It is a sort of living death to be surrounded by the ceaseless concern for judgments and action that one does not even desire to change. In fact, since we are alive, I wanted to demonstrate, through the absurd, the… Read More ›
Drama Criticism
Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh
Personally I love it [The Iceman Cometh]! And I’m sure my affection is not wholly inspired by nostalgia for the dear dead days “on the bottom of the sea,” either. I have a confident hunch that this play, as drama,… Read More ›
Analysis of Georges Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear
Farce is tragedy played at about a hundred and twenty revolutions a minute. The story of Othello and the plot of Feydeau’s Puce à l’Oreille have a striking similarity. Desdemona’s lost handkerchief and Victor Emmanuel Chandebise’s missing braces both give… Read More ›
Analysis of Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths
The Lower Depths . . . is a remarkable play for a relatively inexperienced dramatist. It entertained but confronted, challenged and divided the auditorium. The Moscow Arts Theatre and arguably Russian theater were never to be the same again. —Cynthia… Read More ›
Analysis of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles
I know The Heidi Chronicles was a controversial play among many feminists. It was a play where some people thought I had sold out, because she had a baby at the end and I was saying that all women must… Read More ›
Analysis of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage
It has been suggested that in The Hostage Brendan Behan is trying to “open up the stage.” This is an understatement. He would like to hack the stage to bits, crunch the proscenium across his knee, trample the scenery underfoot,… Read More ›
Analysis of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters
Like steam, life can be compressed into a narrow little container, but, also like steam, it will endure pressure only to a certain point. And in Three Sisters, this pressure is brought to the limit, beyond which it will explode—and… Read More ›
Analysis of Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding
Lorca said once that the only hope for happiness lies in “living one’s instinctual life to the full.” Blood Wedding can be understood as a gloss on that belief. In it the poet succeeded in creating a medium that allowed… Read More ›
Analysis of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is in many important respects a “first.” In addition to being the first of Albee’s full-length plays, it is also the first juxtaposition and integration of realism and abstract symbolism in what will remain the… Read More ›
Analysis of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine
One of the things I wanted very much to do, in Cloud Nine . . . was to write a play about sexual politics that would not just be a woman’s thing. I felt there were quite a few women’s… Read More ›
Analysis of Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman
Man and Superman is, of course, one of Shaw’s major plays, though it perhaps achieves that rank from being not one play, but two. Certainly without the long third-act dialogue in Hell, Man and Superman—for all that it dramatizes the… Read More ›
Analysis of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author
“Why not,” I said to myself, “present this highly strange fact of an author who refuses to let some of his characters live though they have been born in his fantasy, and the fact that these characters, having by now… Read More ›
Analysis of the Morality Play Everyman
The great vice of English drama from Kyd to Galsworthy has been its aim of realism was unlimited. In one play, Everyman, and perhaps in that one play only, we have a drama within the limitations of art. . …. Read More ›
Analysis of Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara
Recently I took my children to Major Barbara. Twenty years had passed since I had seen it. They were the most terrific years the world has known. Almost every human institution had undergone decisive change. The landmarks of centuries had… Read More ›
Analysis of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck
The story of a simple soldier who murders his girl in a fit of jealous rage becomes the theme of a tragedy which Büchner wrote during the last months of his life. The play comes to us a fragment without… Read More ›
Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is, perhaps, to this time, the most mature example of a myth of Contemporary life. The chief value of this drama is its attempt to reveal those ultimate meanings which are resident in modern… Read More ›
Analysis of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata
The Lysistrata has behind it much suffering and a burning pity. Aristophanes had more than once risked his civic rights and even his life in his battle for peace, and is now making his last appeal. It is owing to… Read More ›
Analysis of Ben Jonson’s Volpone
Volpone brilliantly exemplifies Jonson’s unique jungle vision, with its self-contained world composed entirely of predators and prey. His contempt for mercenary motivation and capitalistic enterprise is blistering; the commanding indictment of the vicious habits of the new acquisitive society shows… Read More ›
Analysis of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
More than any other play, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus celebrates that God-like power of language, and shows us how words can soar, and tempts us to dizzying heights within our heads. But all the time, Marlowe is in control. He knows… Read More ›
Analysis of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan
The secret of Peter Pan seems to be that it is not merely a children’s entertainment but a great play in its own right, a memorable theatrical experience, differing only in the nature of its appeal to the adult playgoer… Read More ›
You must be logged in to post a comment.