LYNN NOTTAGE IN REHEARSAL FOR THIS IS READING (2017) AT THE FRANKLIN STREET RAILROAD STATION IN READING, PENNSYLVANIA, 2017.
In an interview in the Review‘s new Fall issue, the playwright Lynn Nottage describes the way one of her classes at Yale would open: with a trip to the Coney Island Circus Sideshow. “Most academics and practitioners weren’t acknowledging the different forms of theater happening all over New York City, and how those forms were in conversation with the way we as playwrights make our work,” she tells Christina Anderson. Her class also visited vogue balls, megachurches, trials, and wrestling matches. “What I’ve witnessed is that, by the end of the course, all the students, even if they began as very naturalistic, structurally conservative writers, are making work that is more playful, inventive, and open,” she says. We asked Nottage to provide us with a syllabus of sorts—and she sent a reading list of plays that can also teach us to look at drama and narrative structure from a similarly wide range of vantage points.
As a playwright, I’m interested in what happens when I enter my craft from differing perspectives, as an anthropologist, an athlete, an activist, a con artist, a criminal, a prosecutor, an exhibitionist, an archivist, a visual artist, a musician, a mystic, or a healer. What can we learn about dramatic structure and storytelling from observing the way theater, and performance, occur outside of a traditional theatrical setting? I’ve gravitated toward the following plays for their ability to raise this question, to engage unexpected dramaturgy, and to bend and twist the architecture of narratives to arrive at a piercing truth.
Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker
Well By Lisa Kron
Forever by Dael Orlandersmith
Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by Moisés Kaufman
Indecent by Paula Vogel
The Christians by Lucas Hnath
Is God is by Aleshea Harris
School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play by Jocelyn Bioh
The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis
Passion Play by Sarah Ruhl
Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks
The Whale by Samuel D. Hunter
The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity by Kristoffer Diaz
Saved by Edward Bond
The Lily’s Revenge by Taylor Mac
Art by Yasmina Reza
Lynn Nottage’s plays include Ruined, Intimate Apparel, Sweat, and Clyde’s. She is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.