What are the Greatest Plays of the Past 100 Years?

It’s always great when theater gets to play with the pop culture big boys and so I was delighted to see that Entertainment Weekly's current issue on “The 100 All-Time Greatest” cultural events has ranked not only movies, TV shows, record albums and books, but plays too. 

But I'm not totally surprised they did it because my old friend Jess Cagle edits the magazine and he was a one-time theater reporter himself. Jess and his staff at EW anointed 50 plays the greatest of the past 100 years. And it’s hard to complain about their top 10:

1. Death of A Salesman

2. A Streetcar Named Desire

3. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

4. Long Day’s Journey into Night

5. Fences

6. Angels in America

7. Waiting for Godot

8. Pygmalion

9. A Raisin in the Sun

10. Our Town

And the other 40 make sense too; among them are: Glengarry Glen Ross, August: Osage County, True West, Look Back in Anger, Master Harold and the Boys, The Homecoming, Ruined, Top Girls, M. Butterfly, Topdog/Underdog, The Orphan’s Home Cycle and Uncommon Women and Others. 

Still, lists are designed in part to get us arguing and what kind of theater lover wouldn’t have at least one gripe?  Here’s mine: how could they have left off Paula Vogel’s remarkable How I Learned to Drive?   

Now what’s yours?