Recommended Reading – Lists
There are many lists of suggestions for plays and books about reading plays to read. Here are several of them:
Bookstr has two lists:
“7 Plays That Are Just As Fun To Read As They Are To Watch”:
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Six Characters In Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht
and, “9 Plays You Can Read Like Books”:
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes by Tony Kushner
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks
The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Amadeus by Peter Shaffer
God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza
Buried Child by Sam Shepard
https://bookstr.com/list/9-plays-you-can-read-like-books/
Lit Hub lists “Ten Plays You Can Read Like Novels”:
Fires in the Mirror by Anna Deaveare Smith
John by Annie Baker
Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill
The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis
for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange
Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks
Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven by Young Jean Lee
Four Plays by Conor McPherson
Happy Days by Samuel Beckett
Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl
https://lithub.com/ten-plays-you-can-read-like-a-novel/
The Booklist Reader offers “13 Great Plays for Readers”:
Amadeus by Peter Shaffer
August: Osage County by Tracy Letts
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time adapted by Simon Stephens
Doubt by John Patrick Shanley
The Flick by Annie Baker
The History Boys by Alan Bennett
In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play by Sarah Ruhl
The Man who Came to Dinner by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman
‘night Mother by Marsha Norman
The Pittsburgh (or Century) Cycle by August Wilson
Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike by Christopher Durang
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
The Playwrights’ Center list has play recommendations from Center-affiliated writers. The list is divided into two parts:
https://pwcenter.org/playwriting-toolkit/reading-list-1
https://pwcenter.org/playwriting-toolkit/reading-list-part-2
Playwright David James Brock made “A (Very Personal) Reading List for Newer Playwrights” that includes Aristotle’s Poetics and David Ball’s Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays:
http://www.davidjamesbrock.com/blog/2016/3/22/playwright-readinglist