Top 5 Plays I've Ever Seen

I'm going through a great archive of my old Playbills, and I've thought about this for a long time, so here I will put down the 5 best plays I've ever seen. It won't change. I won't see any plays better than those I've seen in the past. That's just how the canon works. This is my personal canon.

# 1 is Waiting for Godot. I think this is the best play of the 20th century, perhaps only rivaled by Chekhov or Ibsen, who are in a totally different category, after Shakespeare. No American playwright can match Samuel Beckett.

Waiting for Godot properly interpreted, acted, and directed, is one of the most challenging plays you can imagine. It starts by realizing that the main two protagonists, Vladimir and Estragon, are old aesthetes from the 1890s, the era of Oscar Wilde, a fellow Irishman with Samuel Beckett. These old men, in the early 1950s, have rocks in their shoes, and appreciate eating a little bit of carrot. It's funny and incredibly poignant at the same time. It's extremely difficult to portray this correctly.

Pozzo and Lucky, the interlopers, are essentially comic. The triumph of the play comes in Lucky's monologue: "with some exceptions for reasons unknown." If you have never seen the play or read it, Pozzo, Lucky's driver says, "Speak!" Lucky, like all of us, must speak on demand. Have you ever felt this way? Someone demands that you speak? I cannot say anymore about the comic genius of Vladimir and Estragon, and the skill that actors must have to portray them properly. There is a lot of vaudeville and hat switching in their act, written into the play.

The production I saw was at Yale University in the spring of 2000, and it is the best play I've ever seen, by a long margin. The star of the show was Daniel Larlham, the best actor I saw at Yale. He's probably one of the best actors I've ever seen, and honestly one of my heroes. I never met him, but he triumphed as Vladimir in Waiting for Godot and I remember that he played Banquo in Macbeth and was in the best production of Chekhov's Three Sisters that I ever saw, in Yale's Pierson Common Room. The actor they got to play Lucky, Bud Thorpe, I understood, was in the Broadway production of Waiting for Godot from the 1970s directed by Samuel Beckett himself. This is the best play I've ever seen, the best play of the 20th century, and it won't ever lose its status for me.

# 2 is Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses. My OPRF high school drama teacher, Paul Noble, took us to this play in the 1990s. It was store-front Chicago theater (I can't remember where, but on the North Side) and the stage is a pool filled with water. At the shallow end, it is about ankle deep, and at the deep end it goes up to the actors' waists. I remember the production vividly. There is the story of Narcissus, who transforms into a flower after gazing at himself so long in the pool of his own reflection. There are gods who come down and change the mortals.

The actors were so athletic, as befitted the future legacy of the Lookingglass theater. I saw many productions of that company, and I understood that eventually they could not sustain the production of Metamorphoses that I saw because the pool started leaking into the lower floor. Water destroys even as it sustains, which is an appropriate theme for Ovid.

I have a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is a fundamental source for Chaucer and Shakespeare, and so all of English literature. There are stories such as the golden touch of Midas, and you can explore it at your own leisure. I remember the lighting, the sensuality, the physical skill of the actors, but above all the directorial genius of Mary Zimmerman, who is one of the greatest theatrical artists of our age.

# 3 is The Original Grease. You've heard the songs "Freddy My Love," and "Beauty School Dropout." Maybe you even remember "Mooning." These are all classic songs from the Original Grease. But did you know that the play was premiered in 1971 at a blues bar in Chicago, the Kingston Mines? Did you know there was an actual girl gang in the Northwest side of Chicago called the Pink Ladies, that had actual jackets?

The original Sandy was from Lake Forest, IL. Before "Summer Lovin'" (a Broadway song, not in the original) there was down on "Foster Beach"? Where the kids wrote graffiti on the wall under the bridge of Lake Shore Drive? Rizzo got knocked up by a guy from Melrose Park? There were songs about getting tattoos? In the revival, earth-shattering production of 2011 by the late, dearly missed PJ Paparelli, there was a girl singing a song suspended from the ceiling sitting on a toilet. At the beginning of Act 2, all the kids getting ready for the dance started, sexily, with their bare backs to the audience, and then they spun around and wrapped themselves with their towels. I don't know if this play will ever be staged the way Paparelli did it, to the eternal loss of audiences.

But the best moment of the Original Grease comes at the end of the first act. The kids, in high school, paid some guy to buy them a bottle of vodka from the liquor store. They go up to the forest preserve (Chicago people, you know what I mean) and light a fire, and they drink the vodka. The theater audience has seen that they are "coupled up." They go off into the woods and do what couples do. They come back to the fire, the vodka is gone, and they all lament their fate. The spirit is such as, "Aw, I'll always be in this town, I'll just wind up like my old man." Kenickie working at the auto mechanic's (Greased Lightning!). They all get sad, alcohol gone, sex done, back at the campfire in the forest preserve. Silence. Pause. Then someone sings,

Dip-de-dip-de-dip-dip-de-dip-de-dip-dip-de-dip-de-dip-dip-de-dip-de-dip

Every one says "Aw, come on," no, stop that. The bass continues,

Dip-de-dip-de-dip-dip-de-dip-de-dip-dip-de-dip-de-dip-dip-de-dip-de-dip

Eventually the others start to build

Shoo-bop-ba-do-ba-lop-bang-a-de-bang-bang

etc.

The song builds completely a cappella. You know the song. The most important song in the musical, "We Go Together." But you don't really get the meaning or importance of this song in the Broadway, movie version. It is an anthem to working-class solidarity, and at the end of the first act in the Original Grease, when the song amounts to its glorious height, the kids around the campfire, standing in a football huddle, shoulder to shoulder, shout,

WE GO TOGETHER

(blackout)

# 4 I'm not saying it's the best musical (probably I would vote for West Side Story), but Man of La Mancha is my favorite musical. The story of Don Quixote, the Lord of La Mancha. I know every word and every note of this musical by heart. My dream role that I would ever play is Don Quixote. When no one was at home, when I was in high school, I would play this soundtrack and belt out the songs. For better or for worse, I have had a Dulcinea complex. It's the most beautiful love song I've ever heard, and I can't imagine a better one. I know, romance is not reality. But I think everyone, man or woman, dreams of an impossible love as they dream of an impossible quest. And we conjure our own loves, and I think that is probably the only way to fall in love.

I was an old Dungeons & Dragons kid, so I always have been susceptible to stories of knights and heroes. Much later I learned about this tradition in European literature. And I do think Miguel de Cervantes, and his legacy of the impossible dream captured something universal. I cannot listen to this great Broadway song without affirming my own sense of purpose. Again, like the immortal Don Quixote, I might be misguided--I am always by definition misguided--but I must reach for the unreachable star. It will prop you up and bolster you, and in the end, perhaps we do prefer the beautiful lie over the ugly truth. At least that is the promise of the theater. Don Quixote, perhaps the greatest novel ever written, is both comedy and tragedy, but I want to believe that the comedy transcends the tragedy. I do not personally have a Spanish spirit, but in Cervantes the Spanish genius is for everyone.

# 5 And so we come to the end. Perhaps I could have put this brilliant production higher, but it earns its place in my top 5. The great Brian Dennehy played Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman at the Goodman Theatre around 1998-99 (my playbill does not remind me of the exact date, but it is in that interval).

I wrote above that Waiting for Godot is the best play of the 20th century. I still believe that. No American playwright can reach Beckett's comic subtlety. For American plays, one has to weigh Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. There are also great playwrights Tom Stoppard, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Edward Albee, and many others. Yet no one would dispute the canonical status of Death of a Salesman. I was able to see Dennehy play Willie on stage. There are many other great roles in this play -- Biff and Linda Loman especially. Perhaps the greatest monologue is Linda Loman's. I certainly remember Elizabeth Franz's version to this day. For some reason Death of a Salesman launches me into all the other plays I've ever seen (or acted in, or directed). I can't tell you anything definite about this production, but I've never forgotten it, and for some reason it defines realism in acting like no other production can do, before or after. I suppose maybe Glengarry Glen Ross at the Raven, or Greg Vinkler's performance as Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, or the great performances I've seen of Yasen Peyankov and Amy Morton (to name my favorite Chicago actors)-- but none of them has attained the Stanislavkian, realistic American perfection of Dennehy's Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman. Arthur Miller's elegy is our tragedy still, and all our hopes of commercial success remain shadowed by Willie's sadness.