#2. Journey's End
by R. C. Sherriff
A small band of British officers are jammed together in a dugout in the front-line trenches during World War I, awaiting orders to launch a fruitless, and very possibly suicidal, raid on the German lines. Sherriff's 1928 play has long been regarded as an antiwar statement. Yet it's also a sympathetic portrait of the quietly heroic men who must face (because they have no choice) the ordinariness and utter incomprehensibility of war. David Grindley's beautifully sober, understated (and sadly short-lived) Broadway production left you limp.