Top 100 Drama & Plays Books

📘 Hamlet

In this quintessential Shakespeare tragedy, a young prince's halting pursuit of revenge for the murder of his father unfolds in a series of highly charged confrontations that have held audiences spellbound for nearly four centuries.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Tragedy

📘 The Crucible

The Crucible is a play by Arthur Miller that dramatizes the Salem witch trials of 1692-1693, reflecting on McCarthyism and American history through allegory.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Historical Drama

📘 Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller's tragic tale of a salesman who wanted more for his sons than he could give them, focusing on his ill-fated relationship with his sons and the lessons he learned in the end.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Tempest

The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place using illusion and skilful manipulation.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 The Alchemist, 1612

Samuel Taylor Coleridge said of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist that it had one out of the three most perfect plots in literature. This play, with its sharp portrayal of human folly, is considered by many to be Jonson's best comedy. First performed 1610, its popularity has endured to this day.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 The Merchant of Venice

In this lively comedy of love and money in sixteenth-century Venice, Bassanio wants to impress the wealthy heiress Portia but lacks the necessary funds. He turns to his merchant friend, Antonio, who is forced to borrow from Shylock, a Jewish moneylender.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 A Streetcar Named Desire

Tennessee Williams’ landmark 1951 play, 'A Streetcar Named Desire,' follows the fragile Blanche DuBois as she confronts the brutal realities of her life with Stanley Kowalski, the forceful newcomer.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Tragedy

📘 The Importance of Being Earnest

Set in England during the late Victorian era, the play's humour derives in part from characters maintaining fictitious identities to escape unwelcome social obligations. It is replete with witty dialogue and satirises some of the foibles and hypocrisy of late Victorian society. It has proved Wilde's most enduringly popular play.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

George and Martha clash with their guests at a college party, revealing secrets and lies.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Pygmalion

George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play *Pygmalion*, inspired by the Greek myth of its namesake, examines social class and speech as tools of identity in London.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams’s debut hit, *The Glass Menagerie*, earned the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and saw a long Broadway run with Laurette Taylor in the lead. It remains a staple of American community‑theater repertoire.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Twelfth Night

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, with discussion questions, role-playing scenarios, and other study activities.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 As You Like It

This play has two principal settings: the court that Frederick has usurped from his brother, the rightful Duke, and the Forest of Arden, where the Duke and his followers (including the disgruntled Lord Jaques and the jester Touchstone) are living.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 Our husband has gone mad again

A book centred on an African polygamy life, politics, and women with a good sence of comedy.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 Buzani Kubawo

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Οἰδίπους Τύραννος (Oidípous Týrannos)

Oedipus Rex chronicles the story of Oedipus, a man that becomes the king of Thebes and was always destined from birth to murder his father Laius and marry his mother Jocasta.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Tragedy

📘 Fences

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Antony and Cleopatra

A magnificent drama of love and war, this riveting tragedy presents one of Shakespeare's greatest female characters--the seductive, cunning Egyptian queen Cleopatra. The Roman leader Mark Antony, a virtual prisoner of his passion for her, is a man torn between pleasure and virtue, between sensual indolence and duty . . . between an empire and love.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Tragedy

📘 How I learned to drive

The 1950s pop music accompanying Li'l Bit's excursion down memory lane cannot drown out the ghosts of her past. Sweet recollections of driving with her beloved uncle intermingle with lessons about the darker sides of life. Balmy evenings are fraught with danger; seductions happen anywhere.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Wit

This play is about a professor who finds out she has stage four ovarian cancer. She realizes through her ordeal that she has no friends to fall back on, no family to support her.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Fantastic Beasts

The powerful Dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald has been captured in New York with the help of Newt Scamander. But, making good on his threat, Grindelwald escapes custody and sets about gathering followers, most unsuspecting of his true agenda: to raise up pure-blood wizards to rule over all non-magical beings.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 The Taming of the Shrew

This play within a play is a delightful farce about a fortune hunter who marries and tames" the town shrew. The comedy, often produced today because of its accessibility, is one of the plays Shakespeare intended for the general public rather than for the nobility.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 A Doll's House

Translation of Doll's house, English translation of Norwegian original by William Archer.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Cato

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Historical Drama

📘 The Miracle Worker

A text of the television play, intended for reading, of Anne Sullivan Macy's attempts to teach her pupil, Helen Keller, to communicate.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Salomé

Salome is a tragedy by Oscar Wilde. The original 1891 version of the play was in French. Three years later an English translation was published.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Tragedy

📘 Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. The Original Screenplay

J.K. Rowling's screenwriting debut is captured in this exciting hardcover edition of the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them screenplay. When Magizoologist Newt Scamander arrives in New York, he intends his stay to be just a brief stopover.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 King Henry V

Introducing this edition, Gary Taylor shows how Shakespeare shaped his historical material, examines controversial critical interpretations, discusses the play's fluctuating fortunes in performance, and analyses the range and variety of Shakespeare's characterization.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Historical Drama

📘 The goat, or, Who is Sylvia?

Martin, a successful architect, discovers his love for a goat and the family he's built with his wife and son crumbles around him.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Man and Superman

From the book:My dear Walkley: You once asked me why I did not write a Don Juan play. The levity with which you assumed this frightful responsibility has probably by this time enabled you to forget it; but the day of reckoning has arrived: here is your play! I say your play, because qui facit per alium facit per se.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 All's Well That Ends Well

[Enter BERTRAM, the COUNTESS OF ROUSILLON, HELENA, and LAFEU, all in black.] COUNTESS. In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband. BERTRAM. And I in going, madam, weep o'er my father's death anew; but I must attend his majesty's command, to whom I am now in ward, evermore in subjection. LAFEU.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 The lion and the jewel

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Blues For Mister Charlie

In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence--which is loosely based on the notorious 1955 killing of Emmett Till--James Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Historical Drama

📘 The Mousetrap

SYNOPSIS Mollie and Giles Ralston are opening their guesthouse, Monkswell Manor, for its first guests. They are new to the business and struggle with the details and an unusually heavy snowstorm. They hear on the radio that a Mrs. Maureen Lyon has been murdered in London and the suspect is wearing a dark overcoat, light scarf, and soft felt hat.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Cyrano de Bergerac

Cyrano de Bergerac, verse drama in five acts by Edmond Rostand, performed in 1897 and published the following year. It was based only nominally on the 17th-century nobleman of the same name, known for his bold adventures and large nose.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are dead

Acclaimed as a modern dramatic masterpiece, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead is the fabulously inventive tale of Hamlet as told from the worm’s-eve view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeare’s play.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Members of a neurotic Southern family gather to face the impending death of their patriarch, Big Daddy, and battle over the inheritance of his vast estate.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 The Three Theban Plays

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Winter's Tale

"Neither comedy nor tragedy, The Winter's tale contains elements of each genre, and defies easy classification. It experiments, like many of Shakespeare's late plays, with different styles and tones, and draws on a wide range of sources and inspirations.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 En attendant Godot

D8

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Tragedy

📘 Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Five children find entry tickets to Willy Wonka's mysterious chocolate factory. The tour brings out the best and worst in them

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 A View from the Bridge

A View from the Bridge tells the story of Eddie Carbone, a Brooklyn longshoreman, as he uncovers the truth about his family's Italian roots and the arrival of illegal immigrants.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Tragedy

📘 Look Back in Anger

Osborne led the surge of the 'angry young men' with this play about a disaffected young man railing against what he sees as the sterility of middle class married life in post-war Britain.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 In the chest of a woman

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 "Master Harold"-- and the boys

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 The Heidi chronicles

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Medea

A powerful Greek tragedy about Medea, a woman who decides to take drastic measures to avenge her betrayal and reclaim her stolen children.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Tragedy

📘 Our town

Thornton Wilder contemplates ordinary life events (birth, family life, marriage, and death), mostly through one character, a young woman, Emily Webb, who leads an unexamined life until she encounters death.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 The plays of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde took London by storm with his first comedy, Lady Windermere's Fan.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 The art of dramatic writing

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 King Richard III

"containing his treacherous plots against his brother Clarence, the pittiefull murther of his innocent nephewes, his tyrannicall usurpation, with the whole course of his detested life and most deserved death" (Subtitle of the 1597 edition.)

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Historical Drama

📘 An Inspector Calls

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 The Vagina Monologues

"I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don't think about them. . . . So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas, to do vagina interviews, which became vagina monologues. I talked with over two hundred women.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 The Comedy of Errors

"I feel that I have spent half my career with one or another Pelican Shakespeare in my back pocket. Convenience, however, is the least important aspect of the new Pelican Shakespeare series.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 I will marry when I want

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Prometheus Bound

An ancient Greek tragedy attributed to Aeschylus. The play follows the sufferings of the Titan Prometheus who has been fastened to a rock by Zeus as punishment for giving the knowledge of fire to mankind.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Tragedy

📘 A Man for All Seasons

The classic play about Sir Thomas More, the Lord chancellor who refused to compromise and was executed by Henry VIII.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Historical Drama

📘 Harvest

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!

A collection of short one-person plays featuring characters, between ten and fifteen years old, who live in or near a thirteenth-century English manor.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Bienvenido, Don Goyito

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 The Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual

Guide to the UCB-style of long form improvisational comedy.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 The Lottie Project

A new hilarious, witty - and very perceptive - tale of two girls from different times, but both with similar problems, from award-winning author Jacqueline WilsonHi! I'm Charlie (DON'T call me Charlotte - ever!). History is boring, right? Wrong! The Victorians weren't all deadly dull and drippy. Lottie certainly isn't.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 King Henry IV. Part 1

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, discusses the author and the theater of his time, and provides quizzes and other study activities.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Historical Drama

📘 True and False

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, director, and teacher gives us a blunt, irreverent, unsparingly honest guide to acting that overturns conventional truths and tells aspiring actors what they really need to know. David Mamet leaves no acting tenet untouched: How to judge the role, approach the part, work with the playwright.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 A Woman of No Importance

Oscar Wilde's audacious drama of social scandal centres around the revelation of Mrs Arbuthnot's long-concealed secret. A house party is in full swing at Lady Hunstanton's country home, when it is announced that Gerald Arbuthnot has been appointed secretary to the sophisticated, witty Lord Illingworth.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Три сестры

Три сестры: Драма в четырёх действиях

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 She no longer weeps

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 The little foxes

An acting edition of the 1939 drama in which brothers Oscar and Ben Hubbard steal money from their ailing brother-in-law in order to fund a cotton mill, only to be caught by their sister Regina who demands they give her a seventy-five percent share of the business in exchange for keeping them out of prison.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Amadeus

0riginating at the National Theatre of Great Britain, Amadeus was the recipient of both the Evening Standard Drama Award and the Theatre Critics Award. In the United States, the play won the coveted Tony Award and went on to become a critically acclaimed major motion picture winning eight Oscars, including Best Picture.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Historical Drama

📘 Vertigo, o, El perro vivo : drama en dos actos

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 The burdens

its about the social problems in our society, poverty and it was written by john ruganda## Heading ##

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Year of Magical Thinking, The

"this happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won't when it happens to you . . ."In this dramatic adaptation of her award-winning, bestselling memoir (which Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times called "an indelible portrait of loss and grief . . .

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Measure for Measure

This play examines the nature of mercy and justice, proposing that a good government is one that is flexible and based on common sense.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 The Abhijñānaśākuntalam of Kālidāsa

Sanskrit play, with Gujarati translation and commentary.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 R.U.R. and The insect play

"In 1920 Čapek wrote what was to become his most famous work, the play 'R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)', a meditation on the themes of humanity and subjugation that introduced the 'robot'. He was prolific throughout the 1920s, his plays addressing a range of subjects, although best remembered as a writer of early science fiction.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 The Crucible and Related Readings

Arthur Miller's classic play about the Salem witch trials and related readings in American literature and history, including works by Nathaniel Hawthorne and others on witchcraft and trials in the context of the Cold War and Puritanism in the United States.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Historical Drama

📘 Diary of Anne Frank

This is a duplicate. Please update your lists. See https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5259772W

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Entertainment rigging

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Dutchman and The Slave

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 The night Thoreau spent in jail

A play dramatizing the philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, and his stand concerning civil disobedience. He refused to pay taxes owing to his disapproval of the Mexican War. For his act of protest he was sent to jail.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 The Mousetrap and Other Plays

Table of Contents 1. Ten Little Indians 2. Appointment With Death 3. The Hollow 4. The Mousetrap 5. Witness for the Prosecution 6. Towards Zero 7. Verdict 8. Go Back for Murder

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Twelve angry men

A 'guilty' verdict seems a foregone conclusion. But one member of the jury has the will to probe more deeply into the evidence and the courage to confront the ignorance and prejudice of some of his fellow jurors. The conflict which follows is fierce and passionate, cutting straight to the heart of the issues of civil liberties and social justice.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Art

Serge has bought a modern painting for a large sum of money. Marc hates it and cannot believe that a friend of his could possibly want such a work. Yvan attempts, unsuccessfully, to placate both sides.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 Long Day's Journey into Night

An autobiographical drama about a dysfunctional Irish American family torn apart by drug addiction and alcoholism.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 La Celestina

Celestina is the most remarkable work produced in 15th century Spain and its influence has been enduring and profound. It is a prose dialogue divided into 21 'acts', starting in comedy and ending in tragedy.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Tragedy

📘 The return of Mgofu

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Motswasele II

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 A Taste of Honey

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Lysistrata

In Aristophanes' most popular play, sex is a powerful agent of reconciliation. As war ravages ancient Greece, a band of women, led by Lysistrata, promise to deny their husbands all sex until they stop fighting.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 La vida es sueño

La vida es sueño, the work of Calderón de la Barca, explores the themes of freedom, the transience of life, and the falseness of appearances.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Вишневый сад

""Pevear and Volokhonsky are at once scrupulous translators and vivid stylists of English."-The New YorkerThere have always been two versions of Chekhov's heartrending and humorous masterwork: the one with which we are all familiar, staged by Konstatine Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904, and the one Chekhov had originally envisioned.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 Arms and the Man

Arms and the Man was George Bernard Shaw's first commercially successful play. It is a comedy about idealized love versus true love. A young Serbian woman idealizes her war-hero fiance and thinks the Swiss soldier who begs her to hide him a terrible coward.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Comedy Plays

📘 Midnight hotel

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Andorra

play by Max Frisch

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Romeo and Juliet

An abridged version of Shakespeare's famous love story, in which an age-old rivalry between two feuding families leads to a tragic ending.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Tragedy

📘 Caesar and Cleopatra

Caesar and Cleopatra satirizes Shakespeare's use of history and comments wryly on the politics of Shaw's own time, but the undertone of melancholy makes it one of his most affecting plays.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Historical Drama

📘 Hedda Gabler

A masterpiece of modern theater, Hedda Gabler is a dark psychological drama whose powerful and reckless heroine has tested the mettle of leading actresses of every generation since its first production in Norway in 1890. Ibsen's Hedda is an aristocratic and spiritually hollow woman, nearly devoid of redeeming virtues.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Caligula

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Four Major Plays

Henrik Ibsen's famous Victorian-Era plays 'A Doll's House', 'Ghosts', 'Hedda Gabler', and 'The Master Builder' are translated from Norwegian to English by James McFarlane and Jens Arup. This edition includes an introduction by James McFarlane, select bibliography, and a chronology of Henrik Ibsen.

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama

📘 Betrayal in the city

Genre: Drama & Plays Subgenre: Drama