Tynan's Anger: The Top 10 Quotes from English-language Drama This Decade: #2 and #1

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 and Part 2:

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

5. “I have come (with no little excitement) to understand that baseball is a perfect metaphor for hop in a democratic society”-Take Me Out

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. “ - The Pillowman

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. “ - The History Boys

At long last, following a brief delay, here are the top two lines in English-language drama this decade. Not coincidentally they are two lines whose greatness is only fully realized when you see them in a theater:

"I’M RUNNING THINGS NOW!" – Barbara Fordham (Amy Morton), August: Osage County by Tracey Letts.

On paper, the line simply reads as a hell of an act breaker for the second of the three acts of the gloirous self-destruction of August: Osage County. For those lucky enough to see Amy Morton deliver it, either upon its original Steppenwolf run, in her 552 Broadway performances or in her tour of the West End in London, it made you leave the second act roaring with applause loud enough to match Morton.

In terms of pacing, the line provides a rush of catharsis between Act II and Act III that allows the play to seem much shorter than its three-and-a-half run time. In terms of the narrative, however, the line is more of a red herring; after defiantly taking charge, Barb is unprepared for the calamity after calamity that back-loaded into the play’s third act (after what you saw in the first two acts seemed bad enough). This family is too damaged for one person to run, and the strength of Barb’s conviction (and Morton’s delivery) of this line is ultimately what destroys the character. In an easily-missed nod to Death of a Salesman, a piss-drunk Barb leaves the play by grabbing the car keys and driving off—the play’s final focus on Violet makes allows you to ignore the fact that Barb may well be driving to her death, Willy Loman-style.

Morton, whose decades of work with Letts at the Steppenwolf have given them a synergy that is exceedingly rare between playwright and actor, has a nasty streak to her performances like few actors of her generation. This is invisible to those who don’t attend the theater, who have only seen her in movies like 8MM (where her role was similar but inferior to that of Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone) and the Chicago-based kids movie Rookie of the Year.

Yet, considering that her only other Broadway credit is Nurse Ratched in the revival One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (another Steppenwolf import), it’s hard to question that her ability to play evil on stage is unparalleled. What’s particularly impressive is that on paper, Barb is an exponentially more sympathetic character than Ratched, as eventually seen by Johanna Day’s less spectacular but more even-handed take on Barb. Morton gave Barb a Ratched-like sense of calculating aggression, as her casual venom was nothing compared to the volatile moments when Morton chose to really let her fangs out. Morton’s ability to turn the daughter of a monster into a monster in her own right added a dimension to the play that could not be added by anything Letts put on paper or director Anna Shapiro suggested.

In a play so rife with great quotes, the fact that Morton dominated all of them with this line almost overshadows the brilliance of the rest of the plays witticisms. Nonetheless, “I’M RUNNING THINGS NOW!” is the “Stella!” cry of this generation of American theater, and Morton’s take on Barb is as inextricable from the fabric of the role as Brando was to Stanley Kowalski. The only difference is Brando didn’t make his shriek sound like a bat out of hell, nor did the cry have the ultimate touch of sarcasm touch that Letts and Morton gave it.

"I have doubts! I have such doubts!" – Sister Aloysius (Cherry Jones) – Doubt: A Parable, by John Patrick Shanley.

Despite never thinking I could see anyone but Cherry Jones in the central role to John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning modern day morality play, Meryl Streep absolutely nailed the role in the movie. The one glaring exception, which may have cost Streep a third Oscar, was her delivery of Doubt’s legendary final line, which if Meryl Streep couldn’t deliver it effectively, seems to indicate to me the line could only mean as much as it did when said in the theater.

From the moment Sister Aloysius receives even a whiff of suspicion that Father Flynn, the popular new local priest in the Bronx community that has “St. Patrick on one side of the church and St. Anthony on the other,” has acted improperly with the Catholic school’s one black student, the book is closed. She has seen this too many times before, and, as the hardened soul she is, knows that there’s no way justice will ever be served unless she utterly convinces herself of the fact and proceeds as if Flynn’s guilt is a foregone conclusion. For the rest of Doubt, her conviction is baffling, making her look like as much of the villain as she accuses Flynn of being. Judging by the reviews of both the play and the movie, some still see her that way.

To me,, she’s a mirror image of Hamlet; while Hamlet is brought down by indecision where only at the end he realizes his need for certainty and purpose, Aloysius thrusts herself into certainty to get the results she has to get, when at the end, it is doubt that destroys her. At the end of the play, even when her mission successful and validated, she is left the most hated woman in the parish, Father Flynn gets promoted, and the boy she was trying to protect ends up worse for wear. For one last moment, the greatest moment in American theater this decade, Aloysius is left with as many doubts as the rest of us have.

Despite taking place in 1964, the play’s timeliness when it comes to views on molestation and sexual assault are as timely as ever. People were outraged when the Vatican let off the priests who were accused of molestation in 2002 with a slap of the wrist, but when Kobe Bryant and the Duke Lacrosse team were accused and later cleared of rape, society rushed to their defense. Jersey sales spiked, and the narrative turned to the males as the victims, the Father Flynns of the world. Doubt serves as a reminder that the reason rape and molestation laws are so strict in today’s society is because of how impossible they were to fight in the patriarchal society that existed before women’s lib and Vatican II. They haven’t improved that much afterwards, either.

More pointed, however, is the fact that even in the Catholic church, which represents the absolute, incontrovertible word of God, there will always be doubt, in the form of human weakness, that can never be overcome. This weakness is not due to original sin, it’s due to the fact that, as Father Flynn himself puts it, certainty, or faith, is an emotion that addresses factual matters. It’s not a new conflict; this struggle affects every religion and every philosophy. But I don’t think this conflict has ever been represented in modern drama with as sure as the one with which Shanley handled it in Doubt.