Death of a Salesman, for instance, appears on so many required reading lists that most Americans might think they know it by heart from their schooldays. Exciting to theatregoers who experience them for the first time, the trio's major plays can still grab audience members who've seen them before their rich, complex textures always offer new revelations.

In the first place, obviously, they're great. Why have America's Three Greats suddenly made such a triumphant comeback at the end of what's often been called 'the American century?' The answer has many parts.

And two blocks farther north, lighting up the long-vacant Circle in the Square, sits the most surprising Broadway success of them all: Not About Nightingales, a previously unperformed Tennessee Williams work that more than one reviewer has called the season's best new play. One block up, Miller's 1949 classic Death of a Salesman glows anew in a production shipped east from Chicago's Goodman Theatre, with Brian Dennehy, Elizabeth Franz and Kevin Anderson heading the cast (although the Eugene O'Neill Theatre's marquee seems to give Iceman's author top billing, as if his spirit somehow presided over Miller's mordant drama). A revival of O'Neill's lengthy, somber 1946 saloon drama, The Iceman Cometh, transported from London but with a largely American cast, has taken over the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Yet all three are, once again, the toast of Broadway. But Williams has been dead for 16 years, O'Neill for 46. Morgan both premiered Off-Broadway in 1998. Peters' Connections and The Ride Down Mt. Miller, at 81, is still healthy and productive-two recent plays, Mr. Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller: The three giants of American playwriting are already enshrined in the theatre history textbooks.

Terror on Tape by James O'Neill