IB Theatre - Director's Notebook (last assessment 2023): American & Canadian Plays

Find Drama for Students articles and WSA Library books with plays from the American and Canadian  playwrights listed below.  Also see:

Digital Theatre Plus - films of leading theatre productions
Drama Online - films of National Theatre productions

Writers with plays in the WSA library are marked with:   

Joan Ackermann  ( 19??- )
George L. Aiken (1830 - 1876 ) 
Ayad Akhtar  ( 1970- )
Zoë Akins  ( 1886 - 1958 )
Edward Albee ( 1928 - ) 
Maxwell Anderson (1888 - 1959)
Howard Ashman  ( 1950 - 1991 )
David Auburn  (1970 - )
Robert Auletta  (1940 - ) 
James Baldwin  ( 1924 - 1987 )
Amiri Baraka  ( 1934 - 2014 )  
Marshall Barer  ( 1923 - 1998 )
Philip Barry  ( 1896 - 1949 )
Douglas Carter Beane (1959 - )
Norman Beim  (1923 - )
Michael Bennett  ( 1943 - 1987 )
Jessica Blank  (1975 - )
Lee Blessing  (1949 - )
Marita Bonner  ( 1899 - 1971 )
Mel Brooks   ( 1926 - )
Abe Burrows  ( 1910 - 1985 )
Mary Chase   ( 1907 - 1981 )
Paddy Chayefsky  ( 1923 - 1981 )
Alice Childress  ( 1916 - 1994 )
Frank Chin  ( 1940 - )
Pearl Cleage  ( 1948 - )
D. L. Coburn ( 1938 - )
Marc Connelly  ( 1890 - 1980 )  
Michael Cristofer  ( 1945 - )
Russel Crouse  (  1893 - 1966 )  
Mart Crowley  ( 1935 - )
Migdalia Cruz  (1958 - )
Nilo Cruz  (1961 - )
Owen Davis (1874 - 1956 )
Ariel Dorfman  ( 1942 - )
Rita Dove  ( 1952 - )
Christopher Durang  (1949 - )  
Margaret Edson  (1961 - )
T. S. Eliot  ( 1888 - 1965 )
Eve Ensler  (1953 - )
Nora Ephron  ( 1941 - 2012 )
David Feldshuh  ( 1944 - )
Harvey Fierstein  ( 1954 - )
Lucille Fletcher  ( 1912 - 2000 )
Horton Foote  ( 1916 - 2009 )
Maria Irene Fornes  (1930 - )  
Ketti Frings  ( 1909 - 1981 )
Charles H. Fuller  ( 1939 - )
Dean Fuller  ( 1911 - 1997 )
Zona Gale  ( 1874 - 1938 )
Herb Gardner  (  1934 - 2003 )
Alice Gerstenberg  ( 1885 - 1972 )
William Gibson  ( 1914 - 2008 )
Willie Gilbert  ( 1916 - 1980 )
Rebecca Gilman  ( 1965 - )
Frank D. Gilroy  (  1925 - 2015 )
Susan Glaspell  ( 1876 - 1948 )
James A. Goldman  ( 1927 - 1998)
Frances Goodrich  ( 1890? - 1984 )
Richard Greenberg  ( 1958 - )  
Stephen Gregg  ( 1963 - )
John Guare  ( 1938 - )  
Albert Hackett  ( 1900 - 1995 )
Helene Hanff  ( 1916 - 1997 )
Lorraine Hansberry  ( 1930 - 1965 )
Bill Harris  ( 1941 - )
Moss Hart  (1904 - 1961 )  
Joseph Hayes  ( 1918 - 2006 )
Ben Hecht  ( 1894 - 1964 )  
Thomas Heggen  ( 1919 - 1949 )
Lillian Hellman  ( 1905 - 1984 )  
Beth Henley  ( 1952 - )  
Amy Herzog (1979 - )
Tomson Highway  ( 1951 - )  
Mark Hollman  ( 1963 - )
Rupert Holmes  ( 1947 - )
Sidney Howard  ( 1891 - 1939 )  
Tina Howe  ( 1937 - )  
Quiara Alegría Hudes  ( 1977 - )
Hatcher Hughes  ( 1881 - 1945 )
Langston Hughes  ( 1902 - 1967 )
Zora Neale Hurston  ( 1891 - 1960 )
David Henry Hwang  ( 1957 - )
Naomi Iizuka  ( 1965 - )
William Inge  ( 1913 - 1973 )
David Ives  ( 1950 - )
Erik Jensen  ( 1970 - )
George S. Kaufman  ( 1889 - 1961 )  
Moisés Kaufman  ( 1963 - )
Adrienne Kennedy  ( 1931 - )  
Joseph Kesselring  ( 1902 - 1967 )
Sidney Kingsley  ( 1906 - 1995 )  
Arthur Kopit  ( 1937 - )  
Greg Kotis  ( 1966 - )
Joseph Kramm  ( 1907 - 1991 )
Lisa Kron  ( 1961 - )
Tony Kushner  ( 1956 - )
James Lapine  (  1949 - )
Jonathan Larson  ( 1961 - 1996 )
Arthur Laurents  (  1918 - 2011 )
Jerome Lawrence  ( 1915 - 2004 )  
Robert E. Lee  ( 1918 - 1994 )  
Warren Leight  ( 1957 - )
Tracy Letts  ( 1965 - )
David Lindsay-Abaire  ( 1969 - )
Howard Lindsay  ( 1889 - 1968 )  
Romulus Linney  ( 1930 - 2011 )  
Frank Loesser  ( 1910 - 1969 )
Kenneth Lonergan  ( 1962 - )
Josefina Lόpez  ( 1969 - )
Clare Boothe Luce  ( 1903 - 1987 )
Charles MacArthur  ( 1895 - 1956 )
Ann-Marie MacDonald  ( 1958 - )  
Archibald MacLeish  ( 1892 - 1982 )
David Mamet  ( 1947 - )  
Emily Mann  (1952 - )
Donald Margulies  ( 1954 - )
Jane Martin  ( 19?? - )
Steve Martin  ( 1945 - )
Carson McCullers  ( 1917 - 1967 )
Terrence McNally  ( 1939 - )  
Karen Jones Meadows  ( 1953 - )
Mark Medoff  ( 1940 - )  
Edna St. Vincent Millay  ( 1892 - 1950 )
Arthur Miller  ( 1915 - 2005 )  
Jason Miller  ( 1939 - 2001 )
Marsha Norman  ( 1947 - )
Lynn Nottage  ( 1964 - )
Joyce Carol Oates  ( 1938 - ) 
Eugene O'Neill  ( 1888 - 1953 )  
Clifford Odets  ( 1906 - 1863 )  
Suzan-Lori Parks  ( 1963 - )
John Patrick  ( 1905 - 1995 )
Marge Piercy  (1936 - )
Sharon Pollock  ( 1936 - )  ​
Bernard Pomerance  ( 1940 - )
Dolores Prida  ( 1943 - 2013 )
David Rabe  ( 1940 - )
Heather Raffo  ( 1970 - )
Celeste Raspanti  ( 1928 - )
Theresa Rebeck  ( 1958 - )
Elmer Rice  (1892 - 1967 )  
José Rivera  ( 1955 - )
Mary Rodgers  ( 1931 - 2014 )
Richard Rodgers  (1902 - 1979 )
Reginald Rose  (1920 - 2002 )
Paul Rudnick  ( 1957 - )
Sarah Ruhl  ( 1974 - )
Howard Sackler  ( 1929 - 1982 )
Sonia Sanchez  (  1934 -  )
Milcha Sanchez-Scott  (1953 - )  
William Saroyan  ( 1908 - 1981 )  
Dore Schary  ( 1905 - 1980 )
Robert Schenkkan  ( 1953 - )
Ntozake Shange  ( 1948 - )
John Patrick Shanley  (1950 - )
Claudia Shear  ( 1963 - )
Sam Shepard  ( 1943 - )  
Martin Sherman  (1938 - )
Robert E. Sherwood  ( 1896 - 1955 )  
Larry Shue  ( 1946 - 1985 )
Neil Simon  ( 1927 - )
Anna Deavere Smith  ( 1950 - )
Stephen Sondheim  ( 1930 - ) 
Gary Soto  ( 1952 - )
Bella Spewack  ( 1899 - 1990 )  
Samuel Spewack  (1899 - 1971 )  
Joseph Stein  ( 1912 - 2010 )
Jo Swerling  (1897 - 1964)
Megan Terry  ( 1932 - )
Ernest Thompson  ( 1949 - )
Jay Thompson  ( 1927 - 2014 )
Judith Thompson  ( 1954 - )  
Sophie Treadwell  ( 1885 - 1970 )
Alfred Uhry  ( 1936? - )
Luis Valdez  ( 1940 - )
Gore Vidal  ( 1925 - 2012 )
Paula Vogel  ( 1951 - )
Joseph A. Walker  ( 1935 - 2003 )
Naomi Wallace  ( 1960 - )
Wendy Wasserstein  ( 1950 - 2006 )  
Jack Weinstock  ( 1??? - 1969 )
Eudora Welty  ( 1909 - 2001 )  
Hugh Wheeler  ( 1912 - 1987 )
Barbara Wiechmann  ( 1960 - )
Thornton Wilder  ( 1897 - 1975 )  
Jesse Lynch Williams  ( 1871 - 1929 )
Tennessee Williams  ( 1911 - 1983 )  
August Wilson  (1945 - 2005 )  
Lanford Wilson  (1937 - 2011 )  
Ira Wood  (1950 - )
Doug Wright  ( 1962 - )
Paul Zindel  ( 1936 - 2003 )

Search Follet Destiny to find plays held by the WSA Library - both print and digital.

Includes 'Finding the Sun' by Edward Albee:  Cordelia and Abigail, and their husbands Daniel and Benjamin, lovers before they married their wives, all meet on the beach where Gertrude and Henden--Daniel and Cordelia's parents by previous marriages--are titillated by the couples' situation, as well as by their speculation that Edmee and Fergus, a mother and son also visiting the beach, are lovers.

Includes 'Uncle Tom's Cabin or Life Among the Lowly', by George L. Aiken, based on the book with the same title by Harriet Beecher Stowe, first published in 1852:  Uncle Tom's master sells him, separating him from his wife, and he becomes attached to the gentle daughter of his new owner, but after her death, he is sold to the evil Simon Legree.

Includes 'Stops' by Robert Auletta.

Includes ''Jack Pot Melting: A Commercial'' by Amiri Baraka, a one-act play that examines the black experience in America.  A young man called Brother and a young woman called Sister are astonished to see how they are depicted on television. In contrast to their ordinary selves in an imperfect relationship, they are portrayed as a well-dressed, grinning young couple holding dogs named Fame and Fortune and mouthing vacuous phrases like ''I'm glad.''

Includes 'Dutchman' by Amiri Baraka:  An emotionally charged and highly symbolic version of the Adam and Eve story, wherein a naive bourgeois black man is murdered by an insane and calculating white seductress, who is coldly preparing for her next victim as the curtain comes down. The emotionally taut, intellectual verbal fencing between Clay (the black Adam) and Lula (a white Eve) spirals irrevocably to the symbolic act of violence that will apparently repeat itself over and over again. 

Includes 'The Green Pastures' by Marc Connelly:  a reenactment of stories of the Old Testament in which all the characters (including God) are African American and speak in a black southern dialect. 

Includes 'Life With Father', by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, based on the autobiographical book with the same title by Clarence Day, Jr., published in 1920:  Day's comic stories of his father portray a rambunctious, overburdened Wall Street broker who demands that everything from his family should be just so. He is intolerant, tyrannical and plain obnoxious in his constant battle to harness the world to his way of thinking.

Includes 'Naomi in the Living Room' by Christopher Durang:  Naomi, when visited by John and Johnna, her son and daughter-in-law, is alternately friendly and insulting. Johnna copes her best, but when John changes his clothes to look like Johnna, things start to unravel. Naomi barely notices any differences but throws them both out of the house, then decides she's had a nice time! (1 man, 2 women.) 

Includes 'Springtime' by Maria Irene Fornes, on of the four short plays in "What of the Night?," Fornes' epic drama on the individual's struggle with poverty, love, and sorrow.

Includes 'Life Under Water' by Richard Greenberg:  In the present-day Hamptons, two attractive college girls, Amy-Joy and Amy-Beth, are looking for a good time, and think they have found it in the person of Kip, a handsome preppie who is in flight from the lavish home he shares with his divorced, and domineering mother and her narcissistic married lover. The play yields a lacerating portrait of a contemporary upper-middle-class that is, sadly and humorously, bored, self-indulgent and emotionally reckless.

Includes 'Four Baboons Adoring the Sun' by John Guare:  Eros, the god of love, narrates the story of Penny and Philip, two archeologists who leave troubled marriages to find love amid the ruins in Sicily.

Includes 'The Man Who Came to Dinner' by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman:  Sheridan Whiteside, having dined at the home of the Stanleys, slips on their doorstep, breaking his hip. A tumultuous six weeks of confinement follow. 

Includes 'The Front Page' by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur:  A comedy set in the news room. Hildy wants to break away from journalism and go on a belated honeymoon. There is a jailbreak and into Hildy's hands falls the escapee as hostage. He conceals his prize in a rolltop desk and phones his scoop to his managing editor. Their job is to prevent other reporters and the sheriff from opening the desk and finding their story.

Includes 'The Little Foxes' by Lillian Hellman:  Brothers Oscar and Ben Hubbard steal money from their ailing brother-in-law in order to fund a cotton mill, only to be caught by their sister Regina who demands they give her a seventy-five percent share of the business in exchange for keeping them out of prison.

Includes 'Am I Blue' by Beth Henley:  In 1968 New Orleans, a college freshman about to embark on his eighteenth-birthday gift--a visit to a bordello--instead accompanies a bold teenage girl back to her apartment and learns about her quirks and insecurities.

Includes 'They Knew What They Wanted', by Sidney Howard, Winner of the1925 Pulitzer Prize for Drama:  In the 1920's, Napa Valley middle-aged wine-grower Tony wants to get married and decides to propose by letter to a waitress in San Francisco named Amy who waited on him once. He sends her a picture of his good looking young farmhand Joe instead of himself, which creates unforeseen complications in the lives and loves of these three ordinary yet complex people. 

Includes 'Teeth' by Tina Howe:  It's Bach's birthday. A neurotic woman has come to her dentist to have a filling replaced, but he's struggling with his own problems.

Includes 'The Man Who Came to Dinner' by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman:  Sheridan Whiteside, having dined at the home of the Stanleys, slips on their doorstep, breaking his hip. A tumultuous six weeks of confinement follow. 

Includes 'She Talks to Beethoven', by Adrienne Kennedy:  Set in Ghana, Suzanne waits in her room listening to radio broadcasts about her husband who has mysteriously disappeared while she attempts to write about and communicate with composer Ludwig van Beethoven.  Her world is infiltrated by snatches of Ghanaian string music, the revolutionary words of Frantz Fanon and strains of Beethoven's Fidelio. Suzanne, recovering from an unspecified illness hovers in displaced time and space fluctuating between Vienna, Austria, in 1803, and Accra, Ghana, in 1961.

Includes 'Dead End' by Sidney Kingsley:  A drama about life in New York City. Somewhere along the East River a raffish dead-end street meets the rear entrance to a fashionable apartment house where private yachts have a slip of their own.

Includes 'Life With Father', by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, based on the autobiographical book with the same title by Clarence Day, Jr., published in 1920:  Day's comic stories of his father portray a rambunctious, overburdened Wall Street broker who demands that everything from his family should be just so. He is intolerant, tyrannical and plain obnoxious in his constant battle to harness the world to his way of thinking.

Includes 'Can Can' by Romulus Linney:  A poignant and telling fugue of overlapping soliloquies in which an ex-GI recalls his brief love affair with a French girl, while a Nashville housewife tells of the strange bond she feels for an older country woman.

Includes 'A Life With No Joy In It' by David Mamet:  A man and a woman relive the times when the joy in each of their lives died away.

Includes 'Prelude and Liebestod' by Terrence McNally:  A play about art and how it transforms us.  In Prelude and Liebstod, a renowned conductor watches his life unravel while conducting Wagner's musical masterpiece. 

Includes 'Children of a Lesser God' by Mark Medoff:  James Leeds, a speech therapist on the faculty of a school for the deaf, meets and marries Sarah, a young woman who has been totally deaf from birth, but even though they try to understand each other's needs and feelings, the gap between the worlds of sound and silence seems to grow ever larger.

Includes 'The Last Yankee' by Arthur Miller:  Two men whose wives are being treated in a mental hospital meet in a visitors' room. As their wives begin to recover, they set out to enlighten their husbands and transform their marriages.

Includes 'Tone Clusters', by Joyce Carol Oates.  Frank and Emily are a nice couple with a house in a nice neighborhood. Why are they under so much strain? They are interviewed by an unseen interrogator and their story emerges: The body of a fourteen-year-old girl was found in their basement and their son is charged with the murder. Do they share in the guilt? Could we find ourselves in their situation?

Includes 'The Hairy Ape' by Eugene O'Neill:  the story of a brutish, unthinking laborer known as Yank, as he searches for a sense of belonging in a world controlled by the rich. 

Includes 'Ah, wilderness!' by Eugene O'Neill:  Taking place over the July Fourth weekend of 1906 in an idyllic Connecticut town, it offers a tender retrospective portrait of small town family values, teenage growing pains, and young love.

Both of these books include 'Waiting for Lefty' by Clifford Odets:   The play is set in the Depression era and deals with the cynical exploitation of the working classes.  The action of the play is made up of a series of varied, imaginatively conceived episodes on this theme.

Includes 'The Adding Machine' by Elmer Rice: Elmer Rice's 1923 play takes us through the murder, trial, execution, journey to the afterlife and back of Mr. Zero, an accountant who is replaced by a machine.

Includes 'The Cuban Swimmer'  by Milcha Sanchez-Scott:  A young woman endurance swimmer races from San Pedro to Catalina Island while her family follows her in a leaky boat. As they bicker and exhort her, she begins to weary and stray off course—until a spiritual and magical intervention reinvigorates her and she resolves to "dive into the Milky Way and wash my hands in the stars." 

Includes 'The Time of Your Life' by William Saroyan:  Kitty Duvall wanders into Nick's Pacific Street Saloon Bar, a seedy establishment in Depression-era San Francisco, and finds herself pulled into the dramas of the other patrons' lives.

Includes excerpts from 'Slave to the Camera (an Actor's Notes)' by Sam Shepard.

Includes 'The Petrified Forest' by Robert E. Sherwood:  Gabby Maple is a young girl who wants to see the world, but necessity compels her to work as a waitress in the middle of the Arizona desert. Out of the desert comes Alan Squier, a disillusioned sophisticate on his way to the Petrified Forest, which to him symbolizes self-destruction, the only answer he can find to living in a pointless world.

Includes 'Boy Meets Girl' by Bella Spewack and Samuel Spewack:  Played against a Hollywood background, Boy Meets Girl tells of a studio waitress who, coming into the office of a big-shot producer, announces she is going to have a baby. Two clever writers get the idea of starring the as - yet - unborn infant with Larry Toms, cowboy film hero. 

Includes 'Tender Offer' by Wendy Wasserstein:  Focuses on a distant father and his nine-year-old daughter. When he arrives late to pick her up from dance class, they discuss their lack of communication and why he missed her dance recital. 

Includes 'Bye-Bye, Brevoort' by Eudora Welty:  In this play a group of stodgy old relics fight to remain oblivious to the destruction of their beloved Brevoort hotel.

Includes 'Our Town' by Thornton Wilder.

Includes 'The Chalky White Substance' by Tennessee Williams:  Two haggard male figures meet at the edge of a vast canyon, overlooking a dried-out riverbed, in a future where the fallout from unnamed and uncountable nuclear wars continually floats through the air. It is the chalky white substance that covers the few inhabitants as they scramble in darkness and fear, fighting for the scarce, but indispensable, resources of water, food, shelter and human warmth.

Includes 'Cat On a Hot Tin Roof' by Tennessee Williams:  In a plantation house, a family celebrates the sixty-fifth birthday of Big Daddy, as they sentimentally dub him. The mood is somber, despite the festivities, because a number of evils poison the gaiety: greed, sins of the past and desperate, clawing hopes for the future spar with one another as the knowledge that Big Daddy is dying slowly makes the rounds.  Winner of the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Includes 'Testimonies' by August Wilson.

Includes 'The Moonshot Tape' by Lanford Wilson:  Having come home to visit her mother, who has been placed in a nursing home, Diane, now a well-known writer, is being interviewed for the local newspaper. Only she speaks. At first obliging and matter-of-fact, Diane gradually begins to reveal more than her questioner might have bargained for.