The Play that Changed My Life

The Play that Changed My Life: America's Foremost Playwrights on the Plays that Influenced Them (2009) edited by American theater producer Ben Hodges features essays by 19 playwrights who share which plays inspired them to pursue their trade. The book was presented by the American Theatre Wing, the founding organization of the Tony Awards.

Playwright David Auburn, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Proof, describes living in Little Rock at the age of 17 and setting his VCR to record a PBS television production of The House of Blue Leaves. Written in 1971 by American playwright John Guare, The House of Blue Leaves focuses on a zookeeper living in Queens who dreams of becoming a Hollywood songwriter. As a teenager, Auburn was struck by the play's sheer exuberance which contrasts with its shocking, violent ending in which the characters fall victim to a political bombing.

Best known for writing The Substance of Fire in 1991, American playwright Jon Robin Baltz singles out 1978's Plenty by English playwright David Hare as a particularly influential play on his career. Plenty focuses on the domestic and economic malaise that transpired in Britain after World War II. Its title comes from the promise that the postwar era in Britain would be a time of plenty, a promise that soon proved false. The play caused Baltz to shake off his tendency to emulate other playwrights to find his own original voice.



Next is an interview with the Cuban American playwright Nilo Cruz, the first-ever Latino recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which he received for the 2002 play Anna in the Tropics. In the interview, Cruz relates the formative and exhilarating experience of his father sneaking him into a cabaret show in Havana, Cuba as a child.

The book includes an essay by American playwright Edward Albee, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner famous for his plays Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Zoo Story. Albee recalls seeing the musical Jumbo at the age of six. Written by Richard Rodgers and starring Jimmy Durante, the musical inspired Albee with its ability to make the unreal into reality before his very eyes.

Meanwhile, the American playwright Charles Fuller is inspired less by a specific play than by conversations with a friend who influenced him to revisit the Herman Melville novella Billy Budd, which Fuller loosely adapted into his 1981 play A Soldier's Story. Set at a military base, the play explores the ways in which some African Americans have adopted white racist attitudes toward one another.



American playwright A.R. Gurney—best-known for his Pulitzer Prize-nominated play Love Letters—describes the experience of seeing a revival of the popular 1946 musical Annie Get Your Gun on his first trip to New York and being enchanted by the potential fun of a night at the theater. Also inspired by Harold Pinter's 1964 play Homecoming, Gurney is beguiled yet excited by a play that refuses to solve its own mysteries by the time the curtain drops at the end.

American absurdist playwright Christopher Durang recalls being haunted at the age of 13 by the 1961 musical Carnival!, particularly by the rage and pathos of the bitter and frustrated puppeteer, Paul. Durang points out that the character of Paul speaks to the "incipient existentialist" inside of him, inspiring him to explore his own capacity for introspection.

Best known for her retelling of the Orpheus myth, Eurydice, American playwright Sarah Ruhl recalls the tools and techniques she absorbed from Paula Vogel's 1992 play The Baltimore Waltz, the absurd story of a sister and brother in search of a cure for the fictional but fatal Acquired Toilet Disease contracted by the former.



Finally, the American playwright Lynn Nottage, the only woman to have received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama—for 2009's Ruined and 2017's Sweat—writes that despite the undeniable influence of Lorraine Hansbury's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, the production that inspired her most is an obscure children's play called Succotash on Ice in which vegetables in a giant refrigerator come to life.

The Play that Changed My Life is an insightful look at the theater by some of the world's most prominent living playwrights.