MOBIUS: Ich bin Salomo. Ich bin der arme Konig Salomo. Einst war ich unermeBlich reich, weise und gottesfurchtig. Ob meiner Macht erzitterten die Gewaltigen. Ich war ein Furst des Friedens und der Gerechtigkeit. Aber meine Weisheit zerstorte meine Gottesfurcht, und als ich Gott nicht mehr furchtete, zerstorte meine Weisheit meinen Reichtum. Nun sind die Stadte tot, uber die ich regierte, mein Reich leer, das mir anvertraut worden war, eine blauschimmernde Wuse, und, irgendwo, um einen kleinen, gelben, namenlosen Stern, kreist, sinnlos, immerzue, die radioaktive Erde. Ich bin Salomo, ich bin...

Set in a small town in Switzerland, The Pledge centers around the murder of a young girl and the detective who promises the victim's mother he will find the perpetrator. After deciding the wrong man has been arrested for the crime, the detective lays a trap for the real killer--with all the patience of a master fisherman. But cruel turns of plot conspire to make him pay dearly for his pledge. Here Friedrich Durrenmatt conveys his brilliant ear for dialogue and a devastating sense of timing and suspense. Joel Agee's skilled translation effectively captures the various voices in the...

This volume offers bracing new translations of two precursors to the modern detective novel by Friedrich Durrenmatt, whose genre-bending mysteries recall the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and anticipate the postmodern fictions of Paul Auster and other contemporary neo-noir novelists. Both mysteries follow Inspector Barlach as he moves through worlds in which the distinction between crime and justice seems to have vanished. In The Judge and His Hangman, Barlach forgoes the arrest of a murderer in order to manipulate him into killing another, more elusive criminal. And in Suspicion,...

In Friedrich Durrenmatt's experimental thriller The Assignment, the wife of a psychiatrist has been raped and killed near a desert ruin in North Africa. Her husband hires a woman named F. to reconstruct the unsolved crime in a documentary film. F. is soon unwittingly thrust into a paranoid world of international espionage where everyone is watched--including the watchers. After discovering a recent photograph of the supposed murder victim happily reunited with her husband, F. becomes trapped in an apocalyptic landscape riddled with political intrigue, crimes of mistaken identity, and...

Melodrama / Characters: 16 male, 4 female

Scenic Requirements: Interior

The scene is a madhouse and the focus is on three inmates who are nuclear physicists. One thinks he is Newton and another, Einstein. The third has visitations from Solomon. They appear to be nice, likeable lunatics, but nothing is as simple as it seems. Are they really mad? Or are they playing some murderous game with the world as the stake? Who is earnest and who is the spy? Gradually we learn that each has been led down the path to moral destruction, past the signposts of truth, the purity of science, and personal...

"The Physicists" is a provocative and darkly comic satire about life in modern times, by one of Europe s foremost dramatists and the author of the internationally celebrated "The Visit." The world s greatest physicist, Johann Wilhelm Mobius, is in a madhouse, haunted by recurring visions of King Solomon. He is kept company by two other equally deluded scientists: one who thinks he is Einstein, the other who believes he is Newton. It soon becomes evident, however, that these three are not as harmlessly lunatic as they appear. Are they, in fact, really mad? Or are they playing some murderous...