Professional Playreaders faves
Discover the professional playreader's favorite books, from Tom Stoppard's *The Real Thing* and Arthur Miller's *Death of a Salesman* to the Capek brothers' sci-fi classics *R.U.R.* and Shakespeare's *King Lear* & *Macbeth*—a curated list of essential dramatic masterpieces.
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The Real Thing
by Tom Stoppard
A tie-in edition to the upcoming Broadway revival of Tom Stoppard's extraordinary play about love and marriage--the work that has been called "the most moving play" ("The New York Times") he has ever written.
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R.U.R. and The Insect Play
by K. & J. Capek
Josef and Karel Capek were the best known literary figures of liberated Czechoslovakia after 1918. After the success of R.U.R. (Rossums' Universal Robots, 1920), the brothers collaborated in their best-known work, The Insect Play (1921). Both plays are satires depicting the horrors of a regimented technical world and the terrible end of the populace if they fail to rise against their oppressors. They reflect the world in which the Capeks lived and give a commentary on its grosser follies.
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Death of a Salesman
by Arthur Miller
The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity—and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room. "By common consent, this is one of the finest dramas in the whole range of the American theater." —Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times "So simple, central, and terrible that the run of playwrights would neither care nor dare to attempt it." —Time
