Here are 4 books that The Clean House and Other Plays fans have personally recommended if you like
The Clean House and Other Plays.
Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I’m a playwright who loves not only writing plays but also teaching dramatic writing workshops – mostly through my San Francisco program and Chicago Dramatists where I’m a Resident Playwright. My plays have received many awards and honors, including three selections for the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, and have been presented in Europe, Russia, and Australia as well as the U.S. Meanwhile my workshops and script consultations have given me the opportunity to work with thousands of writers over the past 35 years. This led me to begin writing books for writers, starting with The Dramatic Writer’s Companion, now in its Second Edition.
This is the play that made Suzan-Lori Parks the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
It features only two characters and takes place in only one room, but it is a dynamite exploration of the competitive relationship between two adult African-American brothers who have been abandoned by everyone else in their lives. One brother is a petty thief who wants to become a three-card-monte dealer. The other is an Abraham Lincoln impersonator who works as a target in a mock shooting gallery.
For me, the excitement of this play is all about discovering who these two men are, how they got that way, and how far each is willing to go to become a topdog in a world that has made them underdogs for years.
A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity, winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Suzan-Lori Parks' play Topdog/Underdog tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, foretelling a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by the past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future.
Topdog/Underdog was first performed at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, New York, in 2001. Its UK premiere was at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 2003.
I’m a playwright who loves not only writing plays but also teaching dramatic writing workshops – mostly through my San Francisco program and Chicago Dramatists where I’m a Resident Playwright. My plays have received many awards and honors, including three selections for the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, and have been presented in Europe, Russia, and Australia as well as the U.S. Meanwhile my workshops and script consultations have given me the opportunity to work with thousands of writers over the past 35 years. This led me to begin writing books for writers, starting with The Dramatic Writer’s Companion, now in its Second Edition.
You don’t have to grow up Catholic to like this play, but It sure doesn’t hurt.
Set in a Catholic elementary school in the Bronx, Doubtintroduces us to Sister Aloysius, an uncompromising principal who runs her school as if it were a Marine bootcamp. This regime gets shaken when suspicions of sexual child abuse begin to arise.
What I like most about this play is how four flesh-and-blood characters – a school principal, a history teacher, a priest/gym instructor, and a student’s mother – can bring an entire school and community onstage in an incredibly vital way.
It’s why I think the play is superior to the later film adaptation and also why the play received so many awards, including a Tony for Best Play and a Pulitzer for Drama.
“A superb new drama written by John Patrick Shanley. It is an inspired study in moral uncertainty with the compellingly certain structure of an old-fashioned detective drama. Even as Doubt holds your conscious attention as an intelligently measured debate play, it sends off stealth charges that go deeper emotionally. One of the year’s ten best.”—Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“[The] #1 show of the year. How splendid it feels to be trusted with such passionate, exquisite ambiguity unlike anything we have seen from this prolific playwright so far. Blunt yet subtle, manipulative but full of empathy for all sides,…
I’m a playwright who loves not only writing plays but also teaching dramatic writing workshops – mostly through my San Francisco program and Chicago Dramatists where I’m a Resident Playwright. My plays have received many awards and honors, including three selections for the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, and have been presented in Europe, Russia, and Australia as well as the U.S. Meanwhile my workshops and script consultations have given me the opportunity to work with thousands of writers over the past 35 years. This led me to begin writing books for writers, starting with The Dramatic Writer’s Companion, now in its Second Edition.
A list of play recommendations from me has to include something by Martin McDonagh who is now garnering serious attention as a filmmaker.
I choseThe Cripple of Inishmaan because of its dynamic main character “Cripple” Billy Craven who yearns to escape the poverty and boredom of his life on an Aran island off the west coast of Ireland. Billy begins to envision a future for himself in Hollywood when he learns about a film shoot on a neighboring island and has to figure out a way to get over there.
I love the strange world of this play and how it is revealed through the characters we meet, such as Billy’s Aunt Kate who talks to stones; Johnnypateenmike, the town gossip; and Helen McCormick, Billy’s ever-feisty friend.
"Mr McDonagh is destined to be one of the theatrical luminaries of the 21st century" (The New Republic) In 1934, the people of Inishman learn that the Hollywood director Robert Flaherty is coming to the neighbouring island to film his documentary Man of Aran. No-one is more excited than Cripple Billy, an unloved boy whose chief occupation has been gazing at cows and yearning for a girl who wants no part of him. For Billy is determined to cross the sea and audition for the Yank. And as news of his audacity ripples thorugh his rumour-starved community, The Cripple of…
I’m a playwright who loves not only writing plays but also teaching dramatic writing workshops – mostly through my San Francisco program and Chicago Dramatists where I’m a Resident Playwright. My plays have received many awards and honors, including three selections for the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, and have been presented in Europe, Russia, and Australia as well as the U.S. Meanwhile my workshops and script consultations have given me the opportunity to work with thousands of writers over the past 35 years. This led me to begin writing books for writers, starting with The Dramatic Writer’s Companion, now in its Second Edition.
I saw the world premiere of this play at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and never forgot it.
What stays with me most is the powerful main character Mama Nadi, a fierce, shrewd businesswoman who runs a brothel in the Democratic Republic of Congo during a civil war. And though she lives in a world where sex trafficking, rape, mutilation, and other brutality is commonplace, she knows how to keep her establishment flourishing and her girls, safe.
Playwright Nottage based her characters on women and girls whom she interviewed during a trip to Africa. The authenticity of the characters and storyline may help explain why the play went on to earn multiple awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
“A powerhouse drama. . . . Lynn Nottage’s beautiful, hideous and unpretentiously important play [is] a shattering, intimate journey into faraway news reports.”—Linda Winer, Newsday
“An intense and gripping new drama . . . the kind of new play we desperately need: well-informed and unafraid of the world’s brutalities. Nottage is one of our finest playwrights, a smart, empathetic and daring storyteller who tells a story an audience won’t expect.”—David Cote, Time Out New York
A rain forest bar and brothel in the brutally war-torn Congo is the setting for Lynn Nottage’s…
