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Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-1673), known by his stage name, Moliere, is generally considered to be one of the greatest French writers of all time. Born to a wealthy family, he decided as a young man to become an actor and gradually developed a successful theatrical troupe, writing much of his own material. Though he personally preferred tragedy to comedy, he achieved his greatest success as a writer of comedies, and nearly 350 years after his death, many of his plays continue to be produced around the world on a regular basis. Tartuffe, first performed in 1664, is a comedy about religious hypocrisy. The title character insinuates himself into the household of a wealthy man named Orgon by claiming to be pious and guided by divine inspiration in all things. Orgon and his mother place all their faith in Tartuffe, but the rest of his family, including Elmire, his much younger second wife, are extremely skeptical and worry, not without reason, that Tartuffe's ultimate goal is to claim their home and fortune for himself. Much of the humor involves the family's attempts to trick Tartuffe into revealing his true nature (and his lust for Elmire) to Orgon. The play was banned early in its initial run by King Louis XIV, at the behest of religious leaders, though the king seems to have enjoyed it himself. Like many of Moliere's plays, Tartuffe is written entirely in rhymed Alexandrine verse, with each line containing twelve syllables, and the rhymes often contribute to the comic effect, both in the original French and in many translations. The LATW recording features Brian Bedford as Tartuffe, performing Richard Wilbur's acclaimed English translation. If you enjoy this production, you can check out LATW's Moliere Collection, which includes performances of five of his other great comedies.

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) moved to England with his parents when he was seven. His mother was a successful novelist and playwright, and his father spent time as a theatrical manager and actor while the family was living in Dublin. When Sheridan was still in his twenties, he wrote a string of very successful comedies and also became the co-owner of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, which he managed off and on for several decades. At age 29 he was elected to Parliament and unfortunately that more or less put an end to his career as a playwright. The School for Scandal premiered at Drury Lane in 1777 and was an immediate hit. The “school” of the title is a salon run by Lady Sneerwell, but rather than discussing art, music, or literature, the participants, who include Mrs. Candour, Mr. Crabtree, and the particularly vicious Sir Benjamin Backbite, trade scandalous gossip about their neighbors. Their primary focus is the Teazle household, where Sir Peter Teazle, a wealthy middle-aged bachelor, has recently married a much younger woman. It appears that the new Lady Teazle is not ready to settle down, and the scandalmongers have much to say about her relationship with the Surface brothers, Charles and Joseph, who are closer to her age. Charles seems to be something of a rake, while Joseph is upright and virtuous, but “surface” impressions turn out to be deceptive. A scene in which Lady Teazle is hiding behind a screen that gets knocked over at an inopportune moment generates as many laughs today as it did in the eighteenth century. The LATW production features Simon Templeman as Sir Peter and Julian Sands as Joseph Surface, and Templeman also appears in LATW’s recording of Sheridan’s other great comedy, The Rivals.

Despite coming from one of Europe’s smaller nations (Norway) and writing in a language that, during his lifetime, was gradually evolving out of Danish, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) managed to become one of the world’s leading playwrights and a key figure in the development of modern drama. Born into a wealthy family, he spent much of his childhood and youth in poverty after his father went bankrupt when he was eight. He developed an interest in theatre as a young man and gradually achieved success as a stage manager and, eventually, a writer. Most of his earlier plays were historical verse dramas or based on legend, like Peer Gynt, but after going abroad in the late 1860s he began to write the contemporary prose plays for which he is best known. During his most productive years, he lived mostly in Italy and Germany, and rarely visited Norway, though his plays continued to take place there. Hedda Gabler premiered in 1890 and has always been one of Ibsen’s most frequently produced plays. The title character actually bears the name Hedda Tesman, and as the story opens, she and her husband, George Tesman, have just returned from a six-month honeymoon journey—but Ibsen clearly wants us to be aware that she is still in all respects Hedda Gabler (her late father, a general, is frequently referred to), and that she has already lost the few hopes she ever had for a satisfying relationship with pleasant but deadly dull George. The action revolves around Hedda’s renewed acquaintance with two other men—her former love, the brilliant but unstable Eilert Lovborg, who is now an academic rival of George’s; and family “friend” Judge Brack, who feels Hedda might need a little social (and sexual?) distraction from her unsatisfying life. The pair of pistols left to Hedda by her father play an important role at several points in the story. The LATW production features Jocelyn Towne as Hedda and Gregory Harrison as Judge Brack. You can also listen to the LATW productions of Ibsen’s A Doll House (with Calista Flockhart) and An Enemy of the People.

When it opened at the Haymarket Theatre in London in January of 1895, An Ideal Husband was an immediate popular success. Three months later, Oscar Wilde was arrested for “gross indecency” concerning his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, and his name was immediately removed from the production; the same thing occurred with his other great comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, which was running simultaneously at the St. James Theatre. Both productions were forced to close soon afterward, and Wilde was eventually sentenced to two years of hard labor in prison, which not only broke his health but ended a phenomenally successful theatrical career that had only lasted three years. Born in Dublin, Wilde (1854-1900) was the son of a noted eye surgeon; his mother was a poet and Irish nationalist. After a successful university career at Oxford, young Oscar won renown for his poetry, his essays, and his wit at London parties. His lecture tours in the 1880s took him all over North America, but much of the writing for which he is best remembered was completed in the last few years before his arrest. Unlike The Importance of Being Earnest, which is purely comical, Ideal Husband is a comedy with melodramatic elements and a moral. The central character, Sir Robert Chiltern, is a rising British politician who is blackmailed at a party he’s hosting by Mrs. Cheveley, who has knowledge of an ethical lapse in his past that could cost him his career. It could also cost him his marriage, because his wife, Gertrude, whom he adores, has extremely high moral standards and believes him to be “an ideal husband”. When Gertrude discovers the truth, their friend Lord Goring (an Oscar Wilde surrogate who gets many of the best lines) must step in to put things right. Two of the many great lines from this play are: “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance” and “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike”. Wilde’s own secrets involving his marriage, the Douglas affair, and his forays into London’s sexual underworld were most likely a prime inspiration for writing this charming comedy in which the underlying message is a serious one involving forgiveness of past sins and hypocritical judgment of the behavior of others. LATC’s recording features Alfred Molina as Lord Goring and Jacqueline Bisset as the deliciously evil Mrs. Cheveley. You can also check out The Oscar Wilde Collection, which includes Ideal Husband, Earnest, Wilde’s two other great comedies Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance, plus a dramatization of his classic novel The Picture of Dorian Grey.

Born into a Jewish family in New Orleans, Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) spent part of her childhood in the South and part in New York. In the early 1930s, she went to Hollywood as a script reader for MGM, where she met Dashiell Hammett; their romantic relationship continued on and off until Hammett’s death in 1961. Starting in 1934, Hellman wrote several very successful plays, including The Children’s Hour, The Little Foxes, and Watch on the Rhine. All three of these were turned into equally acclaimed films with scripts by Hellman or, in the case of Watch on the Rhine, Hammett. She continued her playwriting career into the 1960s and also found herself under investigation in the early 1950s by the House Un-American Activities Committee for her earlier ties to the Communist Party; she testified before the committee but refused to talk about anyone but herself. In her 60s she wrote three very popular memoirs—though a number of critics have questioned their basis in fact. The Autumn Garden, which Hellman considered her best play, premiered on Broadway in 1951, just before her brush with the anti-Communist investigation. Set at a Gulf Coast boarding house near New Orleans in 1949, it involves a group of friends, now middle-aged, who share a late-summer reunion and muse about the unfulfilled promise of their youth. Constance Tuckerman, the boarding house owner, is nervous about the return of her long-ago love, Nick Denery and his wife, Nina. In the course of a week, she learns that Nick’s career as an artist in New York is a failure, as in his marriage. Several of Constance’s other guests also come to terms with their unsatisfying lives in this mixture of comedy and drama that has often been called Chekhovian. Hammett helped with the writing of the play and received 15% of the royalties; aspects of the characters of Nick and of Constance’s longtime admirer Ned Crossman, now a hopeless alcoholic, seem to be inspired by him. The LATW production features Gates McFadden as Constance, David Selby as Nick, Mary Steenburgen as Nina, and Eric Stoltz as Ned. You can also check out LATW’s great recordings of The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Lynn Nottage (b.1964) is one of the most accomplished contemporary American playwrights. She has degrees from both Brown and Yale Universities and teaches playwriting at Columbia; early in her career, she worked in Amnesty International’s press office for four years. Nottage is the only woman to have won two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama: the first was for Ruined (2008), which deals with the plight of women in war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo, while the second was for Sweat (2015), which looks at the loss of factory jobs in Reading, Pennsylvania. LATW has not done productions of these yet, but they do have an excellent performance of Nottage’s earlier play, Crumbs From the Table of Joy, first produced in 1995. Set in the early 1950s, it centers on a bereaved Black family and the new life they try to create for themselves. Godfrey Crump, recently widowed, moves his two teenaged daughters from rural Florida to Brooklyn where he hopes to turn his life around by joining the church of Sweet Father Divine. The girls’ free-spirited Aunt Lily soon enters the picture; her devotion is to Communism and bebop, so there is a lot of family discord. Godfrey’s subsequent surprise marriage to a woman who has recently immigrated from Germany leads to further tensions. Gerte is kind and idealistic and wants to fit in to her new family, but the girls know that most Americans do not look kindly on interracial marriages, and there are sure to be some major problems. LATW’s production features Charlayne Woodard as Lily and Russell Hornsby as Godfrey. Charlayne Woodard also stars in another LATW production of a Nottage play, Fabulation, written in 2004.

Born in Cuba in 1960, Nilo Cruz emigrated to Florida with his family at age ten and grew up in Miami. He received an M.F.A. from Brown University and has taught drama at Brown, Yale, and the University of Iowa. His play Anna in the Tropics was a surprise winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003 since it had not received a New York production at the time. In fact, none of the prize judges had seen a staged version of the play and awarded it the prize solely on the basis of the playscript. Set in 1929, the play takes place at a cigar factory in Tampa, Florida, operated by Cuban emigres. In a longstanding Cuban tradition, the factory workers are distracted from their tedious work by a “lector”, who reads to them all day—though at the time the story takes place, automation is threatening to replace both workers and lector. The factory’s new lector, Juan Julian, decides to read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to his audience, and soon his listeners are caught up in the story as it starts to have an effect on their own interactions with their families and lovers. The LATW recording features Jimmy Smits, who also starred in the play’s eventual Broadway production, in the central role of Juan Julian.

Tracy Letts (b. 1965) is a rarity in American theatre—a playwright who has achieved an equal amount of success as an actor. Born in Oklahoma, he was the son of professors at Southeastern Oklahoma State University; his mother also wrote four acclaimed novels, while his father began an acting career late in life and appeared on Broadway in Tracy’s most acclaimed play. Letts moved to Chicago at age 20 and became a member of the city’s acclaimed Steppenwolf Theatre Company, acting in many of their productions. In recent years he has appeared in numerous film and television roles and won the Tony Award for Best Actor for his performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. In the 1990s he began his second career as a playwright, and in 2007, August, Osage County premiered at Steppenwolf, moved on to Broadway a few months later, and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award. The play is a three-act family tragicomedy, set in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, in which most of the characters are members of the highly dysfunctional Weston family. Family patriarch Beverly, a once-famous poet, now an alcoholic, appears in the prologue, in which he hires Johnna, a young Cheyenne woman, as housekeeper for himself and his pill-addicted wife, Violet. The rest of the play focuses on Beverly’s disappearance and suspected suicide, which brings the three Weston daughters, their significant others, and Violet’s sister and brother-in-law back to the family home for several rounds of accusations and revelations over the course of a few hot weeks in summer. The LATW recording features several members of the original Broadway and Steppenwolf casts, including Tony winners Deanna Dunagan as Violet and Rondi Reed as her sister Mattie Fae.

The son of Pakistani immigrants, Ayad Akhtar was born in 1970 in New York City and grew up in Milwaukee. He majored in theatre and religion at Brown University and later moved to Europe, where he became an assistant to celebrated Polish director Jerzy Grotowski. Back in the U.S., he received a master’s degree in film directing from Columbia. His first novel, American Dervish was published in 2012 and received excellent reviews, and in 2013 his first play, Disgraced, received productions in Chicago and New York and won the Pulitzer and Obie awards. Since then, he has had three more acclaimed plays produced and has been nominated twice for the Tony Award. Disgraced takes place on New York’s Upper East Side and centers around a dinner party for two couples. Amir is of Pakistani descent but was born in the U.S.; he has abandoned his Muslim heritage to focus on his law career. His wife, Emily, is an artist who often uses Muslim themes in her art, though she is not of Middle Eastern heritage herself. They are hosting a dinner for Amir’s colleague, Jory, a Black woman, and her husband, Isaac, an art dealer who is Jewish. What starts out as a convivial dinner among four people of divergent backgrounds but seemingly similar liberal instincts gradually devolves into an increasingly tense series of arguments and revelations that will end in violence. LATW’s production features Hari Dhillon, who also played Amir on Broadway.

Born in New York City in 1964, the son of an Egyptian father and an Irish mother, Stephen Adly Guirgis grew up in the city’s Upper West Side, attended school in Harlem, and graduated from SUNY Albany. His longtime involvement in the New York theatre scene includes acting and directing, but he has had his greatest success as a playwright with a string of tough comedies that combine wild plot twists and harsh language with true feeling for his flawed characters. His 2014 play Between Riverside and Crazy won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. The central character, Walter “Pops” Washington, is a former New York City police officer with a large, rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive. Pops is bitter about the direction his life has taken: his wife is dead, his son “Junior” is recently out of prison and seemingly still involved in some sort of illegal activity, and he himself is partially disabled from being shot while off duty by a white policeman. His former colleagues on the force are urging him to settle his long-running lawsuit against the city, and he’s somewhat grudgingly sharing his living space with Junior, his fiancee, and a young friend. Could some form of rebirth and redemption be waiting for him in the form of a neighborhood Brazilian “church lady” who keeps pestering him? LATW’s production features John Cothran as Pops. Guirgis has been a favorite LATW playwright, and you can also check out their recordings of his other plays, Jesus Hopped the “A” Train, Our Lady of 121st Street, and the one library patrons are often embarrassed to ask for: The Motherf***er With the Hat, which features original Broadway cast members Chris Rock, Bobby Cannavale, and Annabella Sciorra.