Monday, July 06, 2009

Playwright! Playwrong?

How well-versed are Realm denizens in the field of play reading? Here's a better question, aside from William Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams - the three playwrights covered in high school (at least for me) - how many plays written by other writers have you read?

On wikipedia, I pulled this exhaustive list of notable playwrights. While I consider myself at least an average reader, I'd say I might know maybe ten percent of this list if I'm lucky, and most of those are from their book writing rather than their plays. Here are some recognizable names that I probably could have named as playwrights:

David Mamet
W.H. Auden
George Bernard Shaw
Euripedes
Ira Levin
Oscar Wilde

but, if pressed, I'm not sure I could name more than a couple plays: Pygmalion, Salome, The Importance of Being Earnest, Deathtrap, Glengarry Glen Ross (the latter trio only because of movies I saw) that any of them wrote.

And here's a fun one I would never have guessed:

Kathie Lee Gifford (who knew???!!!)

and an even better one I never knew:

Wallace Shawn

Mmmmmkay, embarrassingly enough, maybe that 10% I noted above is really more like 2 or 3%. I should probably read a few more plays just to say I did. Chances are, though, since books are what I enjoy writing, I'll probably stick with those. Nonetheless, I think writers, in general, should probably be a little more versed than me in the reading of plays. Probably poetry as well.

Checkout the wikilist of playwrights I linked in the above second paragraph. Here's a chance to impress. Let us know about your play reading and knowledge of playwrights. Pssssst - if you 've read any plays other than Shakespeare, Williams, or Miller, you've already impressed me.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does it count that I've written plays before One was performed in front of my 6th grade health class. And do Puppet skits count as plays? I wrote, produced, and performe some of those, too. Doesn't Wikipedia know me yet?!

WandaV

Rich said...

I'm sure Wikipedia has you on that list somewhere, Wanda, just as a pen name. Just pick one of the names on the list at random, tell us that's you, and none of us will be the wiser, I assure you.