Theatre

About race and power in America, explored through the lens of a family drama.Grandma's birthday approaches. Beverly is organizing the perfect dinner, but everything seems doomed to go awry-the silverware is all wrong, the radio is on the fritz, and the rest of the family can't be bothered to lift a hand to help. And yet, what appears at first to be a standard family dramedy takes a sharp, sly turn into a startling examination of deep-seated paradigms about race in America.

2018 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Overworked but struggling, Jess takes a job as a caregiver for John, a brusque but bright graduate student who has cerebral palsy. Eddie is an unemployed truck driver who reaches a fragile détente with his estranged wife Ani after a devastating car accident requires her to go through a double above-the-knee amputation. With an unsentimental but keen eye, Majok deftly challenges the typical perceptions of those living with disabilities and delves deep into the ways class, race, nationality, and wealth (or lack thereof) can create gulfs between people, even as they long for the ability to connect.

2017 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
In one of the poorest cities in America, Reading, Pennsylvania, a group of down-and-out factory workers struggles to keep their present lives in balance, ignorant of the financial devastation looming in their near futures. Set in 2008, the powerful crux of this new play is knowing the fate of the characters long before it's even in their sights. Based on Nottage's extensive research and interviews with real residents of Reading, Sweat is a topical reflection of the present and poignant outcome of America's economic decline.

2016 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The poor kid from the Caribbean who fought the British, defended the Constitution, and helped to found the United States. Fusing hip-hop, pop, R&B, and the best traditions of theater, this once-in-a-generation show broadens the sound of Broadway, reveals the storytelling power of rap, and claims our country's origins for a diverse new generation.

2014 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
THE STORY: Ex-cop and recent widower Walter “Pops” Washington and his newly paroled son Junior have spent a lifetime living between Riverside and crazy. But now, the NYPD is demanding his signature to close an outstanding lawsuit, the landlord wants him out, the liquor store is closed—and the church won’t leave him alone. When the struggle to keep one of New York City’s last great rent-stabilized apartments collides with old wounds, sketchy new house guests, and a final ultimatum, it seems that the old days may be dead and gone.

2014 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
In a rundown movie theater in central Massachusetts, three underpaid employees sweep up popcorn in the empty aisles and tend to one of the last thirty-five-millimeter projectors in the state. With keen insight and a ceaseless attention to detail, The Flick pays tribute to the power of movies and paints a heartbreaking portrait of three characters and their working lives.

2013 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Amir Kapoor is a successful Pakistani-American lawyer who is rapidly moving up the corporate ladder while distancing himself from his cultural roots. Emily, his wife, is white; she's an artist, and her work is influenced by Islamic imagery. When the couple hosts a dinner party, what starts out as a friendly conversation escalates into something far more damaging.

2012 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Somewhere in Philadelphia, Elliot has returned from Iraq and is struggling to find his place in the world. Somewhere in a chat room, recovering addicts keep each other alive, hour by hour, day by day. The boundaries of family and community are stretched across continents and cyberspace as birth families splinter and online families collide.

2011 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Clybourne Park spans two generations fifty years apart. In 1959, Russ and Bev are selling their desirable two-bedroom at a bargain price, unknowingly bringing the first black family into the neighborhood and creating ripples of discontent among the cozy white residents of Clybourne Park. In 2009, the same property is being bought by a young white couple, whose plan to raze the house and start again is met with equal disapproval by the black residents of the soon-to-be-gentrified area.

2010 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
A musical about a family's struggle to hold itself together while confronting the challenges of mental illness.

2009 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
THE STORY: Set in a small mining town in Democratic Republic of the Congo, this powerful play follows Mama Nadi, a shrewd businesswoman in a land torn apart by civil war. But is she protecting or profiting by the women she shelters? How far will she go to survive? Can a price be placed on human life?

2008 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
August: Osage County is a portrait of the dysfunctional American family at its finest--and absolute worst. When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed.

2007 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
A story of loss, heartbreak and forgiveness--told through daily moments and emotional hurdles--as a family moves on after the accidental death of their 4-year-old.

2005 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
It is an inspired study in moral uncertainty with the compellingly certain structure of an old-fashioned detective drama.

2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama. A one-man show, which explores the astonishing true story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. A transvestite and celebrated antiques dealer who successfully navigated the two most oppressive regimes of the past century-the Nazis and the Communists--while openly gay and defiantly in drag, von Mahlsdorf was both hailed as a cultural hero and accused of colluding with the Stasi.

2003 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama This lush romantic drama depicts a family of cigar makers whose loves and lives are played out against the backdrop of Depression-era America.

2002 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The play tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, foretelling a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by the past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future.

2001 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Proof focuses on Catherine, a young woman who has spent years caring for her father, Robert, a brilliant mathematician in his youth who was later unable to function without her help. His death has brought into her midst both her sister, Claire, who wants to take Catherine back to New York with her, and Hal, a former student of Catherine's father who hopes to find some hint of Robert's genius among his incoherent scribblings. The passion that Hal feels for math both moves and angers Catherine, who, in her exhaustion, is torn between missing her father and resenting the great sacrifices she made for him. For Catherine has inherited at least a part of her father's brilliance -- and perhaps some of his instability as well. As she and Hal become attracted to each other, they push at the edges of each other's knowledge, considering not only the unpredictability of genius but also the human instinct toward love and trust.

2000 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
As described by New York Magazine: "Two married couples have been best friends for years. In their Connecticut home, Karen and Gabe, international food writers, are giving a dinner for Beth and Tom, which he doesn't attend. It emerges from the heartbroken Beth that he has left her for another woman. Gabe and Karen are almost as crushed, having expected 'to grow old and fat together, the four of us.' When Tom shows up at his home in the next scene, late at night, he is enraged that Beth broke the news of their breakup in his absence. Late as it is, he rushes over to his friends in the next scene to present his side of the story. Act Two begins with another dinner, twelve and a half years earlier, in a summer house on Martha's Vineyard, where Karen and Gabe are introducing Beth to Tom. Then we skip five months after the events in Act One, as Beth reveals to Karen…that she has fallen in love with an old friend whom she intends to marry…Later that day, in a Manhattan bar, Tom, a lawyer, tells Gabe about his [newfound] happiness, to which Gabe reacts sourly. Still later that night, Gabe and Karen are going to bed in the Vineyard house, and discuss the Tom-and-Beth situation, as well as their own [marriage]…clinging to it like the shipwrecked to their raft…From this already you can gather that there is skillful construction here, as well as keen psychological insight…Donald Margulies is establishing himself as one of our leading playwrights."

1999 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
As the play begins, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the intricate, difficult Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same intensely rational and painstakingly methodical approach that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its excruciatingly painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded values and standards that have always directed her, finally coming to understand the aspects of life that make it truly worth living.

1998 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
A wildly funny, surprising and devastating tale of survival as seen through the lens of a troubling relationship between a young girl and an older man. "How I Learned to Drive" is the story of a woman who learns the rules of the road and life from behind the wheel.

1996 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The story of Mark, Roger, Maureen, Tom Collins, Angel, Mimi, JoAnne, and their friends on the Lower East Side of New York City will live on, along with the affirmation that there is "no day but today."

1995 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
A brilliantly crafted drama of an aging couple coping with a son's suicide. The menace is the unspoken secret connected with the young man from Atlanta, their son's former roommate, and neither Houston businessman Will Kidder nor his childlike wife, Lily Dale, will name it or discuss it.

1994 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
In Act One, a young lawyer, "C," has been sent to the home of a client, a ninety-two-year-old woman, "A," to sort out her finances. "A," frail, perhaps a bit senile, resists and is of no help to "C." Along with "B," the old woman's matronly paid companion/caretaker, "C" tries to convince "A" that she must concentrate on the matters at hand. In "A's" beautifully appointed bedroom, she prods, discusses and bickers with "B" and "C," her captives. "A's" long life is laid out for display, no holds barred. She cascades from regal and charming to vicious and wretched as she wonders about and remembers her life: her husband and their cold, passionless marriage; her son and their estrangement. How did she become this? Who is she? Finally, when recounting her most painful memory, she suffers a stroke. In Act Two, "A's" comatose body lies in bed as "B" and "C" observe no changes in her condition. In a startling coup-de-theatre, "A" enters, very much alive and quite lucid. The three women are now the stages of "A's" life: the imperious old woman, the regal matron and the young woman of twenty-six. Her life, memories and reminiscences—pondered in the first act—are now unceremoniously examined, questioned, accepted or not, but, at last, understood. In the end, her son arrives and kneels at her bedside, but it is too late.

1993 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Kushner tells the story of a handful of people trying to make sense of the world. Prior is a man living with AIDS whose lover Louis has left him and become involved with Joe, an ex-Mormon and political conservative whose wife, Harper, is slowly having a nervous breakdown. These stories are contrasted with that of Roy Cohn (a fictional re-creation of the infamous American conservative ideologue who died of AIDS in 1986) and his attempts to remain in the closet while trying to find some sort of personal salvation in his beliefs. Kushner's grand plan, which mixes magical realism with political speeches, high comedy with painful tragedy, and stitches it all together with a daring sense of irony and a moral vision that demands respect and attention. On one level, the play is an indictment of the government led by Ronald Reagan, from the blatant disregard for the AIDS crisis to the flagrant political corruption. But beneath the acute sense of political and moral outrage lies a meditation on what it means to live and die--of AIDS, or anything else--in a society that cares less and less about human life and basic decency.

1992 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
This sweeping epic of three families in eastern Kentucky spans 200 years of American history from 1775 to 1975. Fast-paced and finely drawn, Schenkkan's stunning six-hour, nine-play cycle examines the myths of the American past which have created, for better or for worse, the country we are today.

Contains "Lost in Yonkers"
1991 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
It is New York, 1942. After the death of their mother, two young brothers are sent to stay with their formidable grandmother for the longest ten months of their lives. Grandmother Kurnitz is a one-woman German front—a refugee and a widow who has steeled her heart against the world. Her coldness and intolerance have crippled her own children: the boys' father has no self-esteem . . . their Aunt Gert has an embarrassing speech impediment . . . their Uncle Louie is a small-time gangster . . . and their Aunt Bella has the mentality of a child. But it is Bella's hunger for affection and her refusal to be denied love that saves the boys—and that leads to an unforgettable, wrenching confrontation with her mother.

1990 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Berniece's exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real "piano lesson," reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.

1989 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Comprised of a series of interrelated scenes, the play traces the coming of age of Heidi Holland, a successful art historian, as she tries to find her bearings in a rapidly changing world. Gradually distancing herself from her friends, she watches them move from the idealism and political radicalism of their college years through militant feminism and, eventually, back to the materialism that they had sought to reject in the first place.

1988 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Racial tensions are delicately explored when a warm friendship evolves between an elderly Jewish woman and her black chauffeur.

1987 Pulitzur Prize Winner for Drama
The protagonist of Fences (part of Wilson's ten-part "Pittsburgh Cycle" plays), Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation and in the 1960s a spirit that is changing the world. Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can...a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less.

1985 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Inspired by the painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat, this complex work revolves around a fictionalized Seurat immersed in single-minded concentration while painting the masterpiece.

1984 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
David Mamet's scalding comedy is about small-time, cutthroat real estate salesmen trying to grind out a living by pushing plots of land on reluctant buyers in a never-ending scramble for their fair share of the American dream.

1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
The scene is the living room/kitchen of a small house on an isolated country road, which is shared by Jessie and her mother. Jessie's father is dead; her loveless marriage ended in divorce; her absent son is a petty thief and ne'er-do-well; her last job didn't work out and, in general, her life is stale and unprofitable. As the play begins Jessie asks for her father's service revolver and calmly announces that she intends to kill herself. At first her mother refuses to take her seriously, but as Jessie sets about tidying the house and making lists of things to be looked after, her sense of desperate helplessness begins to build. In the end, with the inexorability of genuine tragedy, she can only stand by, stunned and unbelieving, as Jessie quietly closes and locks her bedroom door and ends her profound unhappiness in one fatal, stunning and deeply disturbing moment—a moment never to be forgotten by those who have witnessed, and come to understand, her plight.

1982 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
This is a tough, incisive exploration of racial tensions and ambiguities among blacks and between blacks and whites that gives no easy answers and assigns no simple blame.

1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
The scene is Hazlehurst, Mississippi, where the three Magrath sisters have gathered to await news of the family patriarch, their grandfather, who is living out his last hours in the local hospital. Lenny, the oldest sister, is unmarried at thirty and facing diminishing marital prospects; Meg, the middle sister, who quickly outgrew Hazlehurst, is back after a failed singing career on the West Coast; while Babe, the youngest, is out on bail after having shot her husband in the stomach. Their troubles, grave and yet, somehow, hilarious, are highlighted by their priggish cousin, Chick, and by the awkward young lawyer who tries to keep Babe out of jail while helpless not to fall in love with her. In the end the play is the story of how its young characters escape the past to seize the future—but the telling is so true and touching and consistently hilarious that it will linger in the mind long after the curtain has descended.

1980 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The scene is the ornate, deserted Victorian boathouse on the Talley place in Lebanon, Missouri; the time 1944. Matt Friedman, an accountant from St. Louis, has arrived to plead his love to Sally Talley, the susceptible but uncertain daughter of the family. Bookish, erudite, totally honest, and delightfully funny, Matt refuses to accept Sally's rebuffs and her fears that her family would never approve of their marriage. Charming and indomitable, he gradually overcomes her defenses, telling his innermost secrets to his loved one and, in return, learning hers as well. Gradually he awakens Sally to the possibilities of a life together until, in the final, touching moments of the play, it is clear that they are two kindred spirits who have truly found each other—two "lame ducks" who, in their union, will find a wholeness rare in human relationships.

Contains "Buried Child"
1979 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The setting is a squalid farm home occupied by a family filled with suppressed violence and an unease born of deep-seated unhappiness. The characters are a ranting alcoholic grandfather; a sanctimonious grandmother who goes on drinking bouts with the local minister; and their sons, Tilden, an All-American footballer now a hulking semi-idiot; and Bradley, who has lost one leg to a chain saw. Into their midst comes Vince, a grandson none of them recognizes or remembers, and his girlfriend, Shelly, who cannot comprehend the madness to which she is suddenly introduced. The family harbors a dark secret—years earlier the grandfather, Dodge, had buried an unwanted newborn baby in an undisclosed spot, creating a cloud of guilt which is dispelled only when Tilden unearths the child's mummified remains and carries it upstairs to his mother. His act purges the family, at last, of its infamy and suggests the perhaps slim possibility of a new beginning under Vince, whose estrangement from the others has spared him the taint of their sin.

1978 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Game is used here as a metaphor for life. Weller Martin is playing solitaire on the porch of a seedy nursing home. Enter Fonsia Dorsey, a prim, self righteous lady. They discover they both dislike the home and enjoy gin rummy so they begin to play and to reveal intimate details of their lives. Fonsia wins every time and their secrets become weapons used against one another. Weller longs for a victory to counter a lifetime of defeats but it doesn't happen. He leaves the stage a broken man and Fonsia realizes her self-righteous rigidity has led to an embittered, lonely old age.

1977 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
In this compelling dramatic triptych, three terminal cancer patients dwell in separate cottages on a hospital grounds. The three are attended and visited by family and close friends: Agnes and her mother Felicity, estranged further by the latter's dementia; Brian and Beverly whose martial complications are exacerbated by Brian's new lover, Mark; and Joe and Maggie, unready for the strain of Joe's impending death and it's effect on their teenage son.

1976 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
A Chorus Line examines one day in the lives of seventeen dancers, all vying for a spot in the “chorus line” of a Broadway musical.

1975 Pulizer Prize Winner for Drama
On a deserted stretch of beach a middle-aged couple, relaxing after a picnic lunch, talk idly about home, family and their life together. She sketches, he naps, and then, suddenly, they are joined by two sea creatures--lizards who have de

1973 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Following their annual custom, five men--a high-school basketball coach, now retired, and four members of the team that he guided to the state championship twenty years earlier--meet for a reunion. The occasion begins in a light-hearted mo

1971 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The old, converted vegetable shop where Tillie lives is more like a madhouse than a home. Tillie's mother, Beatrice, is bitter and cruel, yet desperate for her daughters' love. Her sister, Ruth, suffers epileptic fits and sneaks cigarettes every chance she gets. In the midst of chaos, Tillie struggles to keep her focus and dreams alive. Tillie -- keeper of rabbits, dreamer of atoms, true believer in life, hope, and the effect of gamma rays on man-in-the-moon marigolds.

1970 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Johnny Williams is a young black man who owns a bar in New York City in/around the late 1960s. The people who come in and out of the bar have their own set of agendas and each character fulfills a very specific role/purpose.

1969 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Jack Jefferson is the boxing heavyweight champion of early 1910s America. But as a black man, he's not only fighting other boxers, but discrimination and prejudice as well. The boxing fans and press resent the idea of a black champion and are actively searching for a "great white hope" that can defeat him. But it's Jefferson's activities outside the ring, primarily involving the white Eleanor Bachman that may prove to be his downfall.

1967 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The play revolves around wealthy middle-aged couple Agnes and Tobias, who have their complacency shattered when their longtime friends Harry and Edna appear at their doorstep. Claiming an encroaching, nameless "fear" has forced them from their own home, these neighbors bring a firestorm of doubt, recrimination and ultimately solace, upsetting the "delicate balance" of Agnes and Tobias's household.In recent years, A Delicate Balance has enjoyed many and new stunning revivals, running now, including a Broadway production in 1996, which won the Tony Award for Best Revival, and another at the Alameida Theatre in London in 2011.

1965 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
It is May of 1946 and Timmy Cleary has come home from the war to his estranged parents, John and Nettie, in the Bronx apartment where he grew up. As their reunion promises a return to life as it never was, John, giving up a lucrative business opportunity, attends a ball game with his son and grudgingly, at Timmy's request, returns with roses for Nettie in an insincere attempt at reconciliation. Reminiscing, the three attempt to recapture the past and all it symbolizes, but the ideal is shattered amidst recriminations.

1962 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Based on the book by Shepherd Mead, call number HF5386 .M48 1962.
J. Pierpont Finch (Robert Morse) is a lowly window cleaner with dreams of making it big in the business world. After finding a copy of the book "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," Finch decides to apply the tactics in the book to his own life. Soon, he's working as a mail-room clerk at the World Wide Wicket Company and quickly fighting his way up the corporate ladder with relative ease.

1961 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Death in the Family by James Agee and winner of the Pulitzer Prize as Best Play of the season, this is a portrait of a Tennessee family during four days in May, 1915: the warm and tender love that binds them and the tragic death of the husband which shatters the hearts of his wife and young son.

1960 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
A musical about the rise to power of New York's Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Beating all odds, La Guardia breaks the crooked Tammany Hall political machine and fights against vice and corruption. Meanwhile, he falls in love with his loyal secretary, Maria, and they eventually marry.

1959 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
A modern retelling of the story of the biblical figure Job.

1958 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
An authentic American classic, this powerful and vital play captures the sardonic humor and the grief, both private and universal, of Wolfe's novel about a youth coming of age. Concentrating on the last third of Wolfe's story, the play vividly portrays Eugene Gant, his mother, who is obsessed by her material holdings and who maintains barriers against the love of her family, his father, a stonecutter imprisoned by his failures, and the brother who never breaks away.

1957 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Long Day's Journey Into Night is an autobiographical play Eugene O'Neill wrote that--because of the highly personal writing about his family--was not to be released until 25 years after his death, which occurred in 1953. But since O'Neill's immediate family had died in the early 1920s, his wife allowed publication of the play in 1956. Besides the history alone, the play is fascinating in its own right. It tells of the "Tyrones"--a fictional name for what is clearly the O'Neills. Theirs is not a happy tale: The youngest son (Edmond) is sent to a sanitarium to recover from tuberculosis; he despises his father for sending him; his mother is wrecked by narcotics; and his older brother by drink. In real-life these factors conspired to turn O'Neill into who he was--a tormented individual and a brilliant playwright.

1956 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Adapted from "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,"(D810.J4 F715 1952). In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another family lived cloistered in the "Secret Annex" of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and amusing, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.

1955 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
In a plantation house, a family celebrates the sixty-fifth birthday of Big Daddy, as they sentimentally dub him. The mood is somber, despite the festivities, because a number of evils poison the gaiety: greed, sins of the past and desperate, clawing hopes for the future spar with one another as the knowledge that Big Daddy is dying slowly makes the rounds. Maggie, Big Daddy's daughter-in-law, wants to give him the news that she's finally become pregnant by Big Daddy's favorite son, Brick, but Brick won't cooperate in Maggie's plans and prefers to stay in a mild alcoholic haze the entire length of his visit. Maggie has her own interests at heart in wanting to become pregnant, of course, but she also wants to make amends to Brick for an error in judgment that nearly cost her her marriage. Swarming around Maggie and Brick are their intrusive, conniving relatives, all eager to see Maggie put in her place and Brick tumbled from his position of most-beloved son. By evening's end, Maggie's ingenuity, fortitude and passion will set things right, and Brick's love for his father, never before expressed, will retrieve him from his path of destruction and return him, helplessly, to Maggie's loving arms.

1954 Pulitzer Prize Winner for drama
As told by McClain in the New York Journal-American: "…pursues the career of an Army of Occupation officer stationed in a remote town in Okinawa. His duty is to teach Democracy to the natives, and there is a stern and stupid Colonel breathing down his neck to insure the strict enforcement of the Manual of Occupation. But the young officer has not prepared himself for the ingenious charm of the people.

1953 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Set in a small town in Kansas, Picnic details the lives of "ordinary" Americans, from hopeful widows and embittered spinster to idealistic teenagers and restless wanderers.

1952 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Jim Downs is brought to the psychiatric division of City Hospital after a suicide attempt. With the help of his es-tranged wife, who is with him night and day, he recovers. But this does not mean he is free to go home. His estranged wife conspires to keep Jim in the hospital until he renounces his girlfriend and agrees to go back with her. In the process, Jim is faced with well-meaning but inept institutional psy-chiatrists, who themselves have become victims of deadly routine. Through one test after another he is made to prove his sanity, until he almost loses it. Realizing the power of institutional law, Jim proceeds to give the "right answers," until he is finally released in the custody of his wife. Finally free, Jim knows that by compromising his integrity he has simply chosen the lesser of two evils.

1950 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The plot centers on an American nurse stationed on a South Pacific island during World War II, who falls in love with a middle-aged expatriate French plantation owner but struggles to accept his mixed-race children. A secondary romance, between a U.S. lieutenant and a young Tonkinese woman, explores his fears of the social consequences should he marry his Asian sweetheart.

1949 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The story revolves around the last days of Willy Loman, a failing salesman, who cannot understand how he failed to win success and happiness.

1948 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.

1946 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
In 1946, several friends gather in the house of James Conover in Washington, DC. James is about 60; with him are Spike MacManus, a long-time political reporter and Grant Matthews, in his 40's, a businessman and Katherine (Kay) Thorndike, late 30s. The Republican Party has chosen Grant Matthews to run for President. Grant is estranged from his wife Mary, and he has become romantically involved with Kay Thorndike, a newspaper publisher.

1945 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Elwood P. Dowd insists on including his friend Harvey in all of his sister Veta’s social gatherings. Trouble is, Harvey is an imaginary six-and-a-half-foot-tall rabbit. To avoid future embarassment for her family—and especially for her daughter, Myrtle Mae—Veta decides to have Elwood committed to a sanitarium. At the sanitarium, a frantic Veta explains to the staff that her years of living with Elwood’s hallucination have caused her to see Harvey also, and so the doctors mistakenly commit her instead of her mild-mannered brother. The truth comes out, however; Veta is freed, and the search is on for Elwood, who eventually arrives at the sanitarium of his own volition, looking for Harvey. But it seems that Elwood and his invisible companion have had a strange influence on more than one of the doctors. Only at the end does Veta realize that maybe Harvey isn’t so bad after all.

1943 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Meet George and Maggie Antrobus (married only 5,000 years); their two children, Gladys and Henry (perfect in every way!); and their maid, Sabina (the ageless vamp) as they overcome ice, flood, and war -- by the skin of their teeth.

1941 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The entire play takes place in the Helsinki living room of Dr. Valkonen (who has recently won the Nobel Prize) and his wife Miranda. The play chronicles the interactions of the family and various friends from 1938-1940. In the early scenes, Valkonen spends an extensive amount of time talking about his reasons for being a pacifist and abhorring the war (Finland's Winter War with the Soviets) before his son Erik enlists. Eventually, Valkonen himself joins the medical corps. In undramatized moments, both Valkonen men die. American-born Miranda is left both a widow and a grieving mother who feels responsible for the care of Erik's unborn child and sends his fiancee to America to have the baby.

1940 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Joe, the wealthy loafer, tries to help his disciple Tom save Kitty Duval, the burlesque queen turned prostitute. We have Nick, the bartender who tries to help everyone he can while keeping his business open when the head of the vice squad threatens trouble. We have another cop who wants to quit his job and his philosopher best friend, the longshoreman, who may come to blows with each other during the workers strike at the docks. We have a budding song and dance team and characters ranging from Arabs, society couples, young men who are ready to take over the world and the nurses who are weary and hesitant to fall in love with them. All of these people are searching for a new path through life when the road has suddenly disappeared before them.

1939 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The play concerns Lincoln’s life and career—from his early, unsuccessful days as a postmaster in New Salem, Ill., through his initial forays into local politics, his relationship with Mary Todd, and his debates with Stephen Douglas, and culminates with his election to the presidency and imminent departure for Washington, D.C., 30 years later.

1938 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
This drama of life in the town of Grover 's Corners, an allegorical representation of all life, has become a classic.

1937 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
At first the Sycamores seem mad, but it is not long before we realize that if they are mad, the rest of the world is madder. In contrast to these delightful people are the unhappy Kirbys. The plot shows how Tony, attractive young son of the Kirbys, falls in love with Alice Sycamore and brings his parents to dine at the Sycamore home on the wrong evening. The shock sustained by the Kirbys, who are invited to eat cheap food, shows Alice that marriage with Tony is out of the question. The Sycamores, however, though sympathetic to Alice, find it hard to realize her point of view. Meantime, Tony, who knows the Sycamores are right and his own people wrong, will not give her up, and in the end Mr. Kirby is converted to the happy madness of the Sycamores, particularly since he happens in during a visit by an ex-Grand Duchess, earning her living as a waitress. No mention has as yet been made of the strange activities of certain members of the household engaged in the manufacture of fireworks; nor of the printing press set up in the parlor; nor of Rheba the maid and her friend Donald; nor of Grandpa's interview with the tax collector when he tells him he doesn't believe in the income tax.

1936 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
A young English couple on their honeymoon, a German scientist, a French munitions magnate, the inscrutable Irene, and the vulgar but lovable American Harry Van are thrown together in a small winter resort in the Alps. For a short time they are forced to depend upon their own resources under threat of an air-raid, which at the last descends upon the few who are left. The play throws into ironic relief the individual human being who, having brought upon himself the obscene idiocy of wholesale destruction by war, wakes up to find that he can do nothing more than make a futile gesture against the forces he has set in action.

1935 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Set in the epoch of the early American 19th century, this insightful drama chronicles the efforts of an "old maid" Charlotte Lovell, to win the affections of her illegitimate daughter.

1934 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The drama focuses on the personal sacrifices required by the medical profession. The main theme of the play is summed up in one of the doctor's final utterances: "It's not easy for any of us. But in the end our reward is something richer than simply living. Maybe it's a kind of success that world out there can't measure . . . maybe it's a kind of glory."

1933 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Taking place during the Great Depression, this political satire that is as relevant today as it was when it was first performed in 1933. The title comes from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, in which Mercutio calls in his dying speech for "a plague on both your houses," referring to two warring families, the Montagues and the Capulets. In Anderson's play, the title refers to the two houses of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

1932 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
"Of Thee I Sing" is a political satire focusing on the election campaign and Presidency of John P. Wintergreen. Wintergreen is a real empty shirt “ with no viable platform he runs simply on love. He even promises that if elected he will marry the girl chosen for him at an Atlantic City beauty pageant. However, trouble begins when he falls in love with his campaign secretary instead of the beauty pageant winner.

Read more: http://stageagent.com/shows/musical/2290/of-thee-i-sing#ixzz4CVxLCyhV

1931 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
At the heart of this play is a poet, Alison Stanhope, who has been dead eighteen years. Although only a handful of her poems were published during her lifetime, they have captured the attention and affection of people all over the country. Alison's spirit lives on in the hearts of her family and her fans. Alison's House is about the poet's family, their relationships, and the discovery of a portfolio containing hundreds of previously unknown poems by Alison.
Glaspell wanted to write her play about enigmatic New England poet Emily Dickinson, but the Dickinson family refused to give her permission to use their name or to quote from Emily's poetry. Undaunted, Glaspell moved the setting to her home state of Iowa and recast the Dickinson family as the Stanhopes. Unable to quote Dickinson's poetry, Glaspell quoted from Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose work was beloved by Dickinson. Emerson's poem, “The House,” inspired the title of Glaspell's play.

1930 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The play portrays episodes from the Old Testament as seen through the eyes of a young African-American child in the Depression-era South, who interprets The Bible in terms familiar to her.

1929 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
This is a panorama of the comedy and tragedy of daily life played to the accompaniment of rumbling elevated trains and the tooting of whistles. Though this remarkable play is primarily a slice of life in a poor neighborhood, it is held together by a strikingly dramatic plot which has to do with a theatrical scene-shifter whose wife has been having a sordid affair with the milkman. The husband returns unexpectedly and kills them both. The incident serves chiefly to crystalize the viewpoint and very human reactions of the entire neighborhood.

1928 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The plot centers on Nina Leeds, the daughter of an Ivy League professor, who is devastated when her adored fiancé is killed in World War I, before they have a chance to consummate their passion. Ignoring the unconditional love of the novelist Charles Marsden, Nina embarks on a series of sordid affairs before determining to marry an amiable fool, Sam Evans. While Nina is pregnant with Sam's child, she learns a horrifying secret known only to Sam's mother: insanity runs in the Evans family and could be inherited by any child of Sam's. Realizing that a child is essential to her own and to Sam's happiness, Nina decides on a "scientific" solution. She will abort Sam's child and conceive a child with the physician Ned Darrell, letting Sam believe that it is his. The plan backfires when Nina and Ned's intimacy leads to their falling passionately in love. Twenty years later, Sam's "son" Gordon Evans is approaching manhood, with only Nina and Ned aware of the boy's true parentage.

Contains "In Abraham's Bosom"
1927 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Dram
This post Civil War story of a deeply troubled young man, son of a tyrannical white land owner and a poor black woman, who sees education as the means of raising himself and his African-American community out of the bondage of segregation. He strives heroically to fulfill his dream, but in the end is brought down by his own rage at the racist society and the hatred and jealously felt by his white half brother. Throughout his prolific writing life, Green's work focused largely on the struggles of individuals negatively affected by segregation and racism, and, he brought into stark focus, the continuing and discouraging plight of African Americans in the south in the 1920s.

1926 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Mrs. Harriet Craig, a woman of controlling will and vanity, succeeds in driving away her husband, friends, and anyone close to her, all for the sake of her pride.

Contains "They Knew What They Wanted"
1925 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
In the 1920's, Napa Valley middle-aged wine-grower Tony wants to get married and decides to propose by letter to a waitress in San Francisco named Amy who waited on him once. He sends her a picture of his good looking young farmhand Joe instead of himself, which creates unforeseen complications in the lives and loves of these three ordinary yet complex people.

Contains "Hell-Bent for Heaven"
1924 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Theatre
When Sid Hunt returns from WWI, he announces his plans to marry his sweetheart, Jude Lowry, much to the displeasure of his brother Rufe, who is also in love with Jude. Jude's brother Andy has an old grudge against the family, and after some illicit drinking, he decides to murder Sid. Sid hears of this plot and crosses a dam to escape from Andy, but Rufe, hoping to get Jude for himself, blows up the dam. A religious fanatic, Rufe justifies this murder by claiming that God commanded it. Meanwhile, flood waters are rising from unprecedented rainfall, and when the family gets into their boat, Rufe finds that there is no room for him. He is told that if God commanded him to murder Sid, surely God will protect Rufe from the flood.

Contains "Icebound"
1923 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The Jordan siblings have gathered to await the death of their mother, but it rapidly becomes clear that they are actually eagerly anticipating the reading of her will. They are all surprised to discover that she has (spitefully) left the sizable family fortune to second-cousin Jane. The plot thickens when Jane is presented with a letter from Mrs. Jordan that details her dying wish: for her youngest son Ben to be taken care of--by any means necessary. Though Ben is a fugitive and widely believed to be "good for nothing" Jane falls in love with him--with some ambiguity about whether this newfound love is due to his charm or her loyalty to Mrs. Jordan. Ben has some inappropriate relations with another "almost relative" named Nettie, but ultimately ends up proposing to Jane. The two will live "happily ever after" on the farm and fortune left by Mother Jones.

Contains "Anna Christie"
1922 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
A character study of a young woman who falls in love and her struggle to deserve the love she inspires.

1921 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
Lulu Bett lives in a small town with her sister Ina and Ina's husband Dwight, a dentist who rules his household with self-righteous smugness. The unmarried Lulu has learned that she cannot question her role as chief cook, housekeeper, and gracious presence. But when Dwight's sophisticated brother Ninian comes to visit, Lulu finds in herself a surprising wit, and the boldness to accept his playful proposal of marriage. Through her appealing, determined heroine, Zona Gale satirically dispatches a sheaf of the social assumptions of her day, from male supremacy to the security of marriage.

Contains "Beyond the Horizon"
1920 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
The introspective and sensitive Robert falls in love with Ruth, who is engaged to his brother, Andrew; she marries Robert, and Andrew goes to sea. Ruth later discovers that her marriage has been a mistake and that she is still in love with Andrew. Three years pass, and Robert, sick and disillusioned, fails to make a go of the farm. Andrew returns, but brings with him only disillusion to Ruth and Robert. The latter, who yearns for the romance his brother is supposed to have enjoyed, sees in Andrew only an unimaginative materialist.

1918 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Drama
An analysis of a married relationship, in which two young scientists who love each other hesitate to marry because they are afraid it may interfere with the career of the man.