The 30 greatest American family dramas

30. RAISED IN CAPTIVITY
The overbearing matriarch is to family drama as bloodletting is to Jacobean tragedy: inevitable, if usually overdone. Still, no one creates toxic moms like Nicky Silver (now heading to Broadway with The Lyons). Silver’s archly absurd 1995 comedy begins with a description of a mother’s death by hurtling shower-massage attachment, and gets stranger (and sadder) from there. Imprisonment is the apt, operative metaphor for Silver’s portrayal of the Bliss family (in an ironic wink to Noël Coward) and several of the impish playwright’s archetypes are present and accounted for: chronically celibate brother; crazy, self-obsessed sister; and soul-eating mother.—DC

29. LEAR
Young Jean Lee trampolines her devastating postdramatic construction off Shakespeare’s ultimate tragedy, King Lear, using the Elizabethan text to launch her own excruciating deconstruction of grief. Playful and biting, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia snipe at one another; sulky and competitive, Edgar and Edmund mope. Lee’s mean-girl courtiers suddenly give way, though, to women tortured by an inability to sufficiently love their parent, and the fourth wall tinkles into dust. By the strange third act—which quotes the Sesame Street gang explaining death to Big Bird—we realize that we’re in the presence of a playwright contemplating a father’s death and trying, rather desperately, to help us do the same.—HS

28. CROWTET
High priest of the postmodern language play Mac Wellman wrote his quartet A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, The Lesser Magoo and Second-Hand Smoke as a series of unpeeling layers (he called it the “exegesis of the spiritual state of the Onion”) around a certain emptiness—the family drama. In Wellman’s discombobulating darkness, we stumble across Susannah—prophet, daughter to a walking dead man and hater of war—who abandons her human family to live among the crows. His satire, one infinitely regressive and difficult to label, takes ornery delight in puncturing the nation of “the Rational Biped.”—HS

27. THE EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON MAN-IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS
Paul Zindel was a science teacher in his midtwenties when he wrote this tenderly morbid slice of Staten Island gothic, in which a deranged mother torments her two daughters and their unfortunate rabbit. Six years after the play’s 1964 premiere in Houston, it moved to New York and won a surprise Pulitzer Prize for its quirky mixture of hopelessness and adaptive optimism, and Zindel went on to a long and successful career as the author of idiosyncratic books for young adults.—AF

26. TOPDOG/UNDERDOG
Suzan-Lori Parks took the frequently used metaphorical equivalency between family and America and turned it into this scarifying 2002 portrait of two African-American brothers named, portentously, Lincoln and Booth. An astringent burlesque of race, kinship and masculinity, Topdog/Underdog shows us America as a fairground jungle, a place where two black men—a kind of Cain and Abel enslaved by the almighty dollar—hustle three-card monte in a bid to finally realize some interest on their country’s half-hearted investment in Emancipation.—HS