The Play That Changed My Life,—America’s Foremost Playwrights on the Plays That Influenced Them (Applause Books, 2009)

This one’s a year old, but a real perennial since it makes such a good gift book.

Connecticut theatergoers will appreciate the East Coast bias of this collection of short essays by selected theater writers who aren’t hesitant to say that they were influenced by others, and who for the most part seem proud to be part of a distinct theater tradition and heritage. So many writers put on the loner/maverick/prodigy masks that it’s nice to see a whole pack of ’em celebrating traditions and rituals.

Many of the participants are familiar from productions hereabouts—Paula Vogel, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl, Horton Foote, Regina Taylor. A few, including Christopher Durang, David Ives and Lynn Nottage, studied at Yale. One—Pulitzer-winner Donald Margulies—even lives in New Haven. Margulies, whose breakthrough play was The Loman Family Picnic, unsurprisingly picks Death of a Salesman as his answer to the book’s titular query. Other writers are less obvious—in an opening epigraph at odd with the longer essays which the book solicited from others, Edward Albee cites the elephantine Rodgers/Hart/Hecht/MacArthur musical Jumbo as an inspiration (for Zoo Story?).

You’ll plow through this in one swell evening, but then you’ll be gathering up all the classics it mentions and poring through that stack for months to come.