Adult Plays

Not as many people read books that are screenplays or acts performed on Broadway but this is a great diversion from the common novel for a reading experience that is entertaining and can be more sophisticated. Certainly, the Shakespeare plays are read by many a high school and college student. Who hasn’t read the great play, Death of a Salesman?” After college, we don’t however, place much emphasis on books in play format as those pieces that are read and discussed in usual casual circles. People either go to see these plays and discuss them, but few just read the scripts. Here are a few that might be interesting if you care to take a look at some books that will provide a different reading experience from that which you are most used to enjoying.

“Wit,” a Pulitzer Prize winning play by Margaret Edson is one that might start you out on this fine genre of book reading. Because this author was never formally trained as a playwright, the play may even be better as a read than as a theatre view since the action is compelling as a piece of literature but was not as easily transformed into theatrical form, perhaps losing something in the translation from book to stage.

Once again, if you like detective stories as the ones mentioned in the novel section above, a play by John Patrick Shanley, “Doubt,” is one that should be on your list of books to read. Set in a Bronx parochial school in the early 60s, this play. The characters of Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius will bring back memories of any who were schooled in the educational institutions of the Catholic religion in that time period. The sex scandals of the Roman Catholic Church are the backdrop for the plot, and because the author was born and raised in the Bronx, the story also takes on a very real nature that is spellbinding.