(Applause Books). Including Antoin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, E. Gordon Craig, Luigi Pirandello, Konstantin Stanislavsky, W. B. Yeats, and Emile Zolaing.

Eric Bentley's masterful look at George Bernard Shaw was first published over 50 years ago, and time has only strengthened the conviction of his ideas and arguments about shaw. Bentley's success is in reconsidering shaw in the wake of the vast reams of critical analysis and social history compiled about Shaw in the last century. He looks at shaw through the three lenses of politics, religion and drama, and provides the most illuminating study ever to have been written of shaw's beliefs, his method and his meaning.

For two actors (one male, one female) or more.

Called "the theater conscience of our times," Eric Bentley has been both a leading critic and a playwright. "Rallying Cries" presents three of his best known works: "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, " successfully staged around the world and on television; "The Recantation of Galileo Galilei;" and the controversial "From the Memoirs of Pontius Pilate, " a work initially rejected as insufficiently Christian by its commissioning theater but then successfully produced in New York at the Actors Studio and American Jewish Theater.

Full Length, Drama w/music / 18m, 5f, extras /Int./5 Exts.This German play was written in 1939 and was first produced in Zurich in 1941. In America, it was published in English right away (1941, by New Directions) but did not reach Broadway till 1963 - in a memorable production directed by Jerome Robbins and starring Anne Bancroft. It had, of course, by that time been produced to much acclaim all over the world.When Bertolt Brecht directed the play in Munich (1950), Eric Bentley, Assistant Director, at his bidding started to translate the play into English. He was eventually to make several...

First published in 1946, The Playwright as Thinker is a classic work of drama criticism that helped create the intellectual environment in which serious American theater would thrive in the second half of the twentieth century. At the time of publishing, most drama critics believed dramatic art deserved no intellectual status; Eric Bentley set out to prove them wrong. Focusing on the canonic playwrights Strindberg, Ibsen, Pirandello, Sartre, and Brecht, Bentley viewed the playwright as thinker, and his survey of over 150 years of dramatic art provided, in essence, an intellectual...

Brecht presents the vivid and changing scene of Hitler's war machine. There is a worker who only mumbles "Heil Hitlers" and a S.A. man whose suspicion of him is enough to mark him for life. There is an assaulted Jew who did no wrong and a judge who has a tragic inclination to be just. There are a mother and father who have good cause to fear that their son has informed on them. The war machine moves across Europe, bringing ruin and misery everywhere.

Eric Bentley's gay adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's LA RONDE set in 1970's New York. "This masterly transposition of the gaiety of Schnitzler's Vienna into the tragic-comic gay life of New York shows us the foibles of our universal search beyond the thrill of encounter, towards the vision of pure love. So many-faceted that everyone will laugh a little, and identify a little. And there's sure to be controversy among those who insist on an entirely uncritical picture of the gay community. And yet not one of the characters is without deep human sympathies; by an author who has dare to write,...

Eric Bentley's adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's classic LA RONDE. "This seems to be Arthur Schnitzler's year in the English-speaking world. In THE BLUE ROOM, we saw all of Nicole Kidman ... in a daring adaptation of one of his most dazzling works for the stage, REIGEN (LA RONDE, ROUND ONE). Ten couples pair up for the ultimate pleasure. One of each continuing with a different partner until in the last scene the prostitute, who has appeared in the first sketch, appears once more." -Peter Gay, The New York Times Book Review "The original play, REIGEN, was kept from the general public by...