skopia
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.
Nora Helmer forged a signature to save her husband's life and has been paying the debt in secret ever since. The play ends on a closing door that modern theater still hears.
Outnumbered in France, a young king talks his army into fighting at Agincourt, promising that whoever survives will remember the day forever. After the battle he reads out the names of the dead.
Falstaff is the greatest comic creation in English, a fat knight who lies about everything, and Prince Hal wastes his youth drinking with him while rebellion gathers against his father the king.
Falstaff ages and the king dies while Prince Hal waits for the crown. Shakespeare wrote no colder scene than the new king telling his old tavern friend that he does not know him.
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.
Richard tells the audience in his first speech that he means to be a villain, then makes them accomplices. He courts a widow beside the corpse of the king he murdered.
Two in the morning, a history professor and his wife receive a younger couple after a faculty party, and the drinking turns into a night of games designed to strip them bare.
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.