As students prepare for finals and winter break approaches, we asked the School’s Critical Studies and Dramatic Writing faculty to share their favorite plays to read in the wintertime. From wintry Shakespearian classics to rollicking holiday feasts, these plays are the perfect companions to hot cocoa in front of a crackling fire.
A Winter’s Tale
by William Shakespeare
Recommended by Professor Sharon Carnicke:
How can I resist suggesting Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale? The title comes from Hermione’s son, Mamillus asking for ‘A sad tale [that]’s best for winter.’ (WT 2.1.25).
Wintertime
by Charles Mee
Recommended by Professor Melinda Finberg:
A hysterical romp through the frigid winter woods filled with outrageous physical comedy. Dealing with familial and romantic love relationships, a family and their significant others collapse into each other’s entanglements, becoming more and more outlandish until nothing seems impossible, including a return from the dead.
What a Young Wife Ought to Know
by Hannah Moscovitch
Recommended by Professor Rena Heinrich:
“Just don’t lie down and no child will come.”
Set in the north in Ottawa, Canada, this bold play follows a young working-class woman in the 1920s, who must navigate the challenges of life in a country before legalized birth control. Inspired by real stories of mothers in Canada, this is an unapologetic, clear-eyed look at love, fertility and reproductive health by one of Canada’s most celebrated playwrights. A finalist for the prestigious Governor General’s Awards, I highly recommend it. Take this also as an opportunity to get to know this exciting North American publisher of drama: Playwrights Canada Press.
Fairview
by Jackie Sibblies Drury
Recommended by Professor Velina Hasu Houston:
Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury focuses on a middle-class family preparing a dinner for their grandmother. What is distinctive about the play is the addition of another dimension – that of the white gaze on and its interpretation of Blackness. The family, which is African American, is viewed by four white people. The audience not only views an exploration of family energy and cohesion, but also becomes spectator to a dominant society interpreting other lives within that society, something that has a deep impact on African Americans. The play is appropriate for winter both directly and metaphorically. In winter, there are major holidays on which families gather like the one in Fairview does. In addition, white gaze and interpretation of Blackness creates an emotional winter in the psyche of African Americans.
The Long Christmas Dinner
by Thornton Wilder
Recommended by Professor Oliver Mayer:
Long considered to be one of the shortest and sweetest theatrical meals in the repertory, Wilder’s play tackles an entire century while never leaving the holiday dining room. The fixings come and go, and so do the participants. Time moves slowly for the younger characters, and at breakneck speed for the older ones — many of whom leave the table never to return. The play’s arc of progress is a kind of helix wherein generations of the Bayard family return home to an essentially unchanged Christmas dinner, despite a rapidly changing world just offstage and a revolving cast of the living and the dead filling up the table. It’s funny, too.
Do you have a play you would like to suggest for our community to read? Share it with us at sdacomm@usc.edu.