Items related to Broken Glass (Modern Classics)
'Broken Glass is a brave, bighearted attempt by one of the pathfinders of postwar drama to look at the tangle of evasions and hostilities by which the soul contrives to hide its emptiness from itself.' John Lahr (The New Yorker)
Brooklyn, 1938: Sylvia Gellburg is stricken by a mysterious paralysis in her legs for which the doctor can find no cause. He soon realizes that she is obsessed by the devastating news from Germany, where government thugs have begun smashing Jewish stores. But this experience is intermeshed with what he learns is her strange relationship with her husband Philip. When the two seemingly unrelated situations concatenate, a tragic flare of light opens on the age.
'His strongest play for many years, a gripping and at times powerfully affecting drama. As almost always in his work, it balances private lives with public morality...It is also an amazingly full-blooded piece, bursting with pain and passion.' (Charles Spencer Daily Telegraph)
Brooklyn, 1938: Sylvia Gellburg is stricken by a mysterious paralysis in her legs for which the doctor can find no cause. He soon realizes that she is obsessed by the devastating news from Germany, where government thugs have begun smashing Jewish stores. But this experience is intermeshed with what he learns is her strange relationship with her husband Philip. When the two seemingly unrelated situations concatenate, a tragic flare of light opens on the age.
'His strongest play for many years, a gripping and at times powerfully affecting drama. As almost always in his work, it balances private lives with public morality...It is also an amazingly full-blooded piece, bursting with pain and passion.' (Charles Spencer Daily Telegraph)
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review:
'What a fascinating play this is.'
- Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard, 11.10.2010
'A late masterpiece from Arthur Miller, written in 1994 when he was 79, it takes two mighty strands, anti-Semitism and sexual neurosis, and weaves them into a beguiling, unsettling whole.'
- Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard, 11.10.2010
'Once the issue of the Gellburgs' (lack of) sexual relations is thrown in, Miller craftily sets us wondering which one of Phillip or Sylvia is actually the more disturbed.'
- Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard, 11.10.2010
'The"broken glass" of the title of Arthur Miller's 1994 play refers in part to the shattered window panes of Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany. But the title has other resonances, too. Glass, once splintered, cannot be put back together. Running through the play is the question of whether something badly broken can ever be repaired: a marriage, an identity, a country. Miller ties the personal and the political together, as a Jewish couple living in 1930s New York react to the increasingly virulent anti-Semitism in Germany in different ways.'
- Sarah Hemming, Financial Times, 09.10.10
'Miller mixes the personal with the political with incredible skill. He places ideas about identity, assimilation, self-hate and self-acceptance into a story that grips like a thriller.'
- Dominic Maxwell, The Times, 08.10.10
'Can a distant atrocity affect a person so much they become paralysed? Arthur Miller's 1994 psycho-sexual drama ponders this question as Sylvia, a middle-aged Jewish woman in 1930s Brooklyn, is stricken with paralysis just as Hitler's brownshirts are rampaging in Germany.'
- Claire Allfree, Metro (London), 12.10.10
'Miller wrote this lugubrious, complex play in 1994, but he remembered the inter-war years, and the casual references to American anti-Semitism are more shocking than Sylvia's wasted life or Philip's curdled feelings for his people.'
- Nina Caplan, Time Out (London), 14.10.10
'Arthur Miller's only full-length play to deal with his own and every other Jew's Jewishness'
- John Nathan, Jewish Chronicle, 15.10.10
'It's a simple tale of marital grief. An American Jewish woman [...], hearing of the Kristallnacht atrocities, has become paralysed from the waist down. The quest for a cure takes her and husband, Philip Gellberg, to the deepest and darkest vaults of their stagnant marriage. Gellberg is one of Miller's great creations. An ambitious and capable financier, he has vaulted Wall Street's invisible barriers of prejudice and become second-in-command at a venerable old bank. But he remains pathetically grateful to the anti-Semites who employ him. He boasts, with genuine pride, that he's the first Jew to set foot on his boss's yacht. Yet he hates himself. He loathes his Semitic face and the suspicion it arouses among his colleagues.'
- Lloyd Evans, Spectator, 16.10.10
'its ambiguities are haunting'
- Jane Edwards, Sunday Times, 17.10.10
'The lesson the couple learns, though tragically too late, is to rise above incapacitating fear and guilt.' --- Kate Bassett, Independent on Sunday, 17.10.10
From the Back Cover:
- Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard, 11.10.2010
'A late masterpiece from Arthur Miller, written in 1994 when he was 79, it takes two mighty strands, anti-Semitism and sexual neurosis, and weaves them into a beguiling, unsettling whole.'
- Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard, 11.10.2010
'Once the issue of the Gellburgs' (lack of) sexual relations is thrown in, Miller craftily sets us wondering which one of Phillip or Sylvia is actually the more disturbed.'
- Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard, 11.10.2010
'The"broken glass" of the title of Arthur Miller's 1994 play refers in part to the shattered window panes of Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany. But the title has other resonances, too. Glass, once splintered, cannot be put back together. Running through the play is the question of whether something badly broken can ever be repaired: a marriage, an identity, a country. Miller ties the personal and the political together, as a Jewish couple living in 1930s New York react to the increasingly virulent anti-Semitism in Germany in different ways.'
- Sarah Hemming, Financial Times, 09.10.10
'Miller mixes the personal with the political with incredible skill. He places ideas about identity, assimilation, self-hate and self-acceptance into a story that grips like a thriller.'
- Dominic Maxwell, The Times, 08.10.10
'Can a distant atrocity affect a person so much they become paralysed? Arthur Miller's 1994 psycho-sexual drama ponders this question as Sylvia, a middle-aged Jewish woman in 1930s Brooklyn, is stricken with paralysis just as Hitler's brownshirts are rampaging in Germany.'
- Claire Allfree, Metro (London), 12.10.10
'Miller wrote this lugubrious, complex play in 1994, but he remembered the inter-war years, and the casual references to American anti-Semitism are more shocking than Sylvia's wasted life or Philip's curdled feelings for his people.'
- Nina Caplan, Time Out (London), 14.10.10
'Arthur Miller's only full-length play to deal with his own and every other Jew's Jewishness'
- John Nathan, Jewish Chronicle, 15.10.10
'It's a simple tale of marital grief. An American Jewish woman [...], hearing of the Kristallnacht atrocities, has become paralysed from the waist down. The quest for a cure takes her and husband, Philip Gellberg, to the deepest and darkest vaults of their stagnant marriage. Gellberg is one of Miller's great creations. An ambitious and capable financier, he has vaulted Wall Street's invisible barriers of prejudice and become second-in-command at a venerable old bank. But he remains pathetically grateful to the anti-Semites who employ him. He boasts, with genuine pride, that he's the first Jew to set foot on his boss's yacht. Yet he hates himself. He loathes his Semitic face and the suspicion it arouses among his colleagues.'
- Lloyd Evans, Spectator, 16.10.10
'its ambiguities are haunting'
- Jane Edwards, Sunday Times, 17.10.10
'The lesson the couple learns, though tragically too late, is to rise above incapacitating fear and guilt.' --- Kate Bassett, Independent on Sunday, 17.10.10
It's the late 1930s in New York. Phillip Gellburg is an executive and the only Jew among the WASPs at a very Establishment Wall Street bank. His wife, Sylvia, is obsessed with news of Nazi Germany. After seeing a photo of old Jewish men forced to scrub the sidewalk with toothbrushes, she becomes mysteriously paralyzed in the legs. The only one who perceives Sylvia's fears and longings is Dr. Hyman - a man as passionate and empathetic as Phillip is repressed. Miller's resonant and intriguing new play is about sexual awakening, the consequences of denial, and the toll that social injustice takes on an individual. This is an extraordinarily powerful drama from America's foremost playwright.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherMethuen Drama
- Publication date2017
- ISBN 10 147426073X
- ISBN 13 9781474260732
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages96
- Rating
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