The 30 greatest American family dramas

10. BURIED CHILD
Sam Shepard’s masterful 1978 symbolist-realist tale of a dysfunctional family is for many the playwright’s most confident expression of his mythic vision; it even won him the Pulitzer Prize. Certainly Buried Child’s title gives away the play’s darkest secret, but Shepard’s project was in atmosphere and lyricism, not plot. As such, this story of a young man’s reluctant return home to a “Norman Rockwell” house in Illinois (and his eventual reabsorption into the alcoholic, incestuous legacy that waits there) stands as the theater’s most persuasive evocation of spiritual starvation amid the corn husks.—HS

9. A RAISIN IN THE SUN
In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s harrowing drama about a black matriarch moving her family into a hostile white neighborhood knew whereof it spoke: Hansberry’s father had once fought a court case for the family home, and Hansberry herself was the first black female playwright to move onto the Great (all too) White Way. Raisin, though, isn’t just a landmark; it wielded the familiar motif of expansive dreams stifling in cramped living quarters with such force that five decades later, it can still be revived to bravura effect, or can prompt another playwright (Bruce Norris) to revisit the ostensible paradise of Clybourne Park.—HS

8. THE LITTLE FOXES
Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor, Anne Bancroft, Stockard Channing and Elizabeth Marvel are among the many great actors who have played the scheming Regina Hubbard Giddens—a woman maneuvering to fend for herself within a financial boy’s club—in Lillian Hellman’s vicious 1939 dissection of dependence and deliberate cruelty in 1900 Alabama. So compelling was the internecine intrigue of Regina and her brothers that Hellman returned to them in 1946 for a prequel, Another Part of the Forest, that digs up the roots of their rotten family tree.—AF

7. CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
Tennessee Williams’s steamy 1955 drama casts a knowing eye on greed, lust and decay on a Mississippi plantation whose swaggering patriarch (known to all as Big Daddy) is in the final stages of cancer. Out of a mixture of sympathy, Southern manners and self-interest, no one tells him the truth—except his son Brick, an alcoholic wreck determined to release the ugly secrets that the family has kept bottled up. Few scenes in Williams are as wrenching as the Act II showdown in which Brick smashes through the “mendacity” that has walled him from his father for years.—AF

6. FENCES
You could say that every August Wilson play is about the same family: African-Americans, bonded through the crime of slavery. But this 1983 Pulitzer Prize winner is somewhat unusual in Wilson’s ten-play “century cycle,” in that it does focus on a family. Troy Maxson is a big-talking trash collector in 1950s Pittsburgh who waxes nostalgic over his failed dreams in major-league baseball, even as he bullies his college-age son and cheats on his loyal wife. Troy is not a hero or even a great father, but he’s a proud man who wants to take another swing at life.—DC