Tynan's Anger

Each month, I will be unrolling a top 10 list regarding English-language drama this decade. This first month starts with the best lines from English-language plays this decade. I have admittedly taken a more mainstream angle on this list, because my aim is to gauge which lines will resonate the loudest for the longest period of time in the future.To recap, here's the list from Part 1:

10. "Not many people know this, but the Führer was descended from a long line of English qveens." – The Producers

9."You the cowboys and I'm the Indians. See who wins this war." - Radio Golf

8. "Jirous doesn’t care. He doesn’t care enough even to cut his hair. The policeman isn’t frightened by dissidents! Why should he be? Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics. Heretics give meaning to the defenders of faith. Nobody cares more than a heretic. Your friend Havel cares so much he writes a long letter to Husák. It makes no odds whether it’s a love letter or a protest letter. It means they’re playing on the same board…But the Plastics don’t care at all. They’re unbribable." - Rock 'N' Roll

7. "If you let a standing army stand too long...it will find something to do." - If You See Something, Say Something

6. "Did I send you to the most expensive university in the world to teach you how to feel conflicted, or to learn how to manipulate great masses of people?" - Urinetown

Without further ado, here's lines nos. 5 through 3.

5.

“I have come (with no little excitement) to understand that baseball is a perfect metaphor for hop in a democratic society” –Mason Marzac (Denis O’Hare), Take Me Out by Richard Greenberg.

Take Me Out was not Greenberg’s best play this decade (nor was it his worst), but it was his most successful. Part of the reason is Greenberg’s willingness in Take Me Out to go off the deep end to extend a metaphor to where it resonated at the highest level, tonal consistency be damned. O’Hare met Greenberg’s challenge with a brilliant unflinching delivery that practically chiseled his name on the Tony statue, but the line made Broadway a viable art form for sports fans, and made baseball understandable to gay men who treat opera as their sport of choice. As a side-note, the play, which debuted at the Public Theatre in 2002, came on the heels of rumors that Mets star Mike Piazza was gay. While Take Me Out’s protagonist Darren Lemming was based on Derek Jeter, it would be a later Yankees addition, Alex Rodriguez, who would provide more drama to the back page of the New York Post than we would hear about from Clive Barnes and Michael Riedel combined.

4.

“Because for reasons only known to himself, the bulldog of a policemen chose not to put the stories in the burning trash, but placed them carefully with Katurian’s case file, which remained sealed away to remain unopened for 50-odd years…a fact which would have ruined the writer’s fashionably downbeat ending, but was somehow…somehow…more in keeping with the spirit of the thing. “ – Katurian (Billy Crudup), The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh.

The myth of McDonagh’s one creative spurt in the early ‘90s that produced all his plays is in part self-perpetuated by McDonagh himself, even though in interviews he will admit that he constantly tinkered with his plays after that one spurt. The last line of The Pillowman, the only McDonagh play to leave the shores of Ireland, used an imaginary totalitarian dystopia to make a surprisingly heartfelt plea for the creative process. After a series of horrific stories, some imagined by writer Katurian and some occurring to Katurian, The Pillowman ended with a line that, by, generalizing “the writer,” could work just as easily for Katurian and McDonagh within the play’s framework. Creativity of McDonagh’s kind is rare, and it’s even rarer for such a creative voice to succeed so tremendously while moving far out of its comfort zone. What particularly struck me about this line was McDonagh’s self-professed willingness to sacrifice structural consistency for spiritual consistency. Who said McDonagh doesn’t have a heart?

3.

“Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That's the game I want you to learn. Pass it on. “ – Hector (Richard Griffiths), The History Boys by Alan Bennett.

One of the greatest living British playwrights, Alan Bennett crafted The History Boys as a slick swan song for an older, more wistful aim of education in Britain in particular. It worked just as well in America, where the cut-throat world of top-notch education lost that wistfulness decades ago. As delivered by Richard Griffiths in a Tony- and Olivier-award winning performance, Hector’s undying devotion to knowledge in the larger sense is what draws him spiritually to his students, and what loses his relevancy in a world driven on determining the bottom line. This line summed up the gradualist spirit of growth that could only come from a British mind, which makes the sentiment, a fish out of water even in today’s theater world, the greatest line from a British play this decade.

Come back tomorrow for best 2 quotes from English-language drama this decade.

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Labels: alan Bennett, alex rodriguez, Billy Crudup, Denis O'Hare, derek jeter, History Boys, martin mcdonagh, Mike Piazza, Richard Greenberg, richard griffiths, Take Me Out, The Pillowman