Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2024 - Pulitzer Prize Winning Drama
- Sara M.
- Thursday, January 04
Collection
If you love reading plays, fulfill the "Read a book by a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize winning author" with one of these books, all of which won the Pulitzer in the Drama category.
This list is part of the #BroaderBookshelf 2024 Reading Challenge. Find more lists here.
A Strange Loop
Published in 2021
Usher is a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical: a piece about a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical. This blistering musical follows a young artist at war with a host of demons-not least of which are the punishing thoughts in his own head-in an attempt to understand his own strange loop.
Next to Normal
Published in 2010
"A contemporary musical that explores how one suburban household copes with crisis. With provocative lyrics and an electrifying score of more than thirty original songs, Next to normal shows how far two parents will go to keep themselves sane and their family's world intact"--From publisher description.
Cost of Living
Published in 2018
Cost of Living deftly challenges the typical perceptions of those living with disabilities and delves deep into the ways class, race, nationality, and wealth can create gulfs between people, even as they long for the ability to connect. Eddie, an unemployed truck driver, and his estranged ex-wife, Ani, find themselves unexpectedly reunited after a terrible accident leaves her quadriplegic. John, a brilliant PhD student with cerebral palsy, hires Jess, a first-generation recent graduate who has fallen on desperate times, as his new aide.
Clybourne Park
Published in 2011
Clybourne Park spans two generations fifty years apart. In 1959, Russ and Bev are selling their desirable two-bedroom at a bargain price, unknowingly bringing the first black family into the neighborhood and creating ripples of discontent among the cozy white residents of Clybourne Park. In 2009, the same property is being bought by a young white couple, whose plan to raze the house and start again is met with equal disapproval by the black residents of the soon-to-be-gentrified area. Are the issues festering beneath the floorboards actually the same, fifty years on? The author's excruciatingly funny and squirm-inducing satire explores the fault line between race and property. -- Publisher description.
Ruined
Published in 2009
Mama Nadi, the owner of a brothel set in Congo, is a mother figure who keeps watch over her business, serving men from both sides of the conflict, and employing women, "ruined" by rape or torture, who are forced to work as prostitutes.
Sweat
Published in 2017
Winner of the 2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. "From first moments to last, this compassionate but clear-eyed play throbs with heartfelt life, with characters as complicated as any you'll encounter at the theater today, and with a nifty ticking time bomb of a plot. That the people onstage are middle-class or lower-middle-class folks - too rarely given ample time on American stages - makes the play all the more vital a contribution to contemporary drama. If I had pompoms, I'd be waving them now."--Charles Isherwood, The New York Times. No stranger to dramas both heartfelt and heart-rending, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage has written one of her most exquisitely devastating tragedies to date. In one of the poorest cities in America, Reading, Pennsylvania, a group of down-and-out factory workers struggles to keep their present lives in balance, ignorant of the financial devastation looming in their near futures. Set in 2008, the powerful crux of this new play is knowing the fate of the characters long before it's even in their sights. Based on Nottage's extensive research and interviews with real residents of Reading, Sweat is a topical reflection of the present and poignant outcome of America's economic decline. Lynn Nottage's plays include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ruined; Intimate Apparel, the most widely produced play of the 2005-2006 theater season in America, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine; Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; Por'knockers, and POOF!"-- Provided by publisher.
Driving Miss Daisy
Published in 1993
Racial tensions are delicately explored when a warm friendship evolves between an elderly Jewish woman and her black chauffeur. Winner of a 1988 Pulitzer Prize, and Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.
How I Learned to Drive
Published in 2018
Newly published as a stand-alone edition, Vogel's widely celebrated masterpiece How I Learned to Drive was the winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Obie and Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Play, and other honors. Known for its dark subject matter, the play examines the effects of child abuse on identity and the discovery of strength through trauma.
A Streetcar Named Desire
Published in 2004
Tennessee Williams' classic drama studies the emotional disintegration of a Southern woman whose last chance for happiness is destroyed by her vindictive brother-in-law.
Fences
A Play
Published in 1986
During the 1950's Troy Maxson struggles against racism and tries to preserve his feelings of pride in himself.