For Count Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806), theater was a fabulous world apart, in which human beings, statues, and animals change places by magical transformations. Gozzi's stage becomes a multiscenic home for adventures, loves, enmities, and dazzling visual effects. This collection brings together for the first time modern English translations of five of Gozzi's most famous plays: " The Raven, The King Stag, Turandot, The Serpent Woman," and "The Green Bird," each annotated by the translators and preceded by the author's preface. Ted Emery's Introduction places Gozzi in his social and historical...

A companion volume to Contradictory characters, this book analyzes the juxtaposition of the tragic and the comic in modern drama.

Providing an interpretation of the modern theatre, this is a new edition of a classic work of drama criticism.

Luigi Pirandello is best known for his ability to create farcical tragedies that pit reality against appearance in such a way that objective truth is never revealed. Time magazine called Pirandello's work a fascinating precursor of the entire theater of the absurd -- the anguish over existence in Sartre and Camus, the guerilla warfare against ossified language and the mass mind in Ionesco, the bleak, alienated vision of Beckett, the sense of man eternally acting a role in Genet, and the use of the stage as a self-contained universe in Pinter. In new translations by acclaimed playwright and...

Contains twelve plays that have been translated into modern English so that everyone can enjoy the fun. Albert Bermel is a well published critic of modern theatre and has received awards and recognition for his work. The twelve plays are: Washtub; Barber of Seville; Boubouroche; Ubo Cocu; Love of Three Oranges; Hey, Cut Out the Parading Around Stark Naked; Police Chief's an Easy Going Guy; Imaginary Invalid; Piggy Bank; Autumn Violins; My Wife's Dead Brother; Professor Taranne.

(Applause Books). Harpagon, the most desperate, scheming miser in literature, starves his servants, declines to pay them, cheats his own children if he can save (or make) a few coins, and when his hoard of gold disappears, insanely accuses himself of being the thief. Dandin, in this rousing classic, not previously available in English for sixty years, is a man in a plight that everybody but him will find entertaining.

In one of Moliere's most popular plays, Scapin, that monarch of con men, puts his store of ingenuity to work, getting two lovesick young men married to the girls they pine for and, along the way, taking revenge on their grasping old fathers. Closed down after its first, highly successful run because of opposition from powerful enemies of the playwright, Don Juan was performed in a bowdlerized version for almost two hundred years, until actors, directors and critics restored the original text, recognizing it as the most ambitious and mightiest of Moliere's prose plays. Bermel's translations of...

(Applause Books). "Love? What does love mean in this fearsome drama? Not much that is affirmative. Not much to heat the heart of a sentimental spectator. It signifies a passion that amounts to illness, an alternately aching and frantic desire that cannot be slaked. The three characters who love strive to conquer love by straining their will power to its elastic limits. And what does loved mean here? Not the ecstasy of glowing with selflessness and basking in another's affection, but a tormenting burden that cannot be shaken off, can only be readjusted to serve as an instrument of convenience...

(Applause Books). These are the best of Moliere's masterful one-acts, blending broad farce and pointed wit to express his never-ending delight in human foibles. But Moliere is more than just the "master of the laugh," for behind the comic gestures of these matchless rogues, tight-fisted masters, possessive lovers and elegant ladies lurk fears, insecurities and their consequences. Includes: The Jealous Husband, The Flying Doctor, Two Precious Maidens Ridiculed, The Imaginary Cuckold, The Rehearsal at Versailles, The Forced Marriage, The Seductive Mistress.