TT: Five to revive

Today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column is an annotated list of five rarely-seen plays deserving of revival. The plays are S.J. Perelman’s The Beauty Part, Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden, Terence Rattigan’s French Without Tears, Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, and Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit. Here’s an excerpt.
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What’s coming to Broadway this spring? Among other things, two familiar American plays that are widely regarded as modern classics are slated for high-profile revivals.
The first is “Death of a Salesman,” which was premiered on Broadway in 1949 and revived there in 1975, 1984 and 1999. In addition, it was filmed in 1951 and has been performed on TV four times.
The second is “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which was premiered in 1947 and revived in 1950, 1956, 1973 (twice), 1988, 1992 and 2005. In addition, it was filmed in 1951 and has been performed on TV twice.
Enough already!
Yes, I’ll give both shows a fair shake. That’s my job. But all things being equal, I’d rather review a show that hasn’t been so often that you can recite the lines along with the actors. In fact, what I’d really like is to review something that I’ve never seen–and even though I go to more than a hundred shows each year, there are any number of worthwhile plays, some of them important, that I have yet to see onstage.
If, like me, you’re more than ready to send Stanley Kowalski and Willy Loman on a nice long vacation, I invite you to consider this wish list of five rarely revived plays that I’ve never been lucky enough to see….
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Read the whole thing here.