Drama

Everything here was built to be said aloud, which is why it reads faster than anything else in the library and lands harder. Hamlet is four hours of a man deciding; audiences have argued about the decision for four hundred years. Lear is what the form can do when it stops being polite. And Godot (two tramps, one tree, nothing happens, twice) rearranged the whole theater with a shrug. Read plays in one sitting, the way you would sit in a house. The Greeks knew something we keep forgetting: catharsis is not comfort. You leave these lighter because they took something out of you.

Uncut, it runs four hours, and the fourth act sags while the prince is offstage with pirates. The revenge plot creaks under conventions Shakespeare inherited and only half believed in; Hamlet's delay is a problem the play poses brilliantly and declines to solve. You stay for the speeches and forgive the machinery.

— against Hamlet

On the page, half the play is missing; Beckett wrote silences, and silences need actors. Act two repeats act one with the energy deliberately drained, so you experience the tramps' tedium firsthand, which is the point and is also tedium. Lucky's monologue runs three unpunctuated pages you will read twice and parse never.

— against Waiting for Godot

Williams pitches everything at eleven: the symbolism (paper lantern, bathtub, the streetcar names) arrives underlined, and Blanche's destruction is orchestrated with an operatic relish that edges toward cruelty. Stanley is written so magnetically that productions keep accidentally siding with him, which says something uncomfortable about the play's own design.

— against A Streetcar Named Desire