It’s always fascinating to see how you turn up in someone else’s writing. And by “fascinating,” I mean distressing. As a dramatist, I’m entitled to the truth as I create it, and other people’s views (particularly of stories involving me) just get in the way of that. Here’s a case in point.

Remember my good friend Doug, of “Doug’s Reading List“? Yesterday, a year and a half after the creation of The Reading List, and six weeks after my posting it here, he sent a broadcast email with his version of how the list came to be created:

Back when we were planning to go out via sailboat, I asked a well read friend of ours, Lee Wochner, to give me a list of his “take to the desert island” books. I expected him to spend a few minutes banging out his top-of-the-head top ten list and leave it at that. But to Lee, books are the essential currency of our humanness, the primary record of our civilization and any personal list of favorites to be the ultimate opening of the kimono – the baring of the ultimate soul – the absolute and total revelation of who you are as a person.

Most people today would feel that way about recommending their top 10 rental DVDs or best episodes of Friends or favorite American Idol competitor. Books, and reading, have slid from their place of honor in American culture, as a quick glance at literacy rates and market share & revenue numbers for publishers & newspapers will reveal.

I used to feel just as strongly about books as Lee does. Everywhere I ever lived I dragged every book around I’d ever owned, except for the complete collection of original 1st edition Ian Fleming James Bond paperbacks I’d received from my uncle Doug and loaned to Jay Buckles in 1974 and never got back and my large format anniversary edition Harold Head comic book that disappeared into Dan Norenberg’s Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon in 1976 and never returned. Not that I’m resentful and have a hard time letting go or anything.

My woodworking project in high school was a bookshelf. I dragged that around too, and showcased prized books in feature locations around my room, and later, houses. Although many things you wore, watched or discussed reflected who you were, I always believed that nothing told your story like your books. Whenever I visited someone who was a reader, who had books around their place, I always took a long, lingering trip to the bathroom and spent as much time as possible scanning their shelves to a) see if I recognized anything I’d read that validated my existence and provided a connection and b) see what I hadn’t read that defined my gaps and the differences between us.

My first big purge of books was when we moved to California. I sold the bottom layers of my library at our garage sale in Hudson, WI. I had them all laid out on our cargo trailer, which they filled mostly two deep, spines up. After the sale I pulled the trailer down to our used book store in town to sell a few of the remainder to the owner, then took the rest to the local retirement home and hospital for their libraries. It was a traumatic experience. I haven’t forgotten that either, and have spent the intervening six and half years fine tuning a long, complex and very tenuous logic chain that makes my wife entirely responsible. Not that I hold on to things like that or anything.

When I told Lee about the garage sale his expression clouded and he looked at me like a traitor to the cause of literacy and higher thought. The sale, the abandonment of books – the very thought of it – visibly turned his stomach. I would have had the same reaction not two weeks before I’d done it.

The next big purge was when we dispersed our worldly possessions in preparation for this upcoming travel. I sold some more at our garage sale, but donated most of them. I gave my dozens of sailing books to Jimmy Sones, a friend who also nurtures a dream of one day sailing over the horizon. The rest that I really treasured I put in a cargo trailer and drove out to my son, Adam, also a reader, in Minnesota. He put them on the bookshelves that I gave him, which were made by his grandfather as his high school woodworking project back in the early 50s. My dad’s shelves were much better made than mine, and of the two (mine went a long, long time ago), I’m glad I kept his around for such a suitable family heirloom moment.

So, at this point, I am essentially bookless. Aside from a few wilderness medicine books, survival manuals and some guidebooks, I have only a handful, most written by friends.

This is a very strange place to be for a kid who read, on average, at least four books a week for most of my childhood.

So, I need your help. I need your “take to the desert island” list of books so I can stock up for these travels.

When I asked Lee for his list he ended up spending over nine hours on it (see it here: Doug’s Book List ), which I guess is about what I would have invested if someone would have asked me this question prior to the Great Book Purge.

You, on the other hand, do not need to invest that much time or energy.

The expedition vehicle we ended up with is not a 53’, 35,000 lb. cruising sailboat. It isn’t all that big and is already at the limit on weight. Consequently, we don’t have a lot of capacity for me to drag along books. So, your list can, and needs to be, short.

If you could only take a backpack full, what books would you take to a desert island?

Be well,
Doug
—————————————-
Douglas Hackney
dhackney@egltd.com
www.hackneys.com/travel

(You’ll note that I have helpfully included Doug’s email address and website should you wish to draft your own Doug’s Reading List and send it. To him.)

As I’ve written here before, I’m glad to call Doug a friend. He’s a smart person who repeatedly puts his energies into helping the world, usually in a direct fashion, one person at a time, whether it’s clearing debris post-Katrina, donating books to a burned-out store in San Diego, or gifting tools to a would-be motorcycle mechanic in India. I admire Doug. Doug is good people. Which is why it saddens me all the more to see how memory loss is afflicting him at such an early age.

In Doug’s version, Doug tells a tear-stained Lee that the imminent sailboat departure of he and his wife affords the retention or acquisition of no more than 10 books. Lee cannot imagine the world reduced to a mere 10 books and with a darkened brow associates Doug with the “Friends” culture. From “Anna Karenina” to “Friends” to… WWF rebroadcasts on a 2″ iPod screen… it’s a downward voyage, led by Doug’s divestiture of his library. Doug isn’t on a heroic quest, but a fool’s odyssey — one Lee succumbs to joining.

Here’s Lee’s version:

Doug bemoans to me his lack of a degree in literature (completely understandable — the bemoaning part) and asks if there might possibly somehow be some way that I could provide him with a primer — a list of bare essentials that will allow him to escape cocktail-party chatter with only minor stabbings from cocktail toothpicks and in the meantime enlighten him in the non-Biblical literary underpinnings of Western civilization. What we’re looking for here is work that is both relevant and popular in such circles, or which will enable Doug to steer the conversation back to safer shores. (Which provided the reasoning behind my “Hold your own at a dinner party” sub-list, “i.e., the 11 most-discussed, most-influential works of modernist literature at this time; impress your friends, astound your enemies. Comprehensive? By no means. Will these 11 provide enough artillery to cover your weaknesses? Absolutely,” and why the list features Kafka, Beckett, Camus, Sylvia Plath, et al.)

These two origin stories differ greatly, as you see.

In the comics, it has always irritated me when origin stories are recooked. Supergirl goes from being Superman’s cousin as well as the only other Kryptonian to escape the planet’s destruction to being either a shapeshifting protoplasm or a human being with the same Earth name as Supergirl but now infected by the protoplasm, back to being Superman’s cousin but from another dimension, and so forth. I can’t follow it and I don’t like it. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I read none of these related comic books.) Iconic characters and iconic stories are iconic for good reason: The original version carries a deeper truth, one that tells us something about ourselves. Who was the alien Superman, after all, but a Jew, sired by Jews, newly Americanized, someone who had escaped the destruction of his own planet and was now eager to represent his new nation in the battle against Hitler and the forces of genocide and oppression? To suddenly, if briefly, recast him as a cyborg, as DC Comics did in the 1990’s, is lunacy. Forces of reasonable goodness still merit representation; cyborgs deserve nothing.

I feel similarly about the two origin stories now competing for primacy with regard to “Doug’s Reading List.”

In Doug’s version, he can transport only so many books, so he needs a desert-island reading list. We’ve all seen that story. In fact, we’ve heard that story as well, as with radio programs like “Desert Island Discs.” It doesn’t take us very far. It’s about economy of scale, and that is a story lost on a nation of strivers and dreamers.

In my version, Doug is seeking the wisdom of the ages and turns to me for guidance. (This version clarifies why the endeavor is worth nine hours of my time.) Doug is much like the Indian motorcycle repairman who only needs the tools. I draft the list, provide options oriented around Doug’s own goals (“desert island” is there, as well as “succeed at cocktail party,” and further reading choices), as well as a point-by-point explanation of why some titles were chosen while others left off. Ideally, Doug adopts the list and, armed with newfound insights gleaned from this reading, transcends the material to lend new perspectives on what he’s read and on what surrounds him in our world.

To me, that is an American story, and in the six years I’ve known Doug I’ve come to associate him with what we think of as American ideals: mid-Western, commonsensical, hardworking, successful, generous, populist, honest. He may believe that his story of the list is correct — it may even be correct — but it’s not right. It’s not right for Doug, and it’s not right for America.

The narration in “Little Children,” which I finally saw on Thursday after months of strong coercion from friends with respectable opinions, was immediate and jarring. We don’t get narrators in dramas much any more — and certainly not third-person narrators. Whereas in 1944’s “Double Indemnity” it was a fine device for Walter Neff to narrate his own downfall, now he’d have to shut up and leave us to our own judgments. So why this switch? Moreover, why was the narration voiced by Will Lyman, probably best known as the firm ironic voice behind the PBS documentary series “Frontline”?

During the first few scenes I couldn’t help rewriting the film — sans narration. The narrator tells us that Sarah Pierce marks time every day until she’s relieved of child care; why do I need the narrator to tell me that when I can see it? In another scene, Sarah shakes hands with the new friend she wishes she could touch — and the narrator tells us she wishes she could touch him. Imagine listening to someone read you a story and while you’re listening to the story you’re crossing out whole paragraphs at a time. That was the impact my hyperactive editorial mind was making on this moviegoing experience.

Until suddenly I understood: This is a documentary we’re watching. It’s a fake documentary (not a mockumentary, which parodies for comedy), but a documentary nonetheless, of the stunted lives of a certain subclass of suburbanites, as depicted here by this representative (fictional) sample. The “little children” are the childlike adults who act heedlessly and (almost) suffer consequences. And in the end, they are transformed into grownups: One stays with his mate, while the other grabs up her child and apologizes.

Except….

It would seem that each remains in what has been presented as an unbearable situation. Sarah is seen back at home clutching the child she hadn’t loved, in the home of the husband she disdains; her lover is being tended by the wife who insists upon a future in the legal profession that doesn’t interest him. So our choice would seem to be: act like children and be happy but careless and irresponsible; or sacrifice happiness and live as an indentured servant to adulthood. This is a barren decision tree.

It’s odd to sit through two-and-a-half hours of a film, love every moment of it, marvel at its wit and grace, and come away having really no idea what sort of statement it is trying to make. “Little Children” is a literary film, finally inferior to the director’s previous film, “In the Bedroom” (which also investigated moral ambiguities with regard to parental response), and as such is a treat in a calendar generally full of explosions and Tom Cruise. Literature as practiced in the past 100 years asks more questions than it answers, and this film is of a piece with that new tradition. But in a way it cheats: By offering only one (bad) answer, it refutes the breadth of experience the rest of the film endorses.

For two reasons, Sigmund Freud is the bane of my existence: 1. As a culture, we’ve become consumed by psychobabble that weakens our thinking; and 2. Because this psychobabble has so thoroughly infested our culture, it is almost impossible to have a conversation without resorting to this very same psychobabble. It’s a frustrating tautology. If you want to see it in action, clock how lengthy a conversation you can have before one of the speakers falls into the following language:

• saying someone else is being “defensive” (even when previous generations might have said they were “responding to criticism,” especially logical fallacies)
• calling someone’s desire (or their achievement of that desire) “wish fulfillment,” as though results magically appear from wishes and human will had nothing to do with it
• being accused of “projecting” when others are being criticized
• calling someone with standards “anal”

and so forth.

(And right now, I’m sure that some people reading this are thinking that I’m either projecting or being defensive.)

What really drives me bananas, though, is the sort of blithe characterization novelist Jane Smiley performs over on Huffington Post of the quote unquote president. More appropriately, her blithe characterization troubles but doesn’t surprise me — this is what novelists do: characterize people. What’s upsetting is that dozens upon dozens of readers of the piece are confusing it for “insightful analysis.”

I’m not a fan of the quote unquote president or of his invasion of the wrong country. (When he invaded one of the right countries — Afghanistan — I was a supporter.) But 500 words of literary assumption — about his psychology, and the psychology of his colleagues — does not equal penetrating analysis. It equals one of two things: literature, or psychobabble. To think it something else cheapens the language.

Or maybe I’m just being anal.

If you’re one of the Bond fans who initially protested Daniel Craig, look how much worse you could’ve had it.

Given that I now have satellite radio in my car, and knowing what I think of U.S. media coverage of the war in Iraq, I decided last week to switch to listening to the BBC. Here are two things I discovered:

1. On the BBC, the Iraqi president’s name is pronounced “Ma-leekie.” The quote unquote president of the United States, and seemingly all of our media coverage, pronounce it “Mal-ik-eye.” There is certainly a correct way to pronounce this man’s name, and one way to find out would be to ask him. Given that the two major coalition nations cannot agree on a pronunciation, I have to wonder what else they can’t agree on. And given that there is in essence a factual disagreement here, one of these two powers is wrong. This doesn’t breed confidence.

2. Here, our media commentary seems to be torn between “pull out” or “prop it (the Ma-leekie / Mal-ik-eye government) up.” On the BBC, the commentary often includes:  let the minority (Ma-leekie / Mal-ik-eye government) collapse, and let the majority tribe rule, because isn’t that after all democracy?

For a detailed commentary (whether you agree or not) on Mr. Bush’s speech the other night, which I found maddening in its logical gaps, click here for a point-by-point gloss running on the New York Times’ site.

And I promise you I’m returning to issues of writing soon. This little Iraq thing has been getting a bit of press and such lately.

Python Terry Jones on how we could’ve won the hearts and minds of Iraq:  simply buying off the Iraqis.

Apple unveiled its new iPhone today.

At some point in past 6 years, my primary tool went from being a computer to being my smartphone. I don’t have any one computer I’m hooked to all day — I have two different laptops at my office, a desktop at my home office, access to Lex’s G5 upstairs if need be, and when I’m at USC I can drop in at the library or the writing center and sit down to a Mac there as well. But my smartphone — a Treo 650 — is my constant companion. I use it to make phone calls, to check email, to browse the web, to get myself unlost using Google Maps (important when your friend lives on Indian Cabin Road in Mullica Township where there are more burnt offerings than street signs), and when I’m really stuck for something to do I play Minesweep or some other game. Something else I like about this phone: I get a signal everywhere. Elevators, parking garages, you name it. If my wife was sitting atop a cell tower she couldn’t get a signal with her phone.

What I haven’t liked, though, is having to use Palm OS when everything else I use is on the Mac platform. Sure, there are conversion applications, but as the smartphone has gotten smarter the conversion has gotten dumber. Last time I had to call in three different techs to get the phone to synch correctly with the laptops here (yes, it’s 2 a.m. and I’m still at my office; don’t ask) and with the desktop at home. Until the last upgrade (about nine months ago) finally got resolved, the bad synching had left me four of each appointment on all my systems. I don’t need my schedule to look any more complicated than it already is.

There’s already plenty of press about the iPhone on the web, but here’s a link to MSNBC.com’s story, where you can also see a video. I’ve stayed away from Windows; now if this new smartphone can help me get out of Palm OS I’ll be happy to switch. And oh yeah — the phone looks good, too. (And has no buttons. I’ve got to try that out.)

Sadly, just as I predicted to friends weeks ago, here’s the immediate outcome of Saddam Hussein’s execution, as reported by the AP:

———-
Execution sparks Arab support for Saddam
Status as martyr hero grows as new gruesome gallows video appears

Updated: 2:02 p.m. AKT Jan 8, 2007
CAIRO, Egypt – The execution of Saddam Hussein has sparked a wave of support for the former Iraqi leader around the Arab world, with some proclaiming him a martyr and comparing him to heroes of Arab nationalism — raising resentment against the United States and Iraq’s Shiite-led government.

A new video of Saddam’s corpse, with a gaping neck wound, was posted on the Internet early Tuesday, carrying the potential to fan the flames higher.

The video, which appeared to have been taken with a camera phone, pans up the shrouded body of the former leader from the feet. It apparently was taken shortly after Saddam was hanged and placed on a gurney.

As the panning shot reaches the head region, the white shroud is pulled back and reveals Saddam’s head and neck.

His head is unnaturally twisted at a 90 degree angle to his right. It shows a gaping bloody wound, circular in shape, about an inch below his jaw line.

There is blood on the shroud where it covered his head.

Praise overshadowing atrocities
Praise for Saddam has only grown since his Dec. 30 hanging, eclipsing what had been a greater acknowledgement in recent years of the atrocities committed by his regime.

On Monday, one Egyptian paper, the independent Al-Karama, splashed Saddam’s photo over a full page Monday, with an Iraqi flag behind him, declaring him an “Arab martyr.”

“He lived as hero, died as a man,” another Egyptian opposition newspaper, Al-Osboa, proclaimed in a headline, showing a photo of Saddam at the gallows.

The praise has angered Iraq’s government and Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990. On Monday, Kuwaiti lawmakers slammed Arab countries that described the former Iraqi leader as a hero and demanded the government reconsider ties and financial aid to them.

Anger over the execution could fuel support for Iraq’s Sunni Muslim insurgency. It could also complicate the United States’ efforts to rally Arab nations’ help in reconciling between Iraq’s warring Sunni and Shiite communities and ease the country’s bloodshed.

The gallows scene
In large part, it was the unruly scene at the gallows that catapulted Saddam to hero’s status. In video footage smuggled out of the execution room, Saddam’s Shiite executioners are seen taunting and cursing him, while the former leader — his head unbowed — retorts, “Is this manly?”

For many, the scene came to symbolize dignified Arab resistance in the face of humiliation at the hands of a Shiite government seen by some in the region as illegitimate, backed by the U.S. military presence and closely allied to mainly Shiite Iran.

———-

Wouldn’t it have been better to leave him relatively well-treated, powerless, humiliated, and on display in captivity for the rest of his natural life? Wouldn’t that have made a greater statement about what we represent/ And in the long run, given what this execution will lead to, wouldn’t it have been far far less costly in every way?

And please don’t say “we” didn’t execute him. “We” were behind it every inch of the way.

Last year I took my wife to the Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Odditorium in San Francisco. I had visited it as an 8-year-old boy with my sister and it had left a huge impression of the many amazing things in the world I had absolutely no exposure to: strange cultures that reshaped their own bodies and shrank the heads of enemies, people and animals with bewildering abilities or defects, survivors of freak accidents, and outlandish events that left no doubt we were in the hands of a creative force with a twisted sense of humor. Imagine my delight in April discovering that the museum is every bit as fun and exciting now as it was 35 years ago. Either there’s still something wonderful about the world of the strange and bizarre or I haven’t grown up (or both), but Valorie and I loved every minute of it.

With that in mind, late last fall when I went to the worst going-out-of-business sale ever (that would be Tower Records, which started with discounts of something like 10% on product that was already marked 25% too high) imagine my delight in seeing the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Page-A-Day calendar. For more than 20 years at our house the Page-A-Day calendars — note the plural — have been an important tradition. What Page-A-Day calendars will Santa Claus (or Joe Stafford) bring us this year? Some years it’s the Mensa Puzzle Page-A-Day calendar (the clear favorite among family members), some years the Duh! Page-A-Day calendar or the Mom’s Advice Page-A-Day calendar or various trivia Page-A-Day calendars. I had never seen the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Page-A-Day calendar and immediately scooped it up.

Some Page-A-Day calendars don’t make the grade. Last year’s Duh calendar seemed less about stupid people and their antics than about the sour grapes attitude of its writer. This year’s George Carlin Uncensored Page-A-Day calendar lived in the kitchen alongside our other calendar for all of two days before being relocated to an interior bathroom far from children, mostly because a) it’s not funny and b) it features wisdom like this, for today, Monday January 8th: “Haven’t we gone far enough with colored ribbons for different causes? Every cause has its own color. Red for AIDS, blue for child abuse, pink for breast cancer, green for the rain forest. I’ve got a brown one. You know what it means? ‘Eat shit, motherfucker!'” My wife and I are fans of Mr. Carlin’s, but we think his humor works better off the page, as when he is saying it. Moreover, we imagined asking one of the kids to pass the broccoli and being told, “Eat shit, motherfucker!”

The Mensa Puzzle Page-A-Day calendar, as I said, is the most important calendar in the house. (And I guess we’ll have to get one for this year, since neither Santa Claus nor Joe Stafford brought one.) The esteem in which it’s held is clear: In November our eight-year-old daughter was taken to publicly musing over it, pencil poised, then flipping it over to the solution when we were not looking and writing the answer on the front as though she’d solved it. (I asked her to stop.) One of our son’s proudest moments last year was when he proved that the Mensa puzzle was wrong. (No wonder I hadn’t solved that one.) It hasn’t proved to be an indication of Einsteinian intellect, and he didn’t lord it over us, but I do appreciate his ability to question authority — in this case, the geniuses at Mensa.

Given all this, you can see the anticipation that greeted the 2007 Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Page-A-Day calendar. Not only is it a Page-A-Day calendar, it also features sightings from the world of the bizarre. I looked forward to more tales of, say, the man with a 10-foot steel rod stuck halfway through his body who walked to the hospital, or the little boy born with bat wings, or the church made entirely of Spire Christian Comics. (These latter two don’t exist — That I Know Of.)

Imagine my response, then, on seeing Believe It or Not! panels with “amazing” reports such as this (from today): “Believe It or Not! Basketball great Michael Jordan played wearing his University of North Carolina shorts under his Chicago Bulls uniform to bring good luck!”

Um… I believe it. No problem.

Or this one, from April 6th: “A thorn from the crown of Christ, brought back from the Hold Land (sic) by a Crusader in 1185, is preserved in the Church of Chalandry, France, and exhbited each Good Friday.”

Yeah, again, no problem. We call them “relics,” they indeed date from the late Dark Ages and Medieval Age, they are now universally believed to be false, and they led almost directly to Martin Luther’s starting the Reformation. The only part of this that I can’t readily Believe is that the editor of the calendar didn’t catch the typo and correct “Hold Land” to Holy Land.

To be sure, this year’s calendar does still feature what I would call Robert Ripley-quality Believe It or Not!’s, as shown by this one, for October 9th: “Chou Kung, the inventor of the compass, had a swivel wrist and could turn his hand completely around.” To me that’s not only odd — and I hope there’s a picture in one of the Odditoriums around the globe — but useful information for a future dinner party. Or this one, from November 2007: “Sir Winston Churchill, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, once worked as a greeting card designer at Hallmark!” That gives one thought as to the nature of his output, for example on Valentine’s Day: “I shall never never never surrender! Except to your love. Happy Valentine’s Day.”

I hope to discover over the course of the year that there are more tidbits that are hard to Believe than not. We need to have our disbelief pricked every day; it’s part of staying alert. Every day the Page-A-Day calendar gives flight to our imagination. Or at least, it should.

Here’s the email I sent to 10 playwrights the other night seeking input on the new syllabus I’m writing for a class:

I’m taking a quick unscientific poll of playwrights I know whose work I respect to see what they would say in response to this question:

“What are the six contemporary American plays you could learn something about writing plays from?”

If you have just a few minutes to ponder this and reply, I’d appreciate it.

I already know what I think — obviously — but I’d like to know what YOU think.

“Contemporary” in this context means post-1950.

I don’t mean the BEST plays necessarily — I mean the plays that truly demonstrate how to do at least one particular thing well. “True West,” for example, demonstrates how to convey a lot of information organically (as in the opening line), among other things. I think “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” does a great job of foreshadowing. On the other hand, I love “Waiting for Godot” and am a huge fan of Ionesco, but I don’t know that there are any (positive) lessons in playwriting to be gleaned there.

This is an opportunity to send up a signal flare for plays you admire and to let others slip off into the annals of history.

If you have those few minutes and can respond, I’ll be grateful.

Thank you.

Seven of them responded, and while there are a couple of selections I anticipated, and there is some overlap, I still find the list filled with surprises. To wit:

From Respondent #1:

Making it American and post-1950 takes away my favorite learning plays — Chekhov’s rewrite of The Wood Demon into Uncle Vanya, but here goes (off the top of my head):

HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE, by Paula Vogel. Shows how you can use disjointed time and scene sequence to trick an audience out of its prejudices and allow it to view provocative subject matter (child molestation in this case) from a completely fresh angle.

THE FEVER, by Wallace Shawn. Demonstrates how to effect traditional structure — inciting incident, rising action, crisis, climax, denoument — in a one-person play. Also how to handle and present dense, intellectual matter in a theatrically compelling way. A one-person play called MY ITALY STORY by Jospeph Gallo does the structure thing, too.

ANGELS IN AMERICA by Tony Kushner. How to create an alternate universe on stage that really works on its own terms and yet resonates with the audience’s experience of our “real” world. Also, how to inflate domestic drama to the level of grand opera, without music.

DOUBT, PILLOWMAN and PROOF, by John Patrick Shanley, Martin McDonough and David Auburn, respectively, all as one entry, because they demonstrate the same thing: how to structure a modern mystery play — a “whodunnit” — and keep the audience in their seats guessing about what’s really what until the final curtain.

DEATH OF A SALESMAN, by Arthur Miller. How to write an interior play, i.e., a play that’s really going on inside the protagonist’s head, while still keeping events external and dramatic enough to carry the audience along.

LOVE, VALOR, COMPASSION, by Terrence McNally. Demonstartes how to effectively and seamlessly shift point of view. The book for the musical JERSEY BOYS, by Marshal Brickman and Rick Elise, pulls that off, too.

After I replied favorably to seeing HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE on the list, and wondering about Pinter’s absence, he reminded me that I had stipulated “American” and then he added this:

I followed your request pretty carefully. Although HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE and THE FEVER are among my favorite plays, the others on the list are not. For the most part they’re plays I like, but also plays that I think you can learn something about playwriting from.

I really like ARCADIA and just about all of Tom Stoppard’s work, but I can’t think what I’d learn from them. You said American plays, so I didn’t consider him or Pinter for this excercise. If Brit playwrights had been allowed, I would have included Marie Jones’ STONES IN HIS POCKETS as a good teaching play. It shows how to paint a big canvas with just two actors. Maybe something by Caryl Churchill, too.

I realize now that I slipped an Irishman in there with McDonough.

If I were going to suggest a Pinter it would be THE HOMECOMING or A KIND OF ALASKA. But again, I don’t think we can learn how to write like Pinter or Stoppard by reading or seeing their plays, anymore than we can learn how to fly by watching birds and flapping our arms.

Respondent #2’s list:

Proof, how to hide the major dramatic question (will she survive her emotional problems?) behind a McGuffin (did she write the proof)
Cloud Nine, how to play with time and space and effectively make a statement
Angels in America (Part One only), how to use epic structure in post-modern times
The History Boys, how to use of a naturalistic process (preparing for a test) as an umbrella and overriding metaphor for a community (England’s educational transition in the time of Thatcher)
Pillowman, how to mix myth and realism
Rabbit Hole, how to use the 7-page/week workshop format to structural advantage with emphasis on the audience preception shift.

From Respondent #3:

Narrowing it down to six is tough. Even tougher is not including any plays written before 1950 … “Long Day’s Journey,” “Our Town,” “Glass Menagerie” …

But here they are, in no particular order …

“Buried Child” – Sam Shepard
A Greek tragedy set on an Illinois farm. I can’t think of another play that operates on so many levels. It’s comedy and horror perfectly blended, and is a terrific example of giving an audience a play that is as deep as they are willing to dig … and there is always another layer waiting to be explored.

“Kimberly Akimbo” – David Lindsay-Abaire
This would probably be the most controversial play on this list as to whether or not it deserves inclusion. The play has its flaws, but his writing is so seemingly effortless (proven again in “Rabbit Hole”), that it catches you by surprise at how impactful the characters are the ending is. And it does all that without breaking a sweat. To me, that’s playwriting on the highest level.

“Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches” – Tony Kushner
Mixes magic realism with great comedy with awful tragedy, and does it all with beautiful language. This is the play Aristotle had in mind when he wrote The Poetics.

“1776” (libretto) – Peter Stone
This is the very best example of how to write 27 roles, each sharply drawn. And, in addition to the remarkable historical accuracy, Stone manages to make these previously cardboard figures jump off the page. And in what other musical comedy do you find such finely etched political and philosophical arguments?

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” – Edward Albee
If you want to break new ground and create a visceral awfulness onstage that will be the model for many future plays and playwrights, I can’t think of a better example. The key to making this type of play work is to make it as compelling as a fatal traffic accident so that the audience simply cannot turn away. At three plus hours, Albee somehow managed to do this. It’s unrelenting and exhausting. Which makes it perfect.

“The Odd Couple” – Neil Simon
Not a single joke in the entire play. Instead, this is laugh-out-loud humor grounded in character. There are no lines you can take from one character and give to another (aside from the interchangeable Pigeon sisters) without the line falling flat. This is the best well-made comedy ever written. And, I believe (though it’s just a guess), the most difficult play on this list to write.

You could call this list The American Dream and not be far off the mark. I would really like to have included a woman here. Or a minority. (Well, Kushner and Albee are “friends of Dorothy,” though they’re hardly a minority in the theatre.) But you wanted the top six and these are they. In my opinion.

What I like about that list is the range: Here’s a playwright unafraid to equally admire the very disparate “1776,” “Buried Child,” and “The Odd Couple,” all of them excellent plays.

Respondent #4’s list from a contrarian playwright friend of a dozen years features some negative choices:

1. God’s Man in Texas by David Rambo for a demonstration on how you need to have something at stake (in this case, the pulpit of one of the biggest and most influencial church’s in America) that the audience cares about. This is an excellent play to study for theme, as it deals with father-sons in the spiritual and physical world.

2. All My Sons by Arthur Miller (and this might be pre-1950, I’m not really sure) about how to begin a play. The way the information is revealed in the first 20 minutes is especially deft. He doesn’t reveal everything all at once.

3. Mac Wellman’s entire output. How to write utter nonsense and be seen by the misguided as some kind of newfangled genius.

4. Angels in America by Tony Kushner. There isn’t a scene in both plays (but especially the first) that don’t offer lessons on how to write characters that leap off the page. (Also, he is very clear here about what the characters want, which is why they are so alive in the first place)

5. Nothing by David Mamet. Great playwright at times who can ruin playwrights who lapse immediately into his speech patterns, which seem so easy to copy but aren’t.

From Respondent #5:

‘Night Mother, by Marsha Norman. I think it’s a perfect text to teach with, because it is so simple and specific and wonderfully written. It is about one thing that the main character wants and how she goes about achieving it, and has such marvelous complexity of character over the top of its simplicity of action and plot.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” by Edward Albee. Because it turned me on, on, on to playwriting and has kept me there like no other play, and that kind of energy is important if you’re going to do this.

Talley’s Folly, by Lanford Wilson. I actually like Fifth of July better — but Talley’s Folly is direct, specific, two characters (so often new playwrights bite off more than they can chew with their first plays — casts of thousands, fifty different sets — this is an example of one set, two actors, and (again) a very direct action line.

Maybe something that has some good theatricality to it, too: Angels in America, or M. Butterfly. I adore Sam Shepard. Mamet’s Glengarry Glenn Ross. Take Me Out by Richard Greenberg really impressed me. The Pillowman is a terrific read, too, and very intense.

Anyway. There’s a few, off the top of my head. I could talk about this topic over gin martinis for hours. Good luck with the project!

I was surprised that this was the first mention of “‘Night Mother,” a play I have grown to admire more and more over the years, and one which I will certainly be teaching this spring.

From Respondent #6:

“Proof” – it’s the best contemporary example of the well-made play in my mind. I’m speaking particuarly of structure, plot, payoffs, etc. Done extremely economically with good character development.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff” – If there’s better depth of character or superior, crackling dialogue, I don’t know where it exists.

“Streetcar Named Desire” (this might be pre 1950) – Language as poetry. Amazing.

“How I Learned How To Drive” – Breaking structure; themes that carry through the play. It was used at one of the sessions I took at the Kennedy Center and I was more impressed when I read it than with the production I saw here (with Molly Ringwald and Brian Kerwin).

“Angels In America” – It’s brilliant in everything I mentioned above. Really brilliant. And he doesn’t get caught up in the transitions between scenes. He just does them.

“Our Town” – that’s pre 1950, isn’t it? I think it was the forties. But I love the way it travels through time so easily and how it’s narration isn’t jarring and is woven into the fabric of the structure. And its universal theme is what makes it such a great teaching tool. Everyone can relate to it, even if the few cynics who condemn it for being corny.

Finally, I received this reply from Respondent #7. While I don’t know the last play she suggests, I so admire her rationale for its inclusion that now I’m going to seek it out. Here goes:

Doubt by JPS– because I think this is a play where the DNA of the story is really upheld in every scene, monologue, and line of the play (almost every line is an expression of some sort of doubt- and certainly every scene is).

Fences by August Wilson – Most structuralists maintain that Cory (the son) is the real protagonist of this play, even though it is 99% Troy’s story. I find that interesting and love this play for being complexly structured and have two or three utterly, searingly beautiful moments that lift it into the catagory of a classic.

Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neil– for the way he shifts your perception of the characters with almost every line, with stage directions, and with silences.

Red Light Winter by Adam Rapp– from last year’s Pulitzer shortlist. I would teach this as an almost masterpiece by a young contemporary writer. There are some significant Act Two and character problems — but it is brilliant at character development with the two male characters (female character lags a bit). Almost unsurpassed at dialogue riffs that seem gratuitous but are actually very specific and purposeful, and lyrically beutiful while still entirely conversational.

History Boys by Alan Bennet — this is a fascinating play that refuses to tie anything up with a bow for you. Everything seems random, the hand of the maker is not at all in evidence, there is no melodrama or manipulation on the part of the writer, it is made to be performed and not read, and it still manages a profound impact.

Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom by Suzan Lori Parks. This teaches you that you can do absolutely anything and call it a play. In a good way. The only Parks play I actually like. Utter freedom. Total creativity. Shows that playwriting is not a collection of rules, but a celebration of imagination.

For years, one of the things I’ve made a point of saying to students (as well as writing on the board) is this: “I may be wrong.” Although I have strongly held views about craft — how to accomplish certain things well on stage — when it comes to art opinions should be more freewheeling. Creativity demands freedom, and while good playwriting exists atop a framework of what will work (or play), ultimately rules are secondary. If I have any rule, it’s this one: Don’t bore the audience. But, as a very close playwright friend pointed out to me years ago, definitions of “boring” differ.

One thing the list points out is that while some of us gripe about the bad plays we see, there have been many wonderful plays written in our lifetime. The reason we may be unhappy any given night in the theatre may have more to do with our disappointment that we’re not seeing something as memorable as we’ve already seen and demand to see again.

Another thing it shows is that there is always room for good new plays.