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This is a thread to discuss plays in general, along with debating technical details of both kinds of plays - those which are written to be read, and those written to be performed.

We can also discuss plays that we have recently seen, in any language. Since plays are also a powerful means of social/political commentary, it would also be nice to discuss these - but in the context of dramatization.

Perhaps we can start with a general debate : What are common pitfalls while writing a play?

I discover today that some of my favourite plays happen to be in the spirit of the talkative chamber-drama, barring the Beckettian exception:

Oleanna
Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Krapp's Last Tape
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead
Marie and Bruce
Sleuth
Closer
The Real Inspector Hound

I do love experimental theater as well but would have to think long and hard before picking favourites in that sphere. I'll also try to participate in the primary debate later. I was born to a playwright father and just love the form, but just let me think about it some more.

Would be glad to have you for the discussion. The primary debate was just to provide a starting point. You can start with any topic you find fit.

Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill

I loved the re-telling of the Oresteia tale of Aeschylus by O'Neill. It is a trilogy, usually produced as one complete play, and the three parts are titled Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted.

The story of husband and wife Ezra and Christine Mannon, Christine's affair with her daughter Lavinia's beau Adam Brant, her son Orin's passion for her and Lavinia's attachment to her father, with Peter and Hazel forming an important part of the last part, it is a cyclical play with Oedipal recurrences, repetition of history and family rivalry over love and possession.

A very good play exploring Greek classical themes in a modern setting.

Two of Arthur Miller's very tragic plays are All My Sons and Death of a Salesman

The first deals with the disintegration of a family with the possibility of the father having commissioned faulty airplanes in a war that caused the death of their pilots. Embroiled in a legal war, the family deals with its own dark secrets and the crumbling veneer of the happy American family.

The second deals with a family battling disillusionment, trying to keep the façade of the Great American Dream alive over their own fractured psyche. The father (a salesman) fails to cope with his defeats, both personally and professionally. A truly tragic tale.

The Caretaker by Harold Pinter is one of my favorite plays. I love Pinter for his simple plots stuffed with complex emotions. His sense of tragi-comedies. His brand of dark humor. And irony - everything in him that we call Pinteresque.

Davis, a tramp seeks refuge - a poor old bum, lovable, funny and so very kind and grateful when Aston, an unstable man brings him home and offers him the job of his brother Miles' house. Slowly we see Davis transform from the lovable guy to the manipulative guy, driving a wedge between the two brothers, and later, how they deal with him. The plot is of little consequence - but the characters are phenomenal - all coming with their own baggage of ethics, of issues, of histories and of ambitions. A dark, absurd comedy that we can neither laugh at yet can't help sadly smile at.

No heroes, no villains, no protagonists, or perhaps, all protagonists, all heroes, all villains at the same time. A very engaging play of the complexity of human motives.