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 ›
Man and Superman Essay
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 ›
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