The 30 greatest American family dramas

Like his contemporary and sometime friend Tennessee Williams, William Inge was at his best when writing about women, as in this portrait of a Midwestern single mother and her two daughters—a beauty and a tomboy—whose lives are unsettled by a sexy young man. Although Picnic won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the playwright was unhappy with it; his revised version, Summer Brave, ran briefly on Broadway in 1975, two years after his suicide.—AF

“Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust,” says the book of Isaiah, and when the Clifford Odets classic opened in 1935, that “dust” was the Depression-era Bronx. In Awake and Sing, Odets, the ultimate political poet, painted a naturalistic portrait of a struggling Jewish clan, and set the new taste for realistic social critique and any number of overbearing-mama plays. More important still was that other “family” at the play’s heart: Odets wrote it for his fellow Group Theatre members, and actors like Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner would set the style for American acting even unto the seventh generation.—HS

Last seen on Broadway in an all-too-brief 2009 revival directed by David Cromer, Neil Simon’s 1983 memory play is a skillful blending of misery and whimsy, told from the perspective of wisecracking Eugene Morris, who regards his cash-strapped Jewish household as material for a brilliant future writing career. Eugene is an outsider and a chronicler of his Brooklyn clan and its discontents. There’s plenty of sentimental sepia in Simon’s portrait, but welcome flashes of lust and irreverence too. Call it Odets with titty jokes.—DC

Christopher Durang leaves no illusion standing in this rock-em-sock-em comedy about the guignol of modern familial affection—dead babies are tossed willy-nilly in the air, and the sacred cows of religion, mental illness and death go flying with them. Durang’s vicious farce, a look back by an embittered narrator at a terrible upbringing ringed ’round by a plague of selfish or mad adults, oscillates between bumptious hilarity and sudden, vertiginous pain. It’s indictment of parents—all parents, really—and despite a host of imitators, no play since has done so much to make simply having a family seem like the original sin.—HS

So much zaniness takes place in John Guare’s 1971 black comedy—wild stuff involving Pope Paul VI, a deaf Hollywood starlet, three nuns and a terrorist bombing—you would think the play was about anything but family. And yet the farce is firmly anchored in the marital unhappiness of amateur songwriter Artie Shaughnessy’s household. Deeply frustrated by having to care for his mentally unbalanced wife, Bananas, zookeeper Artie grows undeniably beastly and finds a mistress in Bunny Flingus (she tempts him with the promise of home cooking). Meanwhile, soldier-son Ronnie has gone AWOL (en route to Vietnam) and is hiding out in his own bedroom, building a bomb.—DC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward Albee was adopted and hated his surrogate parents; this fact colors virtually everything he wrote. In his off-kilter world, parents are fake, children are imaginary, and home life is rife with existential unease. His 1963 stunner, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, doesn’t technically follow a family: It’s about two married couples who spend a long, boozy night seducing, humiliating and using each other as human shields. What makes it a great family play is the way that the younger couple, Nick and Honey, function both as younger versions of their embittered hosts, George and Martha, but also, implicitly, as their children. And of course, the play famously includes numerous references to George and Martha’s unseen and fictitious son, whose life and death are lovingly recounted in a game George calls Bringing Up Baby. George and Martha are the saddest family of all: the barren couple with the ghostly, absent child.—DC

Thornton Wilder’s huge-framed 1938 portrait of small-town life centers on the neighboring Gibbs and Webb clans, whose eldest children’s lives intertwine through love, marriage and premature death. But even as Our Town traces these major journeys, its emphasis is on seemingly minor events, such as a mother and daughter cutting green beans or a father chastising his self-absorbed son. In its climax—rendered with aching verisimilitude in David Cromer’s gorgeous 2009 revival—a dead woman revisits a day from her childhood, only to retreat to her grave in horror at what she didn’t appreciate when she was alive: the richness packed into every moment of sensation and interaction with other people. Rather than building drama from exceptional domestic conflict, Our Town maps a spiritual cosmology into everyday home life.—AF

“The play is memory,” Tom Wingfield tells us early in Tennessee Williams’s 1945 breakthrough, and it must have been a painful memory for him to re-create. Today, we know that Tom’s sister, the mentally and physically crippled Laura, was based on Williams’s institutionalized sister, Rose. Tom, Laura and their domineering mother, the original steel magnolia, Amanda Wingfield, have been uprooted and abandoned by a man “who fell in love with long distances.” In Amanda’s struggle to maintain Southern dignity in the face of near poverty, she alienates the dissolute Tom and smothers sweet but doomed Laura. Alternating between Tom’s lyrical direct address and exquisitely sad but loving scenes of home life, the play builds to a terrible climax in which some are saved and some are lost. Jim, a handsome “gentleman caller,” gives Laura a brief taste of what independence might be like. But Tom must grab freedom for himself.—DC

Arthur Miller’s suicidally disappointed Willy Loman may be at the bottom of the business-world totem pole, but he never fails on Broadway. Miller’s small-tragedy masterpiece earned a Best Play Tony for its 1949 debut, and its 1984 and 1999 incarnations were both named Best Revival. (The latest version, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy, is poised to continue the streak.) What makes Willy’s plight so poignant, perhaps, is that his free-floating anxiety is grounded not only in his own groggy awakening from the American Dream but in his failures as a family man: The doomed self-inflation he imparts to his two sons, the refusal to see them as they really are, and the marital infidelity whose discovery prompts one of them to crash and burn in disgust. Though he scrapes for a living wage, Willy ultimately yearns to be paid in attention.—AF

According to Eugene O’Neill’s wife, during the composition of Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1940–42), he would emerge from his study “gaunt and sometimes weeping. His eyes would be all red and he looked ten years older than when he went in.” O’Neill was not alone in that writing room; he was pleading and wrestling with the angry ghosts of his own family, fiercely immortalized in the Tyrone clan. Here is the classic O’Neill household: a stingy, self-dramatizing father and two quarreling sons, all drunks, locked in bitter rivalry; a dope-fiend mother bound for a relapse. One emotionally brutalizing day, from morning till midnight, they fight, joke, turn on each other and feebly grope toward reconciliation, until the horrifying final tableau. The genius of this lengthy, bruising masterwork (last seen on Broadway in Robert Falls’s knockout 2004 revival) is the way that O’Neill equates addiction with blood bonds. Whether it’s morphine or a parent’s approval, you go to your grave craving it.—DC