I spoke briefly with Clinton Johnston following last Friday’s Othello performance at Four County Players and asked him if he’d be interested in sending C-VILLE a list of his top 10 favorite plays to accomodate this week’s cover story. Thanks to a SPAM filter with some sort of vendetta against the arts, I didn’t receive the list until this morning, but it’s a good’n.
So—after the Clinton Johnston pancake video stokes your appetite for theater—check out Johnston’s top 10 list, in his own words:
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1. Death of a Salesman / The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Can I sneak in two? Arthur Miller sculpted the way I look both at America and at the power that theater has to entertain and instruct in these two plays. I first saw them as a kid and they’ve never left my soul. A few years ago I was watching a recording of Salesman in Clemons, and it brought me to tears in the middle of the Media Library.
2. for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange
This was the play of my youth. When I was growing up, it was everywhere. The script was on everyone’s coffee table. The record played through people’s houses. Kids recited sections in school during Black History Month. Much love and respect to Raisin, but for me, this play was the Black Theater shot heard ’round the world. Sing a Black woman’s song, indeed!
3. Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmund Rostand
Who cares if you’re a one hit wonder if your one hit is this? Rostand would be the Man just for having the balls to shoot for a balcony scene that rivals, if not surpasses, Romeo and Juliet. The fact that he pulls it off knocks him into the stratosphere.
4. Les Blancs by Lorraine Hansberry
Again, much love to Raisin, but Hansberry’s unfinished final play blows her first one out of the water. It is her overlooked masterpiece, her comment on Othello and Hamlet and easily the smartest play about race I’ve ever encountered. We lost incalculable riches when Lorraine Hansberry died at only 35.
5. A Thousand Clowns by Herb Gardner
When I graduated high school, the man who had been my drama teacher since 7th grade gave me a copy of Gardner’s funny and yet canny examination of the dedicated non-conformist. It made me laugh and contained lessons that that teacher knew I’d have to grow into.
6. That play I can’t remember by someone I don’t know
No, seriously. Can’t remember the name. Can’t remember the playwright. Can’t remember most of the plot. All I remember was it was the early ’70s, my parents took me to see it in the basement of some building of the nearby university, the lead actor looked like Dwayne from "What’s Happening!!" and the final scene had his girlfriend throw off her afro wig and declare that his attempts to "liberate her" were just another instance of someone wanting to control her identity. It introduced me to the level of intellectual sophistication that can be applied to issues of race, revolution and identity.
7. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Why does this piece routinely baffle people? I was in high school when I first encountered it—a play about how much we spend our lives waiting for some vaguely perceived and promised ambiguous force to give us purpose, whether it be religion, education, social standing, nationhood, vocation, or a host of other ultimately absurd things—what’s so hard to understand about that? Made perfect sense to me.
8. Noises Off by Michael Frayn
One of the funniest plays ever—it takes farce to a whole new level. The second act alone should be dipped in gold and surrounded by incense and lotus blossoms.
9. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
So sue me. Everyone’s Top 10 List has at least one cliché. He’s too smart for his own good, has über problems with the ‘rents, may or may not be in love, may or may not be contemplating suicide, talks good, is depressed, and sword fights. How do you get through adolescence without falling in love with this play?
10. Assassins by Stephen Sondheim
Why isn’t this play considered one of Sondheim’s biggees? I had not run into such canny and penetrating observations about the nature of the American Dream and the American Reality since Miller’s works. It’s a weird, twisted, funhouse mirror, star-spangled pageant. It’s one thing to have shows where people walk out, but when you’re afraid the Secret Service or Homeland Security will bust in, then you’re cooking!
