley’s Folly

Talley and Son

Angels Fall

Redwood Curtain

Book of Days

Tracey Scott Wilson

                  The Story

Doug Wright

                  Quills

William Wycherly

                  The Country Wife

The Plain Dealer

Gao Xingjian

                  The Other Shore

William Butler Yeats

                  Cathleen Ni Houlihan (with Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory)

Chay Yew

                  A Beautiful Country