Everyone in my class should probably look at this:
57 Tips for Writing a Term Paper
None of these tips apply to all teachers, but they are good generalizations and you should know them.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
This Week, Elvis Presley Would Have Been 70
There are only four ways an American can think of Elvis. In fact, you can define yourself on some level by what you perceive as your "personal Elvis relationship quotient." Read below, and find out where you stand in the great Elvis balance...
1.) You've never heard of him.
Boomers, calm down. There are plenty of people in this world who have not heard of Elvis, and to most of the youngest Americans, he is a non-entity. In fact, if the average person born after 1980 were to see an Elvis impersonator work (NOT a film of the real Elvis), they would think that the character was somehow based on Cartoon Network's Johnny Bravo.
There is nothing wrong with this. Take a deep breath, boomers. The relevance of the Baby Boom generation (which was never as critical as Boomers thought it was) diminishes by the day. The world moves on. Get used to it.
2.) You are indifferent.
This would be most people. You know about him. You know an Elvis song or two (probably "Hound Dog" or "In The Ghetto"). You might even believe that on some level Presley is (or was) an important cultural figure. Your image of him is probably "Fat Elvis" or "Elvis Impersonator Elvis." [BTW: have you ever noticed how unlike Elvis that most Elvis impersonators are? By all accounts, Elvis was a pretty loose, fairly regular guy. The bizarre, squinched-butt, macho, manneristic, dark figure cut by the typical impersonator really is more of a cartoon than Johnny Bravo.]
If you are in this second category you probably have a notion of Elvis as tabloid fodder, and might occasionally wonder what all the shouting is about.
3.) You are a fan.
Presley matters. But despite your fandom, you are not so far in the wall that you bow toward Graceland five times a day. You like Presley, but you have records by other performers. You often even prefer to hear other performers, but you have a clear image of who Presley really was and what his significance to world music and American society really was. Your image of Elvis is probably "Young Elvis"--the one they put on the stamp a few years ago, but it doesn't matter which Elvis you see in your mind's eye, because you know the difference between a man and the public image he cultivates. This is where I live.
4.) You need help.
On our recent vacation, the family and I went through Memphis and stopped at Graceland. I've been there before, but it's been a long time. Any previous time I was there I was not appalled by the people who were there with me. This last trip I was appalled. Graceland has ceased to be the home of a dead rock star and a museum to that star and the worst stylistic excesses of the 1970's, but a shrine to the great white trash god. The "people" I saw trekking through the house were sick, sick babies who need serious attention from psychiatric professionals. They were all escapees from Jeff Foxworthy routines and they scared me pretty solidly. They were not rubes on vacation, they were religious rubes, mystically transfixed on the pilgrimage to the prime temple of their second-rate hick deity. I can't even imagine what their image of Elvis would be, let alone how they listen to the man's music.
1.) You've never heard of him.
Boomers, calm down. There are plenty of people in this world who have not heard of Elvis, and to most of the youngest Americans, he is a non-entity. In fact, if the average person born after 1980 were to see an Elvis impersonator work (NOT a film of the real Elvis), they would think that the character was somehow based on Cartoon Network's Johnny Bravo.
There is nothing wrong with this. Take a deep breath, boomers. The relevance of the Baby Boom generation (which was never as critical as Boomers thought it was) diminishes by the day. The world moves on. Get used to it.
2.) You are indifferent.
This would be most people. You know about him. You know an Elvis song or two (probably "Hound Dog" or "In The Ghetto"). You might even believe that on some level Presley is (or was) an important cultural figure. Your image of him is probably "Fat Elvis" or "Elvis Impersonator Elvis." [BTW: have you ever noticed how unlike Elvis that most Elvis impersonators are? By all accounts, Elvis was a pretty loose, fairly regular guy. The bizarre, squinched-butt, macho, manneristic, dark figure cut by the typical impersonator really is more of a cartoon than Johnny Bravo.]
If you are in this second category you probably have a notion of Elvis as tabloid fodder, and might occasionally wonder what all the shouting is about.
3.) You are a fan.
Presley matters. But despite your fandom, you are not so far in the wall that you bow toward Graceland five times a day. You like Presley, but you have records by other performers. You often even prefer to hear other performers, but you have a clear image of who Presley really was and what his significance to world music and American society really was. Your image of Elvis is probably "Young Elvis"--the one they put on the stamp a few years ago, but it doesn't matter which Elvis you see in your mind's eye, because you know the difference between a man and the public image he cultivates. This is where I live.
4.) You need help.
On our recent vacation, the family and I went through Memphis and stopped at Graceland. I've been there before, but it's been a long time. Any previous time I was there I was not appalled by the people who were there with me. This last trip I was appalled. Graceland has ceased to be the home of a dead rock star and a museum to that star and the worst stylistic excesses of the 1970's, but a shrine to the great white trash god. The "people" I saw trekking through the house were sick, sick babies who need serious attention from psychiatric professionals. They were all escapees from Jeff Foxworthy routines and they scared me pretty solidly. They were not rubes on vacation, they were religious rubes, mystically transfixed on the pilgrimage to the prime temple of their second-rate hick deity. I can't even imagine what their image of Elvis would be, let alone how they listen to the man's music.
Weird...
A particular friend of mine who owns a automobile dealership in the upper South just wrote me the following note:
"We just had a guy trade an '04 Civic LX for an '04 Civic LX... he said he was having 'psychological differences' with his car and had to trade it off. "
I can't even respond to that one...I wonder how my friend did...
"We just had a guy trade an '04 Civic LX for an '04 Civic LX... he said he was having 'psychological differences' with his car and had to trade it off. "
I can't even respond to that one...I wonder how my friend did...
States and Capitals
Bob-O-Rama Junior came home today and announced that he had to memorize the states and their capitals for Geography Class.
My blood froze.
The tot had my total and utter pity.
The states/capitals thing was the very bane of my existence as a youth. There were few parts of school I have ever hated more and there was no almost no part of my "formal" education that I found more painful or more cumbersome, and probably no part of my education has been more useless to me than memorizing which capital went with which state.
I'm a firm believer that knowledge--almost any knowledge--is good in and of itself. More than most people I believe that knowing things--knowing them just for their own sake--is good by itself. But in this paragraph's first sentence, I said "almost," and I seriously mean that there are exceptions.
Also, there is a very decided difference between "knowing" something and memorizing it. I know Shakespeare's Cymbeline, but I can only quote a few lines from memory. Still, I know what it's about, what it says, I can find any line in it that I want, and if I should ever be lucky enough to play in it, I will then memorize it.
Now Hamlet I do have memorized, but that was a conscious choice for my own pleasure.
But back to states and capitals...
It's funny that such an arcane part of the curriculum is still included in school curriculum. They've killed Latin, Fine Art, Theoretical Math, Literary Masterpieces, Music Appreciation, and "Western Civilization" but my kids still pursue idiocy like states and capitals and sentence diagramming.
Ah yes, now there's one...sentence diagramming. Sentence diagramming might be the measure of just how useless can something be and still remain in curriculum. For the record, I was a crackerjack sentence diagrammer. I could do it in my sleep. Diagramming was fun--it was like working a puzzle--and I learned absolutely nothing from it. Ever.
In fact, when I was a high school teacher, before I would start the very short unit on diagramming (and unlike many teachers, I never spent an entire year diagramming sentences), I would tell the students that the exercise, if learned, was a pleasant diversion, but functionally worthless and would have no real application in their professional lives (unless they also made the mistake of becoming English teachers). In fact I would tell the pupils that if any employer EVER asked them about their sentence diagramming skills prior to hiring them, that they didn't need that job anyway.
Several of those students have written me over the years and congratulated me on that wisdom. One or two told me they appreciated the advice from a more generalized standpoint. These beings had discovered several things that no one uninvolved in teaching ever needed to know, including the value of pi more than two places, the address of the White House, the year the Battle of Sedan was fought, or especially what city was the capital of any state besides their own might be.
Though no one had ever asked them if they could diagram a sentence, they had learned the difference between "nice to know" and "need to know."
When people would tell me I was wrong to talk down sentence diagramming because it was a crucial to learning to write it always confused me. To learn to write, you write. It's like learning to play guitar, you might get some instruction, but you will never actually learn to play guitar unless you pick one up and seriously work at it. Sentence diagramming is exactly the same thing. You do not learn to write or speak better from diagramming, you only learn to diagram. You learn to write--as I say--by practicing your writing.
I want to return to that "nice to know"/"need to know" continuum. I used to be fond of saying that all knowledge breaks into one of those two categories, but I suddenly find myself in possession of a third category: "Nice to know but why bother because it's in a reference book anyway?" (NTKBWBBIIARBA?")
You see, in the end, I don't really believe there is such a thing as "nice to know." I think that under the proper circumstances, every piece of information in the universe could be intensely useful. On some level, for some person, virtually everything is "need to know." Also, most acquired knowledge can form a pattern that qualifies as "beautiful"--if you can just get enough of it to see how everything fits together. But I also understand teaching well enough to understand the concept of "busy work." You know about busy work, that's what a poorly prepared (possibly hung-over) teacher hands out when they can't bare to face your little darlings on a given day. Busy work generally revolves around rote memorization of trivial material that is easily available in a reference book, but has no practical innate usage of its own or contains no inner beauty.
I can still quote from memory dozens of poems and hundreds of songs, and these quotes generally bring some happiness to me (that's why I quote them to myself), this happiness is a practical by-product of that rote information. But I never set around and drive pleasure from the fact that the capital of Wyoming is Cheyenne.
Picture this: "Ooooooooh baby! Wyoming...Cheyenne...YEAH! POW!"
Doesn't work for you either, does it?
I've been to all fifty state capitals, D.C., and San Juan, so I have feelings about those places...mostly the feelings I have are that though I generally like at least something about nearly every state in the union, generally the worst city in any given state is the capital. And I never needed to know I was going to the state's capital for my job...it never applied to my reality except in D.C. where Government is somewhat more elemental.
So what am I telling you? Simple: you can't trust a child to know the difference between "Need to know" (applicable knowledge) and "Nice to know" (aesthetically pleasing knowledge), so anything the teacher forces on them becomes "need to know." This power of determining what information is crucial for memorization should not be abused or confused with busy work/pointless rote memorization.
NOTE: I don't think most adults understand the difference any more either, but with only a very few exceptions any non-aesthetic, abstruse information readily available in a reference book should not be taught for memorization when it does not apply to a learner's real-world vocational needs.
An astrophysicist might need to know the value of pi to many figures...two is enough at the pre-college age level, and probably for most terrestrial engineering functions. Everyone needs to know the capital of their own state, for other states they need to know the proper reference materials.
What I'm against is not the teaching of arcane information (as I say, I think on some level, it's all useful) my gripe is against busy work and abstract memorization.
And while we're talking relevance, if we must exclude Latin, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Higher Math, and Western History from the schools because they are "irrelevant," well, I can't think of anything less immediately relevant than knowing that the capital of Missouri is Jefferson City--unless I happen to live in Missouri.
And really, isn't memorizing the states and capitals just some of that Depression-era crap that should (but hasn't) been jettisoned with nonsense like "perfect attendance awards?"
Now excuse me...I'm tripping on the sudden memory that the capital of California is Sacramento....Oh Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
My blood froze.
The tot had my total and utter pity.
The states/capitals thing was the very bane of my existence as a youth. There were few parts of school I have ever hated more and there was no almost no part of my "formal" education that I found more painful or more cumbersome, and probably no part of my education has been more useless to me than memorizing which capital went with which state.
I'm a firm believer that knowledge--almost any knowledge--is good in and of itself. More than most people I believe that knowing things--knowing them just for their own sake--is good by itself. But in this paragraph's first sentence, I said "almost," and I seriously mean that there are exceptions.
Also, there is a very decided difference between "knowing" something and memorizing it. I know Shakespeare's Cymbeline, but I can only quote a few lines from memory. Still, I know what it's about, what it says, I can find any line in it that I want, and if I should ever be lucky enough to play in it, I will then memorize it.
Now Hamlet I do have memorized, but that was a conscious choice for my own pleasure.
But back to states and capitals...
It's funny that such an arcane part of the curriculum is still included in school curriculum. They've killed Latin, Fine Art, Theoretical Math, Literary Masterpieces, Music Appreciation, and "Western Civilization" but my kids still pursue idiocy like states and capitals and sentence diagramming.
Ah yes, now there's one...sentence diagramming. Sentence diagramming might be the measure of just how useless can something be and still remain in curriculum. For the record, I was a crackerjack sentence diagrammer. I could do it in my sleep. Diagramming was fun--it was like working a puzzle--and I learned absolutely nothing from it. Ever.
In fact, when I was a high school teacher, before I would start the very short unit on diagramming (and unlike many teachers, I never spent an entire year diagramming sentences), I would tell the students that the exercise, if learned, was a pleasant diversion, but functionally worthless and would have no real application in their professional lives (unless they also made the mistake of becoming English teachers). In fact I would tell the pupils that if any employer EVER asked them about their sentence diagramming skills prior to hiring them, that they didn't need that job anyway.
Several of those students have written me over the years and congratulated me on that wisdom. One or two told me they appreciated the advice from a more generalized standpoint. These beings had discovered several things that no one uninvolved in teaching ever needed to know, including the value of pi more than two places, the address of the White House, the year the Battle of Sedan was fought, or especially what city was the capital of any state besides their own might be.
Though no one had ever asked them if they could diagram a sentence, they had learned the difference between "nice to know" and "need to know."
When people would tell me I was wrong to talk down sentence diagramming because it was a crucial to learning to write it always confused me. To learn to write, you write. It's like learning to play guitar, you might get some instruction, but you will never actually learn to play guitar unless you pick one up and seriously work at it. Sentence diagramming is exactly the same thing. You do not learn to write or speak better from diagramming, you only learn to diagram. You learn to write--as I say--by practicing your writing.
I want to return to that "nice to know"/"need to know" continuum. I used to be fond of saying that all knowledge breaks into one of those two categories, but I suddenly find myself in possession of a third category: "Nice to know but why bother because it's in a reference book anyway?" (NTKBWBBIIARBA?")
You see, in the end, I don't really believe there is such a thing as "nice to know." I think that under the proper circumstances, every piece of information in the universe could be intensely useful. On some level, for some person, virtually everything is "need to know." Also, most acquired knowledge can form a pattern that qualifies as "beautiful"--if you can just get enough of it to see how everything fits together. But I also understand teaching well enough to understand the concept of "busy work." You know about busy work, that's what a poorly prepared (possibly hung-over) teacher hands out when they can't bare to face your little darlings on a given day. Busy work generally revolves around rote memorization of trivial material that is easily available in a reference book, but has no practical innate usage of its own or contains no inner beauty.
I can still quote from memory dozens of poems and hundreds of songs, and these quotes generally bring some happiness to me (that's why I quote them to myself), this happiness is a practical by-product of that rote information. But I never set around and drive pleasure from the fact that the capital of Wyoming is Cheyenne.
Picture this: "Ooooooooh baby! Wyoming...Cheyenne...YEAH! POW!"
Doesn't work for you either, does it?
I've been to all fifty state capitals, D.C., and San Juan, so I have feelings about those places...mostly the feelings I have are that though I generally like at least something about nearly every state in the union, generally the worst city in any given state is the capital. And I never needed to know I was going to the state's capital for my job...it never applied to my reality except in D.C. where Government is somewhat more elemental.
So what am I telling you? Simple: you can't trust a child to know the difference between "Need to know" (applicable knowledge) and "Nice to know" (aesthetically pleasing knowledge), so anything the teacher forces on them becomes "need to know." This power of determining what information is crucial for memorization should not be abused or confused with busy work/pointless rote memorization.
NOTE: I don't think most adults understand the difference any more either, but with only a very few exceptions any non-aesthetic, abstruse information readily available in a reference book should not be taught for memorization when it does not apply to a learner's real-world vocational needs.
An astrophysicist might need to know the value of pi to many figures...two is enough at the pre-college age level, and probably for most terrestrial engineering functions. Everyone needs to know the capital of their own state, for other states they need to know the proper reference materials.
What I'm against is not the teaching of arcane information (as I say, I think on some level, it's all useful) my gripe is against busy work and abstract memorization.
And while we're talking relevance, if we must exclude Latin, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Higher Math, and Western History from the schools because they are "irrelevant," well, I can't think of anything less immediately relevant than knowing that the capital of Missouri is Jefferson City--unless I happen to live in Missouri.
And really, isn't memorizing the states and capitals just some of that Depression-era crap that should (but hasn't) been jettisoned with nonsense like "perfect attendance awards?"
Now excuse me...I'm tripping on the sudden memory that the capital of California is Sacramento....Oh Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
The Most Depressing Modern American Plays You Must Read
It is true that Broadway has been in a slump for some time. Decent theatre has been replaced by government-supported "One Man Shows" exhorting the glories of deviant behavior and the evils of law-abiding church-going white male taxpayers. "Message" pieces (usually about AIDS, a real cheery topic), musical spectaculars, and revivals of 20 - 30 year old masterpieces which have already been seen in movie format are about all that currently runs for more than fifteen minutes. The only thing interesting about the typical rotten shows festering on the Great White Way at the dawn of the 21st century is the notion that someone might think another human being could care to see them.
Sure, attending a modern play is (usually) insulting, disgusting, and painful, but it doesn't drag you to real depths of depression like the great dramas of the mid-20th century. Yes, there was a time that Broadway's most depressing stuff was still functionally high art instead of stream-of-consciousness post-modern blither. I was reminded of this fact upon the February 11 death of the original maven of gloom, Arthur Miller.
Actually, I was more surprised on February 11, to discover that Miller had been alive as recently as the 10th. The worthless, self-righteous old fart had ceased to be "relevant" so long ago that his death seemed almost beside the point.
There is no real analog for creating intentionally depressing drama in any other nation besides ours. The British have tragedies, comedies, scary plays, musicals, music hall, etc., but have no real tradition for a play being depressing just for the sake of bringing you down. That kind of thinking is probably an outgrowth of the Puritan tradition, which explains why the Puritans got run out of the old world and sent to America.
But in the true Puritan tradition, the American drama of the mid-20th Century provides no resolution to its tragedy.
In Shakespeareian Tragedy, Hamlet dies, but his nation is saved. Romeo and Juliet die and their parent's feud ends. Macbeth dies, and carries away the evil he has wrought with his passing. But when Willie Loman dies, in fact, sacrifices himself, nothing is resolved, nothing is fixed, "no" is the word, zero is still the number, black is still the color, and everything still sucks. That said, "Death of a Salesman" is a million laughs compared to most of the rest of the American "Serious Drama" catalog.
The really cool thing about good depressing classic drama over newer depressing drama is that the classics stay with you and make you an intolerable intellectual bore for weeks.
You might be wondering, "Why should I read stuff that is going to bum me out?" Good question, especially when you consider some of my comments, but the fact is that like that big dish of boiled spinach your mother forced on you, these plays are actually good for you. They form an important part of the background of American literature, and when we were still educating people, it was assumed that everyone read this madness. News flash: the really smart people still read this stuff, and to be truly educated about the letters that have made up our nation, you should still know these plays. Just as importantly, for all the fact that these are depressing as they can be, they are still well-written drama...and if you're going to wind up committing sepuku, it might as well be over a good play...the bad ones aren't worth it.
Let me say before we go any further, that these are really great plays and I have loved reading them...I especially enjoyed them in my youth. On the other hand, as an older man, I am far more inclined to go see something that qualifies as "pure entertainment" than a "thought piece." This is called "growing up."
Note: these plays have the following in common: fabulously good writing, condescension (usually outright contempt) for the middle class, and high (though narrow and elite) ideals.
Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller)
A play about how salesmen live their lives written by a man who clearly knew nothing about salesmen. I've lived my entire life around salesmen, and I've been a salesman, and I've never yet seen anyone whose existence was this awful or futile. Manic depressives will particularly enjoy this play at the low part of their cycle's swing, but people who suffer from dissociative disorder or are in some other form of complete denial will also enjoy this baby. Will this play bring you down? Fer sure. Will this depress you so thoroughly that suicide will look like a step up? Yoo betcha. Still, this is probably the most important American play of the 1950's. NOTE: Miller was able to write this depressing monstrosity while married to Marilyn Monroe--more evidence of a truly sick mind.
Murder in the Cathedral (T.S. Eliot)
Sure, this gobbler was not written with the intention of ever being staged, but in the American theatre, a play this bleak just cries out for production. The incredible T.S. Eliot (a native of Saint Louis, Missouri) took time out from his busy schedule of writing of happy little ditties like "The Wasteland," and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (didn't he also write "2001 Totally Gross Jokes?") to create one of the least humorous and morose scripts ever penned outside of a psych ward. The play pretends to be about important questions of moral motivation, but it's actually about making the audience beg to be allowed out of the theatre before they bite through their own necks to get away from the drama.
The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee Williams)
Okay. Think about the point in your life when you most needed a date and couldn't get one. Then pile in all sorts of social, emotional, physical, and psychological baggage that you (as a normal, well-balanced person) will never ever suffer from. Then make certain that if you actually happen to get a date, it has to be conducted in front of your mother (who is far more twisted than anyone's mother could be in real life). Now, if that doesn't sound like an evil brew, imagine yourself as a healthy, well-balanced person having to watch the self-destructive wild'n'crazie shenanigans of this particularly demented family. [NOTE: people who only see this play miss out on one of the best parts of William's craft--stage directions. This man could write stage directions possessed of more angst than a Junior High PE dressing room.]
The Little Foxes (Lillian Hellman)
This is supposed to be a comedy, and if you find greedy people who hate each other and live to make each other miserable funny, then this is going to be a real laugh-a-minute for you. Okay, I get the joke, I just don't care. This is the only play on this list--besides "The Zoo Story"--for which I have never nursed at least grudging respect...you could say that I have nursed a grudging grudge against it though...
Long Day's Journey Into Night (Eugene O'Neil)
Except for Eliot, O'Neil is the best writer on this list. That said, five lines into the script are all it will take for you to know why the play wasn't called "Million Dollar Legs."
The Crucible (Arthur Miller)
This play was meant to be an allegory about McCarthyism but in the years since it's debut, we've lost sense of that strange episode of American polity, and it has morphed into a claustrophobic, paranoid, rabid-dog American tragedy. Set during the Salem Witch Trials this this hog was functionally the pace car for depressing drama for the rest of the 20th Century.
Zoo Story Edward Albee)
Oh. Man. This. Is. SO. Tragic.
Sure, attending a modern play is (usually) insulting, disgusting, and painful, but it doesn't drag you to real depths of depression like the great dramas of the mid-20th century. Yes, there was a time that Broadway's most depressing stuff was still functionally high art instead of stream-of-consciousness post-modern blither. I was reminded of this fact upon the February 11 death of the original maven of gloom, Arthur Miller.
Actually, I was more surprised on February 11, to discover that Miller had been alive as recently as the 10th. The worthless, self-righteous old fart had ceased to be "relevant" so long ago that his death seemed almost beside the point.
There is no real analog for creating intentionally depressing drama in any other nation besides ours. The British have tragedies, comedies, scary plays, musicals, music hall, etc., but have no real tradition for a play being depressing just for the sake of bringing you down. That kind of thinking is probably an outgrowth of the Puritan tradition, which explains why the Puritans got run out of the old world and sent to America.
But in the true Puritan tradition, the American drama of the mid-20th Century provides no resolution to its tragedy.
In Shakespeareian Tragedy, Hamlet dies, but his nation is saved. Romeo and Juliet die and their parent's feud ends. Macbeth dies, and carries away the evil he has wrought with his passing. But when Willie Loman dies, in fact, sacrifices himself, nothing is resolved, nothing is fixed, "no" is the word, zero is still the number, black is still the color, and everything still sucks. That said, "Death of a Salesman" is a million laughs compared to most of the rest of the American "Serious Drama" catalog.
The really cool thing about good depressing classic drama over newer depressing drama is that the classics stay with you and make you an intolerable intellectual bore for weeks.
You might be wondering, "Why should I read stuff that is going to bum me out?" Good question, especially when you consider some of my comments, but the fact is that like that big dish of boiled spinach your mother forced on you, these plays are actually good for you. They form an important part of the background of American literature, and when we were still educating people, it was assumed that everyone read this madness. News flash: the really smart people still read this stuff, and to be truly educated about the letters that have made up our nation, you should still know these plays. Just as importantly, for all the fact that these are depressing as they can be, they are still well-written drama...and if you're going to wind up committing sepuku, it might as well be over a good play...the bad ones aren't worth it.
Let me say before we go any further, that these are really great plays and I have loved reading them...I especially enjoyed them in my youth. On the other hand, as an older man, I am far more inclined to go see something that qualifies as "pure entertainment" than a "thought piece." This is called "growing up."
Note: these plays have the following in common: fabulously good writing, condescension (usually outright contempt) for the middle class, and high (though narrow and elite) ideals.
Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller)
A play about how salesmen live their lives written by a man who clearly knew nothing about salesmen. I've lived my entire life around salesmen, and I've been a salesman, and I've never yet seen anyone whose existence was this awful or futile. Manic depressives will particularly enjoy this play at the low part of their cycle's swing, but people who suffer from dissociative disorder or are in some other form of complete denial will also enjoy this baby. Will this play bring you down? Fer sure. Will this depress you so thoroughly that suicide will look like a step up? Yoo betcha. Still, this is probably the most important American play of the 1950's. NOTE: Miller was able to write this depressing monstrosity while married to Marilyn Monroe--more evidence of a truly sick mind.
Murder in the Cathedral (T.S. Eliot)
Sure, this gobbler was not written with the intention of ever being staged, but in the American theatre, a play this bleak just cries out for production. The incredible T.S. Eliot (a native of Saint Louis, Missouri) took time out from his busy schedule of writing of happy little ditties like "The Wasteland," and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (didn't he also write "2001 Totally Gross Jokes?") to create one of the least humorous and morose scripts ever penned outside of a psych ward. The play pretends to be about important questions of moral motivation, but it's actually about making the audience beg to be allowed out of the theatre before they bite through their own necks to get away from the drama.
The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee Williams)
Okay. Think about the point in your life when you most needed a date and couldn't get one. Then pile in all sorts of social, emotional, physical, and psychological baggage that you (as a normal, well-balanced person) will never ever suffer from. Then make certain that if you actually happen to get a date, it has to be conducted in front of your mother (who is far more twisted than anyone's mother could be in real life). Now, if that doesn't sound like an evil brew, imagine yourself as a healthy, well-balanced person having to watch the self-destructive wild'n'crazie shenanigans of this particularly demented family. [NOTE: people who only see this play miss out on one of the best parts of William's craft--stage directions. This man could write stage directions possessed of more angst than a Junior High PE dressing room.]
The Little Foxes (Lillian Hellman)
This is supposed to be a comedy, and if you find greedy people who hate each other and live to make each other miserable funny, then this is going to be a real laugh-a-minute for you. Okay, I get the joke, I just don't care. This is the only play on this list--besides "The Zoo Story"--for which I have never nursed at least grudging respect...you could say that I have nursed a grudging grudge against it though...
Long Day's Journey Into Night (Eugene O'Neil)
Except for Eliot, O'Neil is the best writer on this list. That said, five lines into the script are all it will take for you to know why the play wasn't called "Million Dollar Legs."
The Crucible (Arthur Miller)
This play was meant to be an allegory about McCarthyism but in the years since it's debut, we've lost sense of that strange episode of American polity, and it has morphed into a claustrophobic, paranoid, rabid-dog American tragedy. Set during the Salem Witch Trials this this hog was functionally the pace car for depressing drama for the rest of the 20th Century.
Zoo Story Edward Albee)
Oh. Man. This. Is. SO. Tragic.
The Worst Analogies Ever Written in a High School Essay
This arrived in my E-mail today. I thought it was spiffy & wanted to share...I think almost all of these have shown up in various papers I've graded at some point or another.
They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.
He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.
The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty Bag filled with vegetable soup.
From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and "Jeopardy" comes on at 7 p.m. instead of 7:30.
Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quidaaakk/ch@ung by mistake.
He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like "Second Tall Man."
Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.
He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.
The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty Bag filled with vegetable soup.
From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and "Jeopardy" comes on at 7 p.m. instead of 7:30.
Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quidaaakk/ch@ung by mistake.
He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like "Second Tall Man."
Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
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