Nora Helmer is childishly innocent, despite eight years of marriage and two children. She is protected from all responsibility and kept ignorant of even the most rudimentary knowledge of worldly affairs by her husband, Torvald, who feels that practical knowledge is unladylike. When her husband was ill and she needed money for medical expenses, she signed her dying father's name to a note. Her father died before he could put his legal signature on the document. Now, one of her husband's employees who had witnessed the forgery, desperate to keep his job, threatens to reveal her forgery to her husband unless she pleads for his job. Nora is convinced that her husband will understand that the forgery was an act of love and will forgive her. However, when Torvald learns of it, he upbraids her unmercifully. He relents as soon as he discovers that his employee has had a change of heart and will not expose Nora. But Nora is so shocked by her husband's attitude that she refuses to accept his forgiveness. She realizes that her husband has thougth of her as a pretty, mindless toy for his amusement, not as a human being. She leaves Torvald and her children to seek some kind of life in which she can be more than a mere doll.

From 500 Plays: Plot Outlines and Production Notes
© 1988 by Theodore Shank

This play deals with Mrs. Alving's unsuccessful attempts to escape the consequences of the sterile Victorian traditions of her youth. She had married Captain Alving because he was socially acceptable. Later, she discovered him to be completely dissolute, but her Victorian sense of duty prevented her leaving him. After the birth of her son, Oswald, she began actively to try to disentangle herself from the consequences of her marriage. She sent her son away so that he would not be corrupted by his father. After Captain Alving's death, she used his fortune to build an ophanage, thus hiding his true character forever and at the same time preventing her son from inheriting tainted money.

When the play begins, Mrs. Alving believes that she has finally exorcised the ghosts of the past. Her son is about to return home for the dedication of the orphanage. However, as soon as Oswald arrives, ghosts begin to control the action. The son tries to carry on an affair with a housemaid who is actually his illegitimate half-sister. Then Oswald confesses to his mother that he is fatally ill of a social disease inherited from his father. Under the strain of learning about his father's degeneracy and the maid's true parentage, Oswald becomes ravingly insane and begs his mother to poison him. Rationally, Mrs. Alving knows that death is a merciful escape for him, but her feelings of motherhood keeps her from administering the poison. As the final curtain falls, Mrs. Alving stands by her babbling son, unable to act.

From 500 Plays: Plot Outlines and Production Notes
© 1988 by Theodore Shank

Hedda Gabler is a frustrated woman, capable only of destroying others. One of her amusements is practicing with a pair of dueling pistols which belonged to her aristocratic father. She marries a meek professor for security. not because she loves him. When she becomes pregnant, she refuses to admit her condition. Eventually, she tries to regain influence over Eilert Lovborg, a brilliant young scholar she had previously led to drink and destruction. Unable to find any satisfaction in her own life, she tries to find vicarious thrills by plotting the glorious suicide of Lovborg. Her plan succeeds, and Lovborg commits suicide with one of her dueling pistols, but Hedda discovers that his death was not glorious; he shot himself in the stomach, perhaps by accident. Furthermore, the unscrupulous Judge Brock finds the pistol and threatens to reveal its true ownership unless Hedda consents to a clandestine affair with him. Disappointed, frightened of scandal, and equally frightened of an affair, she uses the other pistol to end her own life.

From 500 Plays: Plot Outlines and Production Notes
© 1988 by Theodore Shank

The play explores the attempts of the Ranevskaya family to maintain their aristocratic values in an increasingly bourgeois world. The Ranevskaya finances are so precarious that part of the family estate, a large cherry orchard, must be sold in order to maintain the remainder of the estate. But although each member of the family realizes the necessity of raising money, no one can bear to sell the orchard -- the orchard symbolizes, in a different way to each person, the happiness of a lost past. To Madame Ranevskaya, the orchard symbolizes a time when she was young, innocent, and secure with a husband and son. To Gayeff, her borther, it symbolizes the time when he could be a carefree gentleman farmer, concerned primarily with billiards instead of banking. To Lopahin, the freed serf, it represents a time when love and loyalty were more important than material successs. Throughout the play, the characters collide comically; although each can see the impracticality and blindness of the others, he is unaware of his own folly. And although they all struggle heroically to face the new Russian world, each retreats into fantastic daydreams whenever his own private dream is threatened. Inevitably, the entire estate is sold. The Ranevskays set out for new lives in which, it is clear, they will continue to live graciously and ridiculously in an outmoded manner.

From 500 Plays: Plot Outlines and Production Notes
© 1988 by Theodore Shank

A year after the death of their father, who had commanded the local army post, Olega, Masha, and Irina Prozoroff find their lives purposeless and lonely. Each tries to find some substitue for the gaiety and hope she had formerly felt. Olega tries to find satisfaction in teaching, although she dreams of a home and family. Unhappy in her marriage to a pedantic schoolmaster, Masha stumbles into a hopeless affair with a married colonel. Irina seeks to find purpose through the "dignity of work" in the local telegraph office. As the play progresses, all three become increasingly aware that their efforts are futile. Their sense of futility is greatly increased by their brother's marriage to Natasha, a course peasant woman. She gradually encroaches on the famiy home until the sisters are robbed of even the solace of a private refuge from the realities of their situation. They dream of starting a new life in Moscow, but they are too burdened by the practicalities of life to make the move. They finally admit the hopelessness of their substitute pursuits when the army post is withdrawn from the town. Despite their past failures, they resolve to seek again some sense of purpose and hope in life.

From 500 Plays: Plot Outlines and Production Notes
© 1988 by Theodore Shank

O'Neill experimented with the use of masks in this play to dramatize the lack of understanding in human relationships. Outwardly, Dion Anthony is joyful, creative, and sensual as a young Pan. This is the Dion his wife Margaret knows and loves, the Dion of the Mask. When the mask is removed, Dion appears haunted, filled with deep sadness, a portrait of the spiritual and lonely artist. When Margaret glimpses him unmasked, she is frightened and fails to understand him. The prostitute, Cybel, understands the unmasked Dion: she believes that life itself is not sacred -- only the you inside is.

Dion's best friend, William Brown, hopes to acquire Dion's power for love, and in protecting him also seeks to possess him. Dion wills himself to Brown and dies. Brown assumes Dion's mask and indentity and takes his place in the family, gaining Margaret's love, which he has desired since childhood. But fully to become Dion he must kill Brown, the Brown beneath Dion's mask. Calling her "Earth Mother," Brown dies in the arms of Cybel. Asked the name of the body, Cybel replies, "Man!" Margaret, surrounded by her sons, finds solace in her belief that love does not die and Dion lives in her heart.

From 500 Plays: Plot Outlines and Production Notes
© 1988 by Theodore Shank

Early evening on a country road, Estragon and Vladimir wait vaguely and disconsolately for a nebulous Godot. They complain of life, toy with repentance, fall asleep to nightmares, quarrel, make up, consider hanging themselves, and wonder what it is they really expect of Godot when he does come. Down the road struts Pozzo, a pompous taskmaster, with Lucky, whom slavery and unquestioning acceptance have reduced to near-idiocy. Prodded to think, Lucky recites a frenzied jumble theology and politics, then stumbles off into the darkness with his master.

During Act II, in a dreamlike slapstick, Estragon and Vladimir trade funny hats, pretend at slave-and-master, recite humorous poetry, argue over the past, the distant, and the present. Pozzo and Lucky stumble in again, one now blind and the other dumb. Neither remembers who he is or was. Godot sends word he will not come today, but surely tomorrow. Vladimir and Estragon should be moving on, but neither can bring himself to stir.

From 500 Plays: Plot Outlines and Production Notes
© 1988 by Theodore Shank

During a civil war the deposed governor's son is rescued by one of the palace maids and carried beyond the mountains for protection, at great risk and embarrassment to the unmarried girl. It proves to be a deed of kindness filled with danger for the doer, for, as the chorus sings, "Terrible is the temptation of Goodness." The civil war, though a fluke, makes a powerful judge of Azdak, a drunken rascal, who proceeds to turn justice upside down. In the course of events, the new judge is asked to decide on the custody of the governor's son; should he and the estates be awarded to the governor's widow and the actual mother, who abandoned her child in her haste to pack her dresses, or to the adopted mother, a lowly servant girl who has loved the child and shielded him from all danger? The judge renders his decision somewhat in the manner of Solmon, but from a different point of view. There are many scenes of vivid and colorful action, humor and character: the overrunning of the palace; the chase through the mountains; the combination wedding-and-funeral feast; and the series of trials presided over by the rascally judge. The role of Azdak is one of the richest in modern dramatic literature.

From 500 Plays: Plot Outlines and Production Notes
© 1988 by Theodore Shank

Tragedy haunts the four members of the Tyrone family: James, Mary, James Jr. and Edmund. James Tyrone, a highly successful actor well past his prime but still active, prefers to buy worthless land rather than spend his money for proper doctors to attend his family. His wife, Mary, nervous and ill, still reflects the innocence she possessed as a convent girl in spite of the loss of a child and long confinement in a hospital. Their older son, Jamie, who unsuccessfully followed his father into the theatre, is cynical and dissipated. Edmund, twenty-three, has returned from the sea with what the family fears is consumption (TB); he is sensitive and studious and the idol of his mother even though it was his birth that caused a quack doctor, summoned by Tyrone, to first administer the drug (morphine) to which Mary is now addicted. While she has promised not to take it again, Jamie believes Edmund's illness has so unnerved her that she is taking the drug secretly. As the day passes, his suspicion proves to be correct. Edmund learns he must go to a sanatorium. Jamie and Tyrone, drinking heavily, begin to evoke old sorrows. Jamie foresees that in destroying himself he may also destroy Edmund. Mary, lost in her memories, appears carrying her wedding gown, still attempting to find the past.

From 500 Plays: Plot Outlines and Production Notes
© 1988 by Theodore Shank

Willy Loman, a traveling salesman, always believed that back-slapping and perseverance were the keys to success in business as well as in life. At sixty-three he has reached a dead end. The long drives on the road make him dizzy. He talks to himself and has hallucinations in which the past and the present are intermingled. Episodes of long ago gain a new meaning in their relation to the present. Loman is seen pampering his boys, Biff and Happy; he is convinced Biff will conquer the world as easily as he does the football field. Willy Loman appears to himself the perfect American, the ideal father and husband--an image shattered for Biff when the boy comes upon his father in a hotel room with a another woman. Willy's older brother, Ben, who died many years ago and led an adventuress life in Alaska, calls on Willy again and again. The tired salesman pulls himself together. He asks his young, indifferent boss for an in-town job, but is fired instead. Biff forces him to realize that they are both failures. Willy Loman is through. His insurance is all paid up; if he dies in an accident he will be worth more dead than he is alive. He goes to the garage and starts the car. Loman, the successful go-getter, was a fake; Loman, the beaten, pitiful human being, attains stature through the devotion of his wife, Linda, who loves him for what he is and who foresees the catastrophe, but can do nothing to prevent it.

From 500 Plays: Plot Outlines and Production Notes
© 1988 by Theodore Shank