Plays

Question 1

Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Answer 1

Eugene O’Neill

Tyrone family, consisting of parents James and Mary and their sons Edmund and Jamie. The “Long Day” refers to the setting of the play, which takes place during one day. The play is semi-autobiographical.

Question 2

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Answer 2

Edward Albee

Two couples at a tiny New England liberal arts college drunkenly go at each other from the wee hours of the morning until almost dawn. Their weapons are their words, and what words they are.

Question 3

Death of a Salesman

Answer 3

Arthur Miller

New York / Willy Loman / Descent into senility

Question 4

Oedipus Rex

Answer 4

Sophocles

Story of Oedipus

Question 5

Angels in America

Answer 5

Tony Kushner

AIDS / Homophobia

Question 6

The Glass Menagerie

Answer 6

Tennessee Williams

Wingfield Family / Semi-autobiographical / Williams’ breakthrough play

Question 7

Look Back in Anger

Answer 7

John Osborne

Young angry British 20th century men
Jimmy and Allison Porter

Question 8

A Raisin in the Sun

Answer 8

Lorraine Hansberry

First black woman to get a Broadway play / Title comes from “Harlem” by Langston Hughes / Black family in Chicago tries to move up in the world

Question 9

Waiting for Godot

Answer 9

Samuel Beckett

two tramps on a mostly barren plain waiting for someone named, obviously, Godot. When he doesn’t show in the first act, they do it again with variations in the second. Are they waiting for some sort of perverse God? Is Beckett simply depicting the mundane realities of daily existence in the play? Both?

Question 10

The Bald Soprano

Answer 10

Eugene Ionesco

French playwright / The life of the complacent bourgeois—and by extension the worlds of many theatergoers—got put through an absurdist prism in this French classic that simultaneously blew the roof off the houses where drawing-room comedies had traditionally taken place.

Question 11

Hedda Gabler

Answer 11

Henrik Ibsen

Suicide by woman in bad marriage

Question 12

A Doll’s House

Answer 12

Henrik Ibsen

Feminist play / main character Nora leaves toxic relationship / controversial

Question 13

Machinal

Answer 13

Sophie Treadwell

For the heroine of this sometimes-harrowing play, life moves from an office job to marriage to the electric chair with cruel intensity.

Question 14

Fences

Answer 14

August Wilson

Troy Maxson, 1950s negro league baseball pitcher / Pittsburgh Cycle

Question 15

Uncle Vanya

Answer 15

Anton Chekhov (doctor)

elderly professor and his glamorous, much younger second wife, Yelena

Question 16

The Seagull

Answer 16

Chekhov

First of Chekhov’s Big 4 / romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the famous middlebrow story writer Boris Trigorin, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Treplev.

Chekhov’s Gun used here

Question 17

Tartuffe

Answer 17

Moliere

indictment of members of Louis XIV’s court

Question 18

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Answer 18

Tom Stoppard

Meanwhile, in Hamlet…

Question 19

Candida

Answer 19

George Bernard Shaw

young poet who thinks he needs to “rescue” a woman away from her clergyman husband,

Question 20

The Importance of Being Earnest

Answer 20

Oscar Wilde

farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae to escape burdensome social obligations in Victorian England

Question 21

A Streetcar Named Desire

Answer 21

Tennessee Williams

Blanche DuBois / Stella and Stan Kowalski / a former Southern belle who, after encountering a series of personal losses, leaves her privileged background to move into a shabby apartment in New Orleans rented by her younger sister and brother-in-law.

Question 22

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Answer 22

Tennessee Williams

Set in the “plantation home in the Mississippi Delta” of Big Daddy Pollitt, a wealthy cotton tycoon, the play examines the relationships among members of Big Daddy’s family, primarily between his son Brick and Maggie the “Cat”, Brick’s wife.

Question 23

The Crucible

Answer 23

Arthur Miller

Salem Witch trials / McCarthyism / Abigail Williams

Question 24

The Cherry Orchard

Answer 24

Chekov’s Last Play

Rise of middle class / end of Russian serfdom / Rich family auctions off estate to son of their former serf / Cherry orchard gets cut down

Question 25

Woyzeck

Answer 25

Georg Buchner

German / Woyzeck deals with the dehumanising effects of doctors and the military on a young man’s life. It is often seen as ‘working class’ tragedy, though it can also be viewed as having another dimension, portraying the ‘perennial tragedy of human jealousy’

Question 26

Ah, Wilderness!

Answer 26

Eugene O’Neill

O’Neill’s only well-known comedy.

Question 27

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs

Answer 27

William Inge

family conflicts during the early 1920s in a small Oklahoma town.

Question 28

American Buffalo

Answer 28

David Mamet

Don, who owns the junk shop where the entire play takes place, has sold a buffalo nickel to a customer for $90 but now suspects it is worth considerably more.

Question 29

Dirty Rotten Scoundrel (MUSICAL)

Question 30

Sweet Bird of Youth

Answer 30

Tennessee Williams;

Question 31

Children of a Lesser God