In this column, once and hopefully twice a month, I hope to bring to your attention not just issues and developments affecting today’s playwrights, but issues and plays of the past that are worth reconsidering. As a matter of habit by now, I read a full-length play every day — have done since I was in college — and I keep getting drawn back to that which I found on library shelves when I was very, very young. Much of it remains as vivid, worthwhile and instructive as it is generally unknown.

But don’t just take my word for it. The great acting coach Stella Adler went on a tear before her students in 1983; a rant that fortunately was recorded and transcribed. Admittedly, she was already in a bit of a state as the news had just broken that the great Tennessee Williams was found dead in a Manhattan hotel, asphyxiated by the plastic cap of a pill bottle. But even had she been under less fraught emotional circumstances, she certainly had a case. Here are some excerpts, as recounted in Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights, Barry Paris, ed. (New York: Knopf):

There was a man called Maxwell Anderson. He was a very important influence in America, our first to write verse plays since Schiller. I’m going to mention these names to you because I’m terribly hurt: Robert Sherwood wrote magnificent plays. Paul Green was one of this country’s great writers. He was influential in making the black-and-white race situation clear. You know more about Turgenev than you know about Paul Green!

She goes on to list over a dozen playwrights who all had their day prior to 1960. Then she gets to the heart of the matter:

I’m scolding you because these are writers who spent a lifetime writing plays….They are forgotten, unknown, unplayed….There is all this work that you think is just old ‘show business.’ It’s not show business but art business.

This is the only country that discards its own writers.

From time to time here, I’d like to strike a blow for pulling some writers of the past out of the ash bin where — if history holds — many of you will end up hereafter, let’s face it. It’s not a fate you welcome, nor is it one the great craftspersons of the past should enjoy.

For starters, I am today recommending six pre-1960 works of the hundreds I’ve read just in the last year. They’re not just enjoyable and revivable, but also I think they can speak to your needs as a vital working writer today. I hope I can interest you enough to seek some or all of them out.

Incidentally, it’s a reflection of the mores of the past that all but one were written by Caucasian men, and that one a husband-wife collaboration. Stella herself only named three women on her list out of 19. In an upcoming column I will be highlighting notable pre-1960 works of women and people of color. There were plenty! But I don’t want to delay discussing the following ones alphabetically listed, which are more mainstream but no less deserving of attention.

Bell, Book and Candle by John van Druten (1950). Witches and warlocks in Manhattan, scoped out by a skeptical urbane publisher. Sounds like high-concept cheese, but in the right hands it plays beautifully as a sinister, subversive take on ’50s subcultures, notably religious cults and the oh-so-secret gay night life, pre-Stonewall. In my case, the right hands were those of Darko Tresnjak at San Diego’s Old Globe, who set it in the round in a blood-red conversation pit (just what the stylish witch might commission for herself!), surrounded by a walkway decorated like the black-and-white New York skyline. When the characters stepped into Gillian’s parlor, the stage was set for a sexy, suspenseful meeting of very different minds. Totally captivating, and funny as well.

Who should read it: Certainly anyone writing about pre-1960s American life needs some evidence that it wasn’t all Ozzie and Harriet white-bread Americana. And even without that stunning production I saw, van Druten demonstrates that there can be more to a five-character so-called “romantic comedy” than meets the eye. For more evidence, check out van Druten’s 1,600-performance smash The Voice of the Turtle; a story of sex between a secretary and a GI on leave that sticks its foot in the door of grownup playwriting, which Streetcar and Death of a Salesman would later kick right open.

Dodsworth by Sidney Howard (1934). Adapted from Sinclair Lewis’ satire of “ugly Americans” abroad, it was a Broadway smash that became an even bigger hit film in ’36. Stodgy, plain-spoken auto magnate Sam Dodsworth takes early retirement at the urging of his long-suffering, coquettish wife Fran, who drags him off on a Cook’s Tour of Europe ostensibly to broaden their horizons. Actually, she’s hoping to recapture her romantic youth which she sacrificed, as she sees it, on the altar of stifling conventionality. Vanity and desperation propel her into several disastrous affairs with designing Europeans, while a lonely Sam wonders why his life’s inventory now comes up so barren. One ends up failing to face up to reality, while the other embraces it.

Who should read it: It’s a big three-act play, completely absorbing and thematically-sharp, ripe for revival by some enterprising company. If you’re looking to adapt a novel — particularly a novel with a wide scope and many characters — Howard will reward you not just with inspiration (he did, after all, provide the framework to make Gone with the Wind manageable), but with 60 pages of preface by him and Lewis on the art of adaptation. For even more food for thought, try the Pulitzer winner of 1957, Look Homeward, Angel by Ketti Frings out of Thomas Wolfe. Forgotten today, and unjustly.

The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (1928). Keeps getting trotted out (and applauded) in production; three movie versions and two all-star revivals, the most recent with Nathan Lane as the hard-bitten Chicago editor who’s trying to exploit the next day’s hanging of a timid anarchist for a murder he didn’t commit, while keeping his star reporter from throwing in the newspaper racket and getting married in the same tight time frame. Unless you sit down and read it, though, it’s hard to appreciate the tightness of the plotting and the hilarity of the dialogue. The Brits discovered it as a treasured classic even before we did.

Who should read it: Any playwright who has a notion of setting a story among a group of people who act heedlessly and talk very fast and over each other. Alternatively, any playwright who’s been told his story or his characters are “too slow.” Watch His Girl Friday — by far the best screen version — then read the stage play, and you’re practically sure to have your next day’s dialogue come tearing out of your fingers into the computer.

The Petrified Forest by Robert E. Sherwood (1935). A run-down, family-owned filling station and greasy spoon on the Arizona desert’s edge is a magnet only for dipsos, lost tourists and on-the-lam desperadoes. But playwright Sherwood — a respected, articulate liberal voice of his day — sees the titular wasteland as a metaphor for post-world war anomie. We know this because his mouthpiece, vagrant Alan Squier, described in the stage directions as “shabby and dusty” but with “a sort of afterglow of elegance,” clocks the desert as “the graveyard of the civilization that’s been shot from under us. It’s the world of outmoded ideas. Platonism—patriotism—Christianity—romance—the economics of Adam Smith—they’re all so many dead stumps in the desert.” Alan Squier, folks, making America desiccated again, and in the world-weary tones of Leslie Howard on film, yet. However, he’ll have a Sydney-Carton-redemption moment to benefit dreamy Gabby Maple (Bette Davis in the movie), when the notorious Duke Mantee (Humphrey Bogart’s breakthrough role) shows up with gang and ordnance in tow. Suspenseful as all get-out, the play deftly mixes comic moments with a tragic sense that a world is somehow coming to an end, a troublingly uncertain future before it.

Who should read it: Those who want first-hand evidence that even genre pieces can admit strong thematic content. Also, and even more so than The Front Page, it demonstrates that a writer can give every member of a large cast plenty to chew on.

Rashomon by Fay and Michael Kanin (1959). A movie classic adapted for the stage is ordinarily something to be very cautious about. But this one is of a different order than most: It’s very respectful of — without being slavish to — its source, which lays out the hugely different points of view on a rape and murder as related by the bandit Tajomaru, a woodcutter, a wife and her Samurai husband. (Though a corpse, he gets to throw in his two cents by way of a medium). Not only does the play not sentimentalize Kurosawa, it may be even tougher; especially in handling the climactic discovery of the abandoned squalling baby who’s there to remind us that life goes on.

Who should read it: What’s really impressive — and this alone makes this script well worth visiting — are the extensive stage directions, which offer striking detail while at the same time staying in touch with character and theme. Here’s a sample I randomly found:

The Husband sits, tied to the bamboo stump—his face tense and pale, his eyes tightly shut. Tajomaru is leaning against a tree, gulping wine from a small goatskin. He has evidently had enough to be boisterous—and dangerous. As he drinks, some of the wine spills down his bare chest and spatters his garment. He wipes his mouth with a hairy forearm, taking a few steps in the direction of the Wife.

I maintain that the vigor and specificity of that prose aids not just the director, but the designers, actors, and dramaturge alike. (Even a non-hairy actor can pick up a clue from that “hairy forearm” as he conveys both boisterousness and danger). The published text is replete with pointed and evocative language like that, conveying what’s supposed to happen during lengthy passages of wordless, complex action. If you want some assurance that the behavior exhibited on stage will be true to your intention, this is a script you should know.

They Knew What They Wanted by Sidney Howard (1924). This always struck me as one of the most beautiful, mysterious titles ever; not to mention allusion to the key to the art form’s secret. What is drama, after all, if not characters going after what they want? In simple, one-dimensional action, they get it or they don’t. But from Oedipus Rex to Hamlet and King Lear and beyond, real drama occurs when the characters think they know what they want — knowledge, revenge, a comfortable retirement — and end up realizing that what they truly coveted was something very different. Hell, even John McClane thinks he wants to wipe out the terrorists, only to discover his real objective was to win back his wife. (Which reminds me, Die Hard is definitely a Christmas movie, because it’s all about Holly. J/k).

Anyway, Howard’s touching, raucous Pulitzer Prize winner and huge 1924 hit has been overshadowed by Frank Loesser’s operatic transformation into The Most Happy Fella, but it deserves its own reconsideration. There’s much that’s contemporary; in fact, the plot hinges on an early variation on catfishing, as elderly Italian Napa vineyard mogul Tony coerces young San Franciscan Amy to marry him by sending her the photo of his virile foreman, Joe. Howard admits a lot of sophisticated dialectic, as when Tony, Joe, the stubborn parish priest and cynical local doctor debate the need for, and likelihood of, socialist revolution in America. Some of the attitudes are as old as the hills, and Tony’s wattsa-matta-you dialect needs toning down. But it’s hard not to be impressed when the cowhand acknowledges admiration for Amy’s “a-havin’ a helluva hard life for a girl, an’ if she come through straight like she did, well, there ain’t no credit due nobody but just only herself, and that’s a fact.”

Who should read it: Everybody, but especially those whom Stella was hectoring; those who think there’s nothing robust to be found in, and nothing fresh to be learned from, the American dramatic past. Like all the works on this list, this play is solid. And that’s a fact.