Reading some plays

I've started a project to read more plays.  I've been writing plays for years and years, and I've done okay as far as that goes.  I'd like to be a lot more successful, but you know, who wouldn't like that? I used to read a ton of plays all the time, but it's been a long time since I really dug in and read scripts.  Looking back at my reading choices, I tended to read plays in a pretty narrow zone:  Modern plays by European men.  Sure I've read a ton of the classics, too, but I consider most plays written more than a hundred years ago to be of more academic interest than anything.  Many plays written in the last century are also primarily of academic interest, as far as that goes.

I'm a writer, so I look for 'living threads' that run through a play, to inspire me to write something along that same thread, or in the direction it suggests.  It's like mining, and hoping to find a vein of ore.  You go through a lot of slag before you find that vein, and then you follow it wherever it leads, until it's tapped out or until the way becomes too dangerous.

So, I'm looking for new threads to follow and explore, and that means reading and watching new plays, and plays outside of my usual zone of interest.  I want to hear new and interesting voices, voices from different perspectives, from all over the world.  I want to discover things.

So I made a reading list of 100 plays, and loaded it with playwrights from all sorts of places and perspectives.  It's still a little heavy on straight white guy pieces, but I'm keeping my eyes and ears open for more plays to add to the list.  If there's a play you think I should read (rule: it has to be published and either in a library or for sale someplace) feel free to comment with your suggestions.

All that being said, the first play I read was "Harvest" by Manjula Padmanabhan.

Harvest:  A sci-fi play about a young man in a crowded, third world city who decides to become a donor of organs or other body parts for a wealthy woman in the West.  Basically, she outfits his apartment with all the comforts and conveniences she thinks he needs, as long as he adheres to a strict diet and stays healthy. And when the time comes that she needs a new organ of some kind, he'll provide it.  His mother and wife live in the apartment with him, and while his mother is completely sold on all the wonderful new comforts to be had - their own bathroom and shower, for example, and a television set - his wife is less enthused.  Her anxiety isn't about his eventual, possible demise, however, it's that she's in love with her husband's brother, who has decided that being a prostitute is better than being a living donor.

There is a lot of great stuff in this play, in particular the relationships between the characters.  The Western woman is kind a of distilled, extreme version of all the worst aspects of a well-to-do woman who thinks she's doing the family a kindness with this arrangement, treating them at times like friends and at other times like pets.  Overall, the storyline of the organ donor come to fruition in a fairly standard way, without too many surprises.  It required a bit of exposition at the end, which I usually try to avoid if I can when doing some kind of reveal, but it's always a temptation to have your antagonist start monologuing.  The wife, Jaya, becomes the true protagonist of the play and shows great strength and resolve at the end.  Overall, I'd give it a 7/10 on my purely arbitrary scale.  It was mostly solid, it had some interesting ideas and characters, and it gave me a few ideas to fiddle with as a writer.