Eric Bentley

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First published in 1967 The Theatre of Commitment presents miscellaneous collection of seven essays written over fifteen years. Eric Bentley deals with themes like is the drama an extinct species; the American drama; what is theatre; the pro and con of political theatre; letter to a would-be playwright and the theatre of commitment. For most people, theatre of commitment is political theater, though Bentley indicates that the word commitment is broad enough to embrace the work of any serious writer even if the commitment is to non-commitment. This is an interesting read for students of theatre and performance studies.

First published in 1967 The Theatre of Commitment presents miscellaneous collection of seven essays written over fifteen years. Eric Bentley deals with themes like is the drama an extinct species; the American drama; what is theatre; the pro and con of political theatre; letter to a would-be playwright and the theatre of commitment. For most people, theatre of commitment is political theater, though Bentley indicates that the word commitment is broad enough to embrace the work of any serious writer even if the commitment is to non-commitment. This is an interesting read for students of theatre and performance studies.

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.

Drama / Characters: 14 male, 4 female Sacrificed to powers larger than himself, Woyzeck is one of drama's first anti-heroes. He serves a German captain and makes money by allowing a doctor to experiment on him, but his deeper morality leads him to a tragic end.

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 history of Europe. This edition not only contains the original, long-suppressed foreword, in which Bentley lambastes the climate of Broadway at the time, but also the author's 1987 afterword.

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 D

Translated and adapted by Eric Bentley Music by Arnold Black, William Bolcom, Lucas Mason, and Peter Winkler Flexible casting, 1m., 1f. or expanded to more actors as needed /Musical Revue A first draft of this entertainment was produced at The Ballroom in New York City in 1994, starring Alvin Epstein and directed by Isaiah Sheffer. Howard Kissel, Daily News, commented: "Bentley's pungent translations of Wedekind's lyrics have been set deftly by three composers, Arnold Black, William Bolcom and Peter Winkler... Tingle Tangle [as the work was then called] is well performed and invariably fascinating." For the Wedekind renaissance of the 21st century Eric Bentley has re-arranged the material and added to it. The piece now consists of two cabaret programs which could be performed together in one long evening or separately. The first program is framed by two Bentley ballads telling the stories of Spring's Awakening and The First Lulu, respectively. Within that frame is a varied series of Wedekind songs and spoken poems. The second program is framed by two Wedekind short stories, neither of them ever before presented on an American (or any other) stage. Within this second frame come poems and songs in which we meet another Wedekind, a wild poet who also had a tender, even elegiac side. The two-part show ends with a song by Eric Bentley and Arnold Black which celebrates, not Wedekind the rebel, but Wedekind the artist.

These plays by Eric Bentley, all of them variations on plays by Heinrich von Kleist, as follows: Concord, which depicts discord in Concord, Massachusetts around the year 1800. From Kleist's The Broken Jug: who broke that jug? It hardly seems a metaphysical question, or even an important one. But in a sense it was. Eric Bentley has explored it. The Fall of the Amazons, in which the Greek hero Achilles is slain by the Amazon queen, Penthesilea. Kleist rejected the older version of the story in which he killed her. Kleist's version receives another twist from Eric Bentley. Wannsee is the third play in The Kleist Variations (and also the lake on whose shores Heinrich von Kleist committed suicide). But his play Cathy of Heilbronn rather leaves the impression that ""God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world."" Eric Bentley juxtaposes the suicide and the play. The Kleist Variations follows Monstrous Martyrdoms and Rallying Cries, nine Bentley plays in all. The Kleist Variations was written for the theatre of the State University of New York in Buffalo and was first produced there.

Eric Bentley's graceful 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. When it arrived in the late 1940's this book was hailed by the great poet William Carlos Williams as the best treatise on contemporary manners I think I have ever read. I was fascinated and rewarded in the depths of my soul. Even Shaw himself described the book as the best critical description of my public activities I have yet come across.

This book was written between 1946 and 1952, and first published in 1953. It is now widely regarded as the standard portrait of the European and American theater in the turbulent and seminal years following World War II; but it is far more than that. It ranges back as far as Ibsen and even Shakespeare, and has contributed very substantially to a number of reputations that would long outlast 1950, such as those of Bertolt Brecht, Charles Chaplin and Martha Graham. For Bentley fans, it is an essential link in a chain that runs from The Playwright as Thinker to The Life of the Drama to The Brecht Memoir and Thinking About the Playwright.

(Applause Books). Included in this are Bentley's published analyses and commentaries on Brecht's plays, as well as some new thoughts of recent years. Also included is Bentley's highly personal memoir of his years with Brecht; his personal recollections of Charles Laughton's L. A. production of Galileo and Brecht's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

All the farces of Russia's greatest dramatist are rendered here in the classic lively translations which audiences and scholars alike applaud on the stage and in the classroom. The blustering stuttering eloquence of Chekhov's unlikely heroes has endured to shape the voice of contemporary theatre. This volume presents seven minor masterpieces: Harmfulness of Tobacco Swan Song The Brute Marriage Proposal Summer in the Country A Wedding The Celebration.

Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. With Kurt Weill's unforgettable music - one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz to the theatre - it became a popular hit throughout the western world. Published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, this edition features extensive notes and commentary including an introduction to the play, Brecht's own notes on the play, a full appendix of textual variants, a note by composer Kurt Weill, a transcript of a discussion about the play between Brecht and a theatre director, plus editorial notes on the genesis of the play.

Eric Bentley's radical new look at the grammar of theatre...is a work of exceptional virtue... The book justifies its title by being precisely about the ways in which life manifests itself in the theatre... This is a book to be read again and again. ä Frank Kermode ÊThe New York Review of BooksÊ