Athol Fugard: collaboration, apartheid and the changing relationships of a scene.

Christopher Durang: satire, parody and the precise circumstances of absurd events.

Clifford Odets: economic pressure, ensemble work and arguments that become action.

John Guare: storytelling, invented identities and specific entrances into a scene.

Lanford Wilson: ensemble collaboration, intimate scenes and changing tactics.

Tennessee Williams: language, desire, memory and the demands of a listening partner.

Terrence McNally: plays, musical books and the relationship between intimacy and public performance.

Tony Kushner: political arguments, imaginative worlds and immediate human needs.

Wendy Wasserstein: friendship, family, social expectations and comic encounters.

William Inge: Midwestern lives, indirect speech and the circumstances beneath a conversation.

William Shakespeare: language as argument, seduction, humor and urgent action.

Anton Chekhov: the event within an ordinary conversation and the changes between people.

Henrik Ibsen: hidden facts, social rules and demands that become present action.

Oscar Wilde: wit as a means to obtain, conceal or change something.

Bertolt Brecht: plays that make human needs and the social terms of an encounter visible.

Arthur Miller: public arguments and the private cost of a choice.

Samuel Beckett: waiting, repetition, silence and the concrete tasks of performance.

George Bernard Shaw: arguments made personal, physical and necessary to the listener.

Edward Albee: social exchanges and the moment their rules change.

Nikolai Gogol: absurd situations with exact consequences for the people inside them.