skopia
Two minor courtiers from Hamlet wait in the wings of a play they cannot follow, flipping a coin that lands heads ninety two times running. Stoppard wrings comedy and dread from their helplessness.
Ten thousand dollars of insurance money reaches a Chicago apartment and a Black family goes to war over what it is for. Broadway had never staged a play by a Black woman before.
Brutus is persuaded that killing his friend will save the republic. Antony stands over the body, says he comes to bury Caesar and not to praise him, and turns Rome around.
Snowbound on a failing Massachusetts farm, Ethan Frome works beside a wife who is perpetually ill and the young cousin he has fallen for. Wharton makes poverty and duty feel like weather.
Eighty-four days without a fish, and an old Cuban fisherman hooks a marlin longer than his boat and is towed out to sea. A man can be destroyed but not defeated, Santiago thinks.
Tom narrates the St. Louis apartment he escaped, where his mother relives the seventeen gentlemen callers of her girlhood and his limping sister tends her glass animals. Everything turns on one visitor.
Phaedra confesses she wants her stepson, a father is ordered to sacrifice his daughter for a favorable wind, and a hidden boy threatens a usurping queen. Racine packs this into polite rhymed couplets.
Newland Archer, engaged to the right New York girl, falls for her cousin the Countess Olenska, back from a ruinous European marriage. Old New York moves against them without ever raising its voice.
At a party in Verona two teenagers from feuding families meet, marry the next day, and are gone inside a week. Everything they say to each other still sounds newly invented.
Agamemnon comes home from Troy to a wife who has spent ten years planning her welcome, and the killing runs down the generations until Athena stops it by seating the first jury.
Blanche DuBois arrives at her sister's New Orleans apartment with nothing left, and her brother-in-law Stanley sets about destroying what remains. No American play has staged desire and cruelty this nakedly.
Willy Loman, a traveling salesman worn down to nothing, argues with his grown sons and with people who are not in the room. Audiences have recognized their own fathers in him since 1949.
No drama has matched the moment Oedipus understands. He investigates the crime poisoning his city and the trail turns toward him. His daughter later defies the state to bury her brother.
Iago tells the audience exactly how he will destroy his general, then does it with a handkerchief and patient lying. His reasons never explain it, and watching Othello believe him is agony.
Having learned everything and felt nothing, a scholar bets the devil that no moment will ever satisfy him. Then Mephistopheles introduces him to a girl named Gretchen, and Goethe follows the damage down.
Witches promise a soldier the crown, and he and his wife murder their way to it. Shakespeare's shortest tragedy moves like a nightmare, and the guilt arrives before the blood dries.
An old king divides his kingdom by asking his daughters how much they love him, and the truthful one says least. Shakespeare wrote nothing bleaker, and the last scene is unbearable.
Hamlet's father appears as a ghost and demands revenge, and the prince spends the play failing to take it. Four centuries of readers have found their own divided minds in his hesitation.
