(Photo: Carol Rosegg/Courtesy of New York Theatre Workshop)

7. The Nightmare Scene in Will Power’s ‘The Seven’
Many were dubious when New York Theatre Workshop announced that playwright/MC Will Power would rewrite Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes in an all-rhyming hip-hop treatment, complete with onstage D.J. and crew of rapper-dancers. Any suspicions about the unlikely marriage of street poetry and Greek tragedy were banished when one of Oedipus’s sons described a nightmare about being choked by his father, who was being choked by his father: “And all the mack daddys back to the beginning of time / Choking each other on the family line / And my daddy starts to look small / His curse just a piece of it all.” The relentless rhyme scheme established Power—unlikely as his style might be—as the most exciting verse playwright in America.