One good list deserves another, so here are the ten American plays I most wish I’d written. The second “play” is actually an evening-long bill of one-act plays by the same author, but it’s my list, so I decided to count it as a single work.

As with my previous list of American novels, the word best was nowhere in my mind when I drew up this roster. Since I’ve lately become a playwright myself, I suppose you could say that I have more of a stake in this list than its predecessor, but the standards for inclusion are identical: these are the ten American plays that mean the most to me personally. I love them and identify with them, and though I will never live long enough to write anything remotely as good, they collectively define the kind of play I’d like to be able to write:

• Horton Foote, The Trip to Bountiful

• William Inge, Come Back, Little Sheba

• David Ives, All in the Timing

• Warren Leight, Side Man

• Kenneth Lonergan, The Starry Messenger

• David Mamet, American Buffalo

• Lynn Nottage, Crumbs from the Table of Joy

• Thornton Wilder, Our Town

• Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

• August Wilson, Fences

“The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.”
Willa Cather, One of Ours

Patrick Kurp’s thoughtful response to the list of ten American novels that I posted the other day contained this observation:

Some of the satisfactions I once found in fiction–human drama, moral complexity, memorable language–I now find more reliably elsewhere, in poetry, history and biography. One of good fiction’s chief virtues, the way it encourages self-forgetting as we inhabit the lives of others, is often better accomplished in other forms.

I’m not sure that I’d say often, but I do know that I spend more time reading history and biography than fiction, and I don’t know why. I truly love the novels on my list, and many more as well, but all things being equal, I’m somewhat more likely to be reading non-fiction than fiction at any given moment. This has always been so. I tend to read fiction in spurts–I recently spent a whole week revisiting the novels of William Maxwell–whereas there is rarely a time when I’m not either reading, consulting, or writing about a non-fiction book.

This doubtless has much to do with the nature of my work, and it may also have something to do with the fact that I don’t write fiction. On the other hand, I’ve written three plays and two opera libretti in the past two years, a development without precedent in my writing life and one that puzzles me greatly. I simply don’t understand how or why I have suddenly found within myself the desire and ability to write for the stage. As I recently told a friend, it feels as though I’ve grown another arm.

It will be interesting to see whether this belated change of life causes me to spend more time reading novels. (I already spend quite enough time reading and watching plays!) Perhaps, consciously or not, I’ve developed in middle age a greater need for what fiction alone has to offer. Or maybe it’s just a manifestation of one of the mysterious cycles of life to which all of us are subject. Eight years ago I noticed with like puzzlement that I seemed to be less interested in music: “It’s as if I’ve become alienated from myself, in much the same way that the victim of a stroke might feel he was no longer himself. I’m not all here.”

Needless to say, the I to whom I referred in that posting came back, if not so decisively as I expected: I spend noticeably less time listening to music now than I did a decade ago, though I don’t think that I love it any less. The sad and inescapable truth is that there are only so many hours in the day, and you can only spend them doing one thing at a time. (Playing music while doing something else is not the same thing as listening to it.)

It is also inescapably true that there are only so many hours in a lifetime, and at fifty-six, I’m intensely aware of wanting to use the ones that I have left to me as well as possible. I long to spend less time spinning my wheels and more time “making everything more beautiful.”

That last phrase, which is a favorite of mine, comes from an essay by Fairfield Porter: “When I paint, I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful.” In the past I believed that the only way I could accomplish that goal was by being a good critic and a loving friend and companion. Now it appears that it could also be within my power to accomplish it by being a good playwright and librettist. May it be so!

A cleaned-up version of Gypsy Rose Lee’s strip routine, from the 1943 film Stage Door Canteen:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“Oh, my dear little librarian, you pile up enough tomorrows and you’ll find yourself with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays.”
Meredith Willson, The Music Man

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to an important regional revival of Once in a Lifetime in Sarasota, Florida. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
If you’re a theater buff with a serious interest in American comedy, “Once in a Lifetime” probably ranks high on the list of little-known shows you’d love to see onstage. Otherwise, I doubt you’ve heard of it. A farce about the coming of talking pictures to Hollywood, “Once in a Lifetime” was the first collaboration between George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, who went on to write “The Man Who Came to Dinner” and “You Can’t Take It With You.” It opened on Broadway in 1930 and ran for 406 performances, which was big business back then. Two years later, it was turned into a middling movie, then vanished from sight (the 1979 Broadway revival was a flop). Today the play is known solely because Mr. Hart wrote about how it came to Broadway in “Act One,” his 1959 autobiography.
Why doesn’t anybody do “Once in a Lifetime” nowadays? It costs too much–way too much. The published script calls for five sets and 38 actors. You could get away with that in the Thirties, but no commercial producer would think of bringing so horrendously expensive a play to Broadway anymore. Enter San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater and Sarasota’s Asolo Repertory Theatre, two regional companies that double as drama schools, making it possible for them to put on large-cast shows by using students to cover smaller parts. A.C.T. mounted “Once in a Lifetime” last fall and Asolo Rep is doing it now, and both versions, not coincidentally, were directed by the same man, Mark Rucker.
Since the two productions are identical in concept–most of the members of the cast play double, triple and quadruple roles–I tossed a coin and elected to see “Once in a Lifetime” at Asolo Rep, whose version makes use of 19 actors, four more than at A.C.T. It was worth the trip. “Once in a Lifetime” proves to be as fresh as any of the later screwball comedies on whose screenplays it surely left a mark (not to mention “Singin’ in the Rain,” whose authors, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, must have had it in mind).
“Once in a Lifetime” is the story of George, Jerry and May (Jason Bradley, Andrew Carter and Hillary Clemens), a trio of small-time vaudeville hoofers who see the premiere of “The Jazz Singer” in New York and decide to go to Hollywood, pass themselves off as authorities on elocution and make their fortune by teaching silent-movie actors how to talk….
This premise is so familiar that you have to remind yourself that Kaufman and Hart were the first writers ever to turn it into a plot. Part of what makes “Once in a Lifetime” more than just a historical curiosity is the jaundiced wit with which the characters comment on the head-banging craziness that surrounds them. (Jerry, working a crossword puzzle: “What’s a four-letter word for actor?” May: “Dope.”) But mere wisecracks won’t make a play fly. That’s where craftsmanship comes in, and the authors of “Once in a Lifetime” knew their stuff. Every piece of the puzzle fits together with a crisp, satisfying click…
Ms. Clemens, who gave a poignant performance as the tomboy in Writers’ Theatre’s 2008 Chicago revival of “Picnic,” plays May as a spunky, cloche-hatted girl-next-door who knows how to snap off a punch line, which is just right….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
The 1932 film adaptation of Once in a Lifetime:

Aline MacMahon, who plays May, created the role in the original Brighton Beach tryout of the stage version, but was replaced on Broadway by Jean Dixon. She later appeared in the play’s Los Angeles premiere.

“The patience most people have for someone else’s grief is short-lived. The display of a measured grief is comforting. It implies order, and even benevolence (for being designed of sensible proportions) to process of life that we don’t understand well, can understand only if we have gone through them. Profound grief suggests mysteries at the heart of human existence that cannot be prepared for, which can come at any time, and into any life.”
Alec Wilkinson, A Violent Act

Apropos of absolutely nothing, here’s a list of the ten American novels I most wish I’d written.

Note that I didn’t say best or greatest or significant or anything so highfalutin. This is a purely personal inventory, reflective only of admiration, love, and–if a reader who has no gift whatsoever for the writing of prose fiction can use the word–identification. These books speak to me, and if I could write a novel, they collectively represent the kind of novel I’d like to write:

• Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

• James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor

• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• John P. Marquand, Point of No Return

• William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

• Edwin O’Connor, The Edge of Sadness

• Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

• Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King

• Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

• Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

UPDATE: Patrick Kurp responds, thoughtfully as always. Some of his picks, not surprisingly, came within inches of making my list.