Complex, Experimental, In-your-face, Physical force, Pioneering, Political, Sincere, Smart

In a 1909 essay called "How to Write a Play," George Bernard Shaw argued that the great playwright must "pick out the significant incidents from the chaos of daily happenings and arrange them so that their relation to one another becomes significant, thus changing us from bewildered spectators of a m

Composed, Dark, Irish renaissance, Lyrical, Political, Sincere

Playwright, professor, and Performance artist Anna Deveare Smith grounds her avant-garde theater in the infinitely strange world of reality. "I look for the poem that the person is," Smith says of the real-people inspirations for her dramatic characters. Instead of creating intricate backgrounds for

Collage, Huge, Layered, Open-ended, Political, Polychromatic, Sincere, Social protest, Solo performance