STAGE LIGHTS COME up on a two-story building on a New Orleans street. The music of a “blue piano” can be heard. Then the audience, listening intently, hears the iconic first words of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire: “Hey, there! Stella, Baby!” Think you know how other great playwrights have broken the silence? Take a brief intermission to identify these opening lines from favorite plays.
1. One out, a man on, bottom of the seventh, two balls, no strikes.
2. How beautiful is the princess Salome tonight?
3. Ismene, dear sister, you would think that we had already suffered enough for the curse on Oedipus.
4. Hide the Christmas tree away carefully, Helene. The children mustn’t see it till this evening when it’s decorated.
5. Yes, I have tricks in my pocket. I have things up my sleeve.
6. Nothing to be done.
7. Would that the Argo had never winged its way to the land of Colchis through the dark-blue Symplegades!
8. She’ll live.
ANSWERS
1. Neil Simon, Brighton Beach Memoirs (1982).
2. Oscar Wilde, Salome (1894).
3. Sophocles, Antigone (c. 441 BCE).
4. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (1879).
5. Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (1945).
6. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953).
7. Euripides, Medea (431 BCE).
8. William Gibson, The Miracle Worker (1961).