Tynan's Anger: Characters of the Decade - Part Three: The Top 10 Original Characters in English-Language Drama This Decade: Nos. 10-6

Each month, I will be unrolling a top 10 list regarding English-language drama this decade. Last month, I revealed the best lines from English-language plays this decade [Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]. This month, I will be unveiling the best characters to emerge in Engish-language drama this decade. Because of the complications of such a list; I have broken it into three categories

Original Characters
Historical Characters (a.k.a. characters based on real life people)
Reinterpreted characters: Characters Who Are Fictional But Have Appeared in Other Plays or Media Previously.

On Monday, I listed the Top 5 Reinterpreted Characters in English-Language Drama This Decade. Yesterday, I continued with the top 5 historical characters of the decade. Today, I will begin the countdown of the Best Original Characters, going from #10 to #6.

Laurence (Shining City, Conor MacPherson). Therapy is always an exceedingly dangerous area for playwrights to cover; it can so easily fall into a playwright's own self-absorption that most New York playwrights don't even bother trying. In the case of MacPherson's Dublin, however, the social stigma that afflicts therapy outside of New York City is still visibly present, and while the guilt-ridden Laurence admits his need for it, he feels the stigma as well. In MacPherson world, Laurence is the lynch pin between modern psychotherapy and the old Irish ghost story, where facing your personal demons can be as terrifying as facing demons straight out of hell. Laurence's unassuming ability to grasp this concept made him one of the most endearing characters we've seen all decade, and one who, in a perfect world, would be a role model for fighting psychotherapy's stigmatization outside the theater universe.

Matt (Red Light Winter, Adam Rapp) You won't find that many Angry Young Man in today's drama. You’re more likely to find plays like Red Light Winter, an excellent, Pulitzer Prize-nominated work by Adam Rapp that outlines quite clearly the problems with the modern approach to masculinity. In previous generations, characters like Matt would be the ones raging against a corrupt social. After these playwrights were fooled once in the 60s, and fooled again in the 90s, dealing with a corrupt society has turned would-be culture warriors into neurotic messes. On the other hand we have Davis, Matt's megalomaniacal best friend who cheats on the wife he has pilfered from Matt, treats everyone he meets as an object. In previous generations, Davis would be stuffing Matt into a locker. Today, Matt envies Davis' style, but secretly abhors everything about the way he thinks. Matt is the most vivid portrayal as the modern young man theater has produced this decade; he's Jimmy Porter with a self-inflicted castration.

Eleanor (Rock 'n' Roll, Tom Stoppard). In Stoppard's vision of Cambridge and Prague in 1968, a world where politics, philosophy, music, history, and attitude all combine in one sordid mess, Eleanor is the smartest one in the room. She's cynical enough to know when she's being threatened ("Lenka, don’t try to shag my husband until I’m dead or I’ll stick The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance up your rancid cunt, there’s a dear.”), but also one most grounded in the basic thrust of humanity ("Don’t you dare, Max—don’t you dare reclaim that word now, I don’t want your mind; which you can make out of beer cans. Don’t bring it to my funeral. I want your grieving soul or nothing. I do not want your amazing biological machine—I want what you love me with.") There were a handful of characters make me laugh and cry with a statement cut on a dime; Eleanor, dying of cancer, was the only one of those characters at peace with herself.

Lincoln and Booth (Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks). If August Wilson brought the African American experience its Death of a Salesman with Fences, Suzan-Lori Parks brought that world its American Buffalo and its True West in one play taking the Mamet world of con artistry and Shephard's brother-on-brother power struggle into an area no white playwright could bring it without resorting to stereotypes. With a sense of verbal rhythm on par with Mamet, a mysticism on par with Shephard, and a social conscious that may have even surpassed both, Parks connected the con to the culture of the present day, linked it to our nation's history (the brothers' names imply exactly what they are meant to imply), and, by my guess, the highly-coveted Universal Human Condition. By putting con artistry in both the real world its most basic theatrical form, Parks may have out-Mameted Mamet.

Katurian Katurian (The Pillowman, Martin McDonagh). Upon visiting Soviet Czechoslovakia, Philip Roth once said, "It occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters” (a sentiment Tom Stoppard has echoed). In the nameless totalitarian regime Katurian lives in, it's easy to see why. Katurian doesn't write for personal fame; of his hundreds of stories, only one has been published. Nor does he write for a social cause; there's no current events within the Pillowman universe for him to fight against. Instead, Katurian writes simply because he has to; there's something inside his private world that brings his instinct as a writer out of him, even if it takes the form of deeply disturbing stories about murdering children. The only thing that matters to Katurian is that his work is preserved; it's more important than a book deal, his brother, or his own life. The last to be completed work of McDonagh's famed wave of creativity, all Katurian wanted was a voice in a world not inclined to give him one; it helped that he, like McDonagh, was a fantastic writer. In fact, in debating whether this list was worth it, or whether it was a kind of pointless waste of time, Katurian's plight was exactly what convinced me to go ahead with it. Katurian would have given up everything to have the kind of freedom a blog provides. Of course, if he did have it, there'd be no Pillowman.