Synopsis
In this landmark work, Eric Bentley focuses on the playwright, not merely its a supplier of words to indicate a situation or to precipitate action, but rather as the crafter or auteur of the whole drama. In a notorious foreword (suppressed by the author for over forty years, since critics tended to review it instead of the book), Bentley reads last rites over the postwar Broadway theater.
Surveying a period of over one hundred and fifty years, he provides an entertaining, perceptive intellectual history of Europe, a history personified by playwrights and thinkers: Goethe, Schiller, Wagner. Strindberg, Ibsen, Pirandello, Sartre, Brecht.
As witty and contentious as when it was first published, The Playwright as Thinker now stands out more incontestably than ever for what it is: it classic that both prophesied and helped bring about the transformation of American theater. After four decades of nearly continuous publication, HBJ is proud to issue the definitive version of Bentley's original text, complete with foreword, plus a new afterword by the author and an appreciative introduction by the distinguished critic Richard Gilman.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
