The 30 greatest American family dramas

Sam Shepard’s masterful 1978 symbolist-realist tale of a dysfunctional family is for many the playwright’s most confident expression of his mythic vision; it even won him the Pulitzer Prize. Certainly Buried Child’s title gives away the play’s darkest secret, but Shepard’s project was in atmosphere and lyricism, not plot. As such, this story of a young man’s reluctant return home to a “Norman Rockwell” house in Illinois (and his eventual reabsorption into the alcoholic, incestuous legacy that waits there) stands as the theater’s most persuasive evocation of spiritual starvation amid the corn husks.—HS

In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s harrowing drama about a black matriarch moving her family into a hostile white neighborhood knew whereof it spoke: Hansberry’s father had once fought a court case for the family home, and Hansberry herself was the first black female playwright to move onto the Great (all too) White Way. Raisin, though, isn’t just a landmark; it wielded the familiar motif of expansive dreams stifling in cramped living quarters with such force that five decades later, it can still be revived to bravura effect, or can prompt another playwright (Bruce Norris) to revisit the ostensible paradise of Clybourne Park.—HS

Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor, Anne Bancroft, Stockard Channing and Elizabeth Marvel are among the many great actors who have played the scheming Regina Hubbard Giddens—a woman maneuvering to fend for herself within a financial boy’s club—in Lillian Hellman’s vicious 1939 dissection of dependence and deliberate cruelty in 1900 Alabama. So compelling was the internecine intrigue of Regina and her brothers that Hellman returned to them in 1946 for a prequel, Another Part of the Forest, that digs up the roots of their rotten family tree.—AF

Tennessee Williams’s steamy 1955 drama casts a knowing eye on greed, lust and decay on a Mississippi plantation whose swaggering patriarch (known to all as Big Daddy) is in the final stages of cancer. Out of a mixture of sympathy, Southern manners and self-interest, no one tells him the truth—except his son Brick, an alcoholic wreck determined to release the ugly secrets that the family has kept bottled up. Few scenes in Williams are as wrenching as the Act II showdown in which Brick smashes through the “mendacity” that has walled him from his father for years.—AF

You could say that every August Wilson play is about the same family: African-Americans, bonded through the crime of slavery. But this 1983 Pulitzer Prize winner is somewhat unusual in Wilson’s ten-play “century cycle,” in that it does focus on a family. Troy Maxson is a big-talking trash collector in 1950s Pittsburgh who waxes nostalgic over his failed dreams in major-league baseball, even as he bullies his college-age son and cheats on his loyal wife. Troy is not a hero or even a great father, but he’s a proud man who wants to take another swing at life.—DC

Edward Albee was adopted and hated his surrogate parents; this fact colors virtually everything he wrote. In his off-kilter world, parents are fake, children are imaginary, and home life is rife with existential unease. His 1963 stunner, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, doesn’t technically follow a family: It’s about two married couples who spend a long, boozy night seducing, humiliating and using each other as human shields. What makes it a great family play is the way that the younger couple, Nick and Honey, function both as younger versions of their embittered hosts, George and Martha, but also, implicitly, as their children. And of course, the play famously includes numerous references to George and Martha’s unseen and fictitious son, whose life and death are lovingly recounted in a game George calls Bringing Up Baby. George and Martha are the saddest family of all: the barren couple with the ghostly, absent child.—DC

Thornton Wilder’s huge-framed 1938 portrait of small-town life centers on the neighboring Gibbs and Webb clans, whose eldest children’s lives intertwine through love, marriage and premature death. But even as Our Town traces these major journeys, its emphasis is on seemingly minor events, such as a mother and daughter cutting green beans or a father chastising his self-absorbed son. In its climax—rendered with aching verisimilitude in David Cromer’s gorgeous 2009 revival—a dead woman revisits a day from her childhood, only to retreat to her grave in horror at what she didn’t appreciate when she was alive: the richness packed into every moment of sensation and interaction with other people. Rather than building drama from exceptional domestic conflict, Our Town maps a spiritual cosmology into everyday home life.—AF

“The play is memory,” Tom Wingfield tells us early in Tennessee Williams’s 1945 breakthrough, and it must have been a painful memory for him to re-create. Today, we know that Tom’s sister, the mentally and physically crippled Laura, was based on Williams’s institutionalized sister, Rose. Tom, Laura and their domineering mother, the original steel magnolia, Amanda Wingfield, have been uprooted and abandoned by a man “who fell in love with long distances.” In Amanda’s struggle to maintain Southern dignity in the face of near poverty, she alienates the dissolute Tom and smothers sweet but doomed Laura. Alternating between Tom’s lyrical direct address and exquisitely sad but loving scenes of home life, the play builds to a terrible climax in which some are saved and some are lost. Jim, a handsome “gentleman caller,” gives Laura a brief taste of what independence might be like. But Tom must grab freedom for himself.—DC