The 30 greatest American family dramas
American playwrights know how to keep it in the family.
Fri Mar 23 2012
15. AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY
It could have ended up an overstuffed grab bag of dysfunctional tropes—pill-popping mother, suicidal father, miserable children, vicious grudges, infidelity, incest, insanity and a passel of vulgar, nosy relations—but Tracy Letts is too damn good a writer to lose control. His rollicking 2007 tragicomedy veered giddily from eloquent rage over the damage done by the misnamed Greatest Generation to hilarious screeds, one-liners and put-downs. The Steppenwolf Theatre Company world premiere will be hard to top in future revivals. Oklahoma turned out to be anything but OK.—DC
14. A DELICATE BALANCE
Alcohol and vitriol lubricate the gears of Edward Albee’s ominous 1966 dramedy, in which the suburban home of an upper-crusty couple is invaded by a whinging adult daughter (escaping a fourth failed marriage) and a pair of close friends (fleeing an intangible sense of dread). The original production, with Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, won the first of Albee’s three Pulitzers; Lincoln Center’s revival 30 years later earned plaudits for stars Rosemary Harris, George Grizzard and Elaine Stritch. In the writer’s discomfiting family portrait, the nest seems to have always been a little empty.—AF
13. THE ORPHANS’ HOME CYCLE
Horton Foote’s three-part, nine-play magnum opus is actually a lifetime of work systematized into a cycle—adapting many decades’ worth of plays (some in condensed versions) and stage-adapted screenplays to trace the life of Horace Robedaux, buffeted by the rough winds of the 20th century. Foote’s trademark humanism suffuses the whole, a thing both very large (it includes the flu epidemic and World War I) and incredibly particular. Foote’s own father was the pattern for Robedaux, but in this critically beloved saga, it’s the playwright’s plainspoken empathy that sets the pattern for the rest of us.—HS
12. THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH
Humankind is the family in Thornton Wilder’s 1942 metatheatrical classic, last seen starring John Goodman and Kristen Johnston in Central Park in 1998. The play revolves around the Antrobus family, led by inventor George (he patents the wheel and the lever). The New Jersey–based clan survives the Ice Age, flood, wars and other calamities of biblical proportion. Wilder’s epic allegory—with his signature cosmic-meets-quotidian touches and talky Stage Manager—mixes domestic comedy with witty philosophical ruminations on the value and viability of our race.—DC
11. ALL MY SONS
Arthur Miller’s 1947 moral drama, about a self-important industrialist whose factory produced defective wares during World War II, owes equal debts to Sophocles and Ibsen in its exploration of guilt, denial and responsibility. (One of the Keller family’s sons died in the war; the other must gradually accept the reality of his father’s misdeeds.) Miller’s first commercial success, the play retains its power to provoke us into clearer sight, as demonstrated by Simon McBurney’s beautiful 2008 Broadway revival, which starred John Lithgow as the munitions maker and Dianne Wiest as his denial-dwelling wife.—AF
