Interpretation of Literature Books:
Plays Annotations

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee

A play that remains controversial and mind-numbing 30 years after its debut. A middle-aged couple (professor and wife) attempt to destroy the other by manipulating the guests they have over for drinks, starting a chain of explosions that ends up exposing everyone for who they really are. The conventions of polite society are quickly dropped through Albee's use of conventional (and volatile) language, bringing issues of masculinity, fidelity and reproduction to the foreground. The ending is so surprising that it frequently jars students into questioning the difference between fact and fiction, reality and illusion.

Dutchman and The Slave by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (1964)

Imbued with overwhelming rage, Dutchman is a civil rights era parable about black-white race relations. On a New York City subway, Clay, a twenty-year-old black man in a business suit, encounters Lula, a thirty-year-old white woman, who tries to seduce him while simultaneously ridiculing his integrationist self-construction. After Clay asserts a powerfully written defense of his own black identity, Lula stabs him, with the implied consent of the white riders on the subway. The play offers a powerful look at the problems of black identity in white culture that, some have claimed, is separatist to the extent that it leaves no neutral subject position for white audiences.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1952)

Because it resists simple interpretation so thoroughly and imaginatively, this avant-garde classic encourages interesting classroom discussions about interpretation, the nature and purpose of literature, and narrative expectations. Irish-French playwright Beckett's tragicomedy is as baffling and disturbing as it is bleakly humorous.

Wit by Margaret Edson

Vivian Bearing is a renowned English professor who has been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. Her approach to her illness is very similar to her approach to her literary study: aggressively probing and intensely rational. The play explores such issues as the relationship between medical researchers and their patients; the ethics of experimentation; the relationship between a professor, her research, and her students; the power of literature to confront difficult emotions; and the process of coming to terms with death. The play could be taught productively in connection with some of Donne's sonnets. It might also fit well into the Reader section of a course as Vivian reexamines her own early reading experiences, her role as a professor of literature, and her position as a kind of text being read by the doctors. There is also an excellent recent film adaptation of the play starring Emma Thompson.

Euripides: Ten Plays by Euripides, tr. Paul Roche (455-403 BCE)

This text includes the following plays: Alcestis, Hippolytus, Ion, Electra, Iphigenia at Aulis, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Medea, The Bacchae, The Trojan Women, and The Cyclops. Paul Roche provides verse translations and an introduction explaining the rationale behind his translation. The translations themselves are somewhat modernized, though this possible defect is meliorated by the liveliness of his verse (and a lack of expurgation as in some older translations). Each play is prefaced by a brief introduction.

"Master Harold" . . . and the boys by Athol Fugard (1982)

Fugard's autobiographical "bildungsdrama" articulates moments of moral commitment imposed upon Hally, a 17-year-old white South African, as he is forced to re-evaluate his relationships with Sam and Willie, the two blacks employed in his mother's tearoom. During a tedious and rainy afternoon, the trio consider "men of magnitude," the role of the father, and kite flying, but the dominant metaphor for their discussion arises from the older men's interest in competitive ballroom dancing. Sam's dream of "a world without collisions" analogizes a concept for racial harmony. This becomes the first of several lessons the "uneducated" man attempts to teach his pupil/son Hally. Fugard stresses his morals clearly; and students will likely respond enthusiastically to the characters and clearly-stated issues of the play.

Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner

A "fantasia on national themes," the first part of Kushner's epic (Perestroika is the second) is set in 1985, during Ronald Reagan's second term. The play critiques the values of the Reagan administration and the political climate in the country at the time. The protagonists are gay men living with AIDS, Mormons, and Roy Cohn. Kushner focuses on AIDS because it has been a 20th-century plague; Mormons because they favored goodness and godliness but would not tolerate homosexuality; and Roy Cohn, because he was a closeted gay man who personified the selfishness and greed that characterized the decade. The play also includes a discussion of supernatural themes, most notably when an angel crashes through the ceiling at the end.

Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca

This is one of Garcia Lorca's most celebrated plays, lending itself easily to discussions of modernist theater, visual symbolism, gender roles, and cultural tradition. The play deals with the events leading up to and following a young bride's decision to elope with her former lover after her arranged marriage has taken place. Her lover is murdered as stylized characters chant commentary on events, suggesting that the life he leaves is equally limited for those who still live.

Oleanna by David Mamet (1992)

Mamet's 1992 controversial script focuses on just two characters: John, the college professor recently recommended for tenure, and Carol, his student, who first appears in his office, worrying about her inability to understand the course. By the second act, Carol has accused John of sexual harassment, and by the third, of rape. The play generates intense discussion because of its loaded subjects -- gender roles, use and abuse of power, political correctness -- and its university setting. Teaching hint: discuss the first act by itself, before assigning the other two.

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (1588-90)

Marlowe’s play is about power, salvation, and damnation. Dissatisfied with the limitations of permissible study—medicine, law, philosophy—Faustus turns to magic and begins conjuring demons. Thinking himself already lost by this, he sells his soul to Lucifer and, in return, receives Mephistopheles as his servant for 24 years. The play explores Faustus’ slapstick use of his satanic wizardry, but the play’s power originates from his terror of damnation and his desire to be saved—through what might be his stubbornness, his pride, or an insufficient faith in God’s grace. The final soliloquy is harrowing, and may introduce into the classroom ways of thinking about religious experience and death. (It might be useful to pair with a Flannery O’Connor story like “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”)

For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange (1975)

For Colored Girls is what Shange calls a "choreopoem": a piece which incorporates the art forms of poetry, music, and dance. And Shange experiments with language as well as form, using phonetic spelling and slang to make her text personal and accessible. Her writing both explores the oppressions and celebrates the triumphs of women of color in contemporary American culture. In For Colored Girls, Shange offers the personal stories of representative female characters of color, tracing experiences from childhood fantasies and teen crushes to marriage and motherhood and from the pain of abuse and abandonment to the joys of friendship and self-love.

Stop Kiss by Diana Son

The play concerns the relationship between two women: Callie, a New York City traffic reporter, and Sara, a school teacher transplanted from St. Louis. Their growing attraction to each other is impacted by an act of homophobic violence. The action of the play unfolds in a nonlinear fashion, so it lends itself to discussions about structure and time. The play explores themes of violence and survival, as well as the tension between remaining silent and bearing witness. It is also recommended for those with an interest in contemporary playwriting or in the sociological issue of bias-related violence.

The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles

Sophocles's Theban plays mark a high point in Greek tragedy. Aristotle considered Oedipus the King to be the greatest example of the form. In it, the infant son of King Laius and Queen Jocasta, exposed to die in the wilderness, but rescued instead and raised as the scion of Corinth, leaves home for fear of fulfilling a prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Once Oedipus has been married to Jocasta and crowned king in Thebes, he resolves to find the murderer of the former king. His determination leads to ruin when he finally discovers the truth about his identity. Oedipus at Colonus follows the story further and traces its effect on the next generation of Oedipus's family. Antigone finishes the trilogy, portraying the destruction of the entire ruling family that occurs then Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, must disobey the ruling of Creon in order to fulfill the divine decree that she should give her brother Polynieces a proper burial.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (1967)

Stoppard's 1967 play, retelling Hamlet from the point of view of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, owes a debt to Beckett's Waiting for Godot as well as to Shakespeare's tragedy. Like the tramps in Godot, Ros and Guil pass their time trying to figure out what's going on, and even who they are. The play is both witty and sad, with Stoppard's characteristic word-play balanced by his portrayal of two young courtiers who find themselves hopelessly confused by the events at Elsinore and finally trapped in a world (and play) they cannot control.

How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel

The play's protagonist is a young girl called Li'l Bit who is trapped in a crude, coarse family that just doesn't fit her. (We learn that they have a family habit of nicknaming relatives based on characteristics of their genitalia.) Among this domestic squalor, the one person who seems to listen and understand Li'l Bit is her Uncle Peck. But Peck is a predator who seduces and coerces her into horrifying situations, all in the name of love, hunting her as carefully as he hooks and reels in a fish on a riverbank. But the play is not only about sexual molestation; it is also about families, growing up, becoming independent, and survival.

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (1895)

Though no one can guarantee that Gen. Ed. Lit. students will rise in their seats to cheer and cheer again as did its first-night audience, this play may prove interesting not only for its wit, but also for its expression of fin-de-siecle aesthetics, ennui and British dandyism. Wilde's focus on style is particularly provocative; like many Wilde works, Importance questions, always tongue in cheek, whether form or content should be more valued (as Gwendolen says, "In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing"). To sum up: The Importance of Being Earnest, with its pun on "earnest," follows two friends who are unaware that they are brothers. The elder, Jack Worthing, has invented a profligate younger brother named Ernest who lives in town, to whose aid he professes to go in order to escape from the country (when he is in town, Jack assumes the name of Ernest); in order to escape social obligations, Algernon Moncrieff has invented an invalid named Bunbury, to whose assistance he professes to go. Gwendolen and Cecily, the young women in love with Jack and Algernon (who, in act 2, pretends to be the wicked brother, Ernest), believe that they are both engaged to men named Ernest (Jack and Algernon). These deceptions, on being exposed, complicate the plot and produce the dual discoveries that: 1) Jack is Algernon's long-lost brother and, 2) Jack's true name is actually Ernest.

Four Plays by Tennessee Williams (Summer and Smoke, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, Period of Adjustment) (1948-1960)

These four Williams plays showcase his lyricism and, as in his more famous works, explore the secret lives of men and women who, in the face of repressive societies, are willing to suffer destruction if needed in order to follow their passion, erotic desires, and own inimitable visions of individuality. In particular, Suddenly Last Summer and Orpheus Descending would each work well in the classroom. Suddenly Last Summer links cannibalism, incest, and homosexuality: a wealthy widow attempts to cover up the death of her homosexual son, who died on vacation, by lobotomizing his cousin Catherine, who witnesses his death. In Orpheus Descending, a young charismatic musician descends on a small, repressive southern town, forming a relationship with a passionate woman who is trapped in a bad marriage and who has a tragic past. The play exhibits many of the playwright's typical themes: loneliness and desire, sexuality and repression, the longing for freedom. Violence lurks just below the surface, and it bursts into the open at the play's end.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by August Wilson (1985)

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom explores the various clashes between a blues singer (Ma Rainey), her band, her white manager, and the white owner of the record company during a recording session in 1920s Chicago. Through a "slick" trumpeter's attempts to deal with the violence of his past, the play examines racism and racial exploitation in a subtle and complex manner. Ma Rainey's ongoing battles with musicians and managers about how to sing the blues may also provide an interesting start to a discussion about styles and the significance of interpretation.

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