Few authors have had such a dramatic effect as Bertolt Brecht. His work has helped to shape a generation of writers, theatergoers, and thinkers. His plays are studied worldwide as texts that changed the face of theater.The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a para
In 1952, Hannah Arendt hailed Bertolt Brecht as "beyond a doubt the greatest living German poet and possibly the greatest living European playwright." His plays, widely taught and studied, are searing critiques of civilizations run amok.During the thirtie
This special one-volume edition features five great plays by one of the most celebrated and fascinating dramatists of the twentieth century.Pirandello, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1934, was the playwright par excellence of the conflict between illusion and
Spring's Awakening is a tragi-comedy of teenage sex. Its fourteen-year-old heroine, Wendla, is killed by abortion pills. The young Moritz, terrorized by the world around him, and especially by his teachers, shoots himself. The ending seems likely to be th
1898. Most of Shaw's early plays were either banned by the censor or refused production. With Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant he sought a reading audience. He also began the practice of writing the challenging, mocking, eloquent prefaces to his plays, whic
BAAL, which renowned playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) wrote when he was in college, is the provocative story of a drunken, ruthless, womanizing poet and singer, a desperate antihero in the tradition of Villon and Rimbaud. The NEW YORK TIMES called th
No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over lit
