Modern Theater
Discover essential Modern Theater books, from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman to Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. Explore curated drama, classics, and avant-garde plays.
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The Ubu Plays
by Alfred Jarry
Alfred Jarry is regarded as one of the founders of modern avant-garde theatre-- "Dada, Surrealism, Pataphysics, Theatre of Cruelty, the Absurd--all owe a debt to Jarry." (Encore) This volume contains his three classic Ubu texts: Ubu Roi, Ubu Cocu and Ubu Enchaîné. Through the lucid translations of Connolly and Taylor, the reader comes to realize that the violent and loathsome Ubu is Jarry's dark metaphor for man in the modern age. As Ubu himself said, "We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well."
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Rhinoceros, and Other Plays
by Eugène Ionesco
A collection of three modern plays by the master of the absurd and member of the French Academy.
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Death of a Salesman
by Arthur Miller
The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity—and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room. "By common consent, this is one of the finest dramas in the whole range of the American theater." —Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times "So simple, central, and terrible that the run of playwrights would neither care nor dare to attempt it." —Time
