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8 books match the query 'Bentley, Eric'
Bentley on Brecht
Eric Bentley
Northwestern University Press, 2008
Recipient of 2007 The Robert Chesley Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in Playwriting
Winner of 2006 International Association of Theatre Critics Thalia Prize
Winner of 2006 Village Voice OBIE Awards Lifetime Achievement Award
Since their first meeting in Santa Monica, California in 1942, Eric Bentley has been Bertolt Brecht's other, offstage voice. Just as Brecht reshaped modern theater, Bentley's writings on Brecht helped shape his reputation in the United States and the rest of the world. Bentley on Brecht represents a lifetime of critical and personal thoughts on both Brecht as friend and Brecht as influential literary figure. Brought together in this volume are Brecht-Bentley correspondence, Bentley's personal recollections of his years with Brecht, including Charles Laughton's production of Galileo, Brecht's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Bentley's analysis of Brecht's plays.
Winner of 2006 International Association of Theatre Critics Thalia Prize
Winner of 2006 Village Voice OBIE Awards Lifetime Achievement Award
Since their first meeting in Santa Monica, California in 1942, Eric Bentley has been Bertolt Brecht's other, offstage voice. Just as Brecht reshaped modern theater, Bentley's writings on Brecht helped shape his reputation in the United States and the rest of the world. Bentley on Brecht represents a lifetime of critical and personal thoughts on both Brecht as friend and Brecht as influential literary figure. Brought together in this volume are Brecht-Bentley correspondence, Bentley's personal recollections of his years with Brecht, including Charles Laughton's production of Galileo, Brecht's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Bentley's analysis of Brecht's plays.
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Monstrous Martyrdoms
Three PlaysEric Bentley
Northwestern University Press, 2004
Winner of 2006 International Association of Theatre Critics Thalia Prize
Recipient of 2007 The Robert Chesley Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in Playwriting
Winner of 2006 Village Voice OBIE Awards Lifetime Achievement Award
"The road will be red with monstrous martyrdoms, but we shall win." Oscar Wilde wrote these words at the end of the nineteenth century after serving two years at hard labor for the crime of being homosexual. This modern martyrdom is the subject of Lord Alfred's Lover, Eric Bentley's Brechtian dramatization of Wilde's last days.
H for Hamlet is another variation on the modern martyr play, this time in homage to Pirandello. The protagonist thinks, or once thought, he was Hamlet. Fantasy? Perhaps. But, to paraphrase Marianne Moore, there was a real toad in the imaginary garden--a real martyr in the toy theatre.
In German Requiem, Bentley takes inspiration from Heinrich von Kleist's play The Schroffenstein Family, which in turn is a version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The young star-crossed lovers in his play are martyrs of an internecine conflict much like those seen in recent history in Ireland and the Middle East.
Recipient of 2007 The Robert Chesley Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in Playwriting
Winner of 2006 Village Voice OBIE Awards Lifetime Achievement Award
"The road will be red with monstrous martyrdoms, but we shall win." Oscar Wilde wrote these words at the end of the nineteenth century after serving two years at hard labor for the crime of being homosexual. This modern martyrdom is the subject of Lord Alfred's Lover, Eric Bentley's Brechtian dramatization of Wilde's last days.
H for Hamlet is another variation on the modern martyr play, this time in homage to Pirandello. The protagonist thinks, or once thought, he was Hamlet. Fantasy? Perhaps. But, to paraphrase Marianne Moore, there was a real toad in the imaginary garden--a real martyr in the toy theatre.
In German Requiem, Bentley takes inspiration from Heinrich von Kleist's play The Schroffenstein Family, which in turn is a version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The young star-crossed lovers in his play are martyrs of an internecine conflict much like those seen in recent history in Ireland and the Middle East.
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Pirandello Commentaries
Eric Bentley
Northwestern University Press, 1986
A New York newspaper column from 1924 proclaimed: "Everybody's caught in the mazes of Pirandellism. . . . He is the great convention-smasher, and he just naturally leaves you face to face with the eternal query, What is truth?"
"Everybody" is still caught in the mazes of Pirandellism. But since the 1940s Eric Bentley has threaded his way through those mazes. The Pirandello Commentaries is the result.
"Everybody" is still caught in the mazes of Pirandellism. But since the 1940s Eric Bentley has threaded his way through those mazes. The Pirandello Commentaries is the result.
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Plays
Luigi Pirandello
Northwestern University Press, 1998
“How has the art of theater managed to survive at all into the era of modernism and the era of what is currently, however ineptly, called postmodernism?” asks preeminent theater scholar Eric Bentley. “Through the work of [Luigi] Pirandello, I should think, more than any other single individual.”
Bentley’s English versions of four of Pirandello’s most celebrated plays—collected here for the first time—capture the playwright’s voice with remarkable perception. He has provided texts that are the standard for American productions, sensitive both to what is uniquely “Sicilian” in Pirandello’s language and to the rigors of the American stage.
Along with Pirandello’s better-known works, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Emperor Henry, and Right You Are, this edition includes the widely performed The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, unavailable in any other collection.
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Rallying Cries
Eric Bentley
Northwestern University Press, 1977
Called "the theater conscience of our times," Eric Bentley has been both a leading critic and a playwright. Rallying Cries presents three of his best known works: Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, successfully staged around the world and on television; The Recantation of Galileo Galilei; and the controversial From the Memoirs of Pontius Pilate, a work initially rejected as insufficiently Christian by its commissioning theater but then successfully produced in New York at the Actors Studio and American Jewish Theater.
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The Kleist Variations
Three PlaysEric Bentley
Northwestern University Press, 2005
Winner of 2006 International Association of Theatre Critics Thalia Prize
Winner of 2006 Village Voice OBIE Awards Lifetime Achievement Award
In this collection, Eric Bentley presents Concord, a comedy adapted from Kleist's The Broken Jug;The Fall of the Amazons, a tragedy written in response to Kleist's Penthesilea; and Wannsee, a tragic-comedy which is Bentley's rendering of Kleist's Cathy of Heilbronn.
Bentley sets Concord in a courthouse during the early days of the Republic. Convened to discover who broke an irreplaceable jug symbolic of the chivalric age of Sir Walter Raleigh, Judge Adam's madcap court flounders in hilarious chaos induced by huge lies to cover comic lust.
Fall of the Amazons is the story of Achilles and the Amazon queen, Penthesilea. Through this pagan play, Bentley explores improbably love, which he exemplifies in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac: "In seeming to be cruel to both father and son, God has enabled them to find, in total vulnerability, total love," a theme that also pervades Wannsee.
Bentley's Wannsee is a play of pageantry: emperors, counts, dueling knights, a young beauty of seemingly low birth, cherubs, and witches masked in loveliness. A fabulous love story ostensibly designed to dissuade Kleist from self-destruction, Wannsee demonstrates with a flourish that, though devils roam the earth, there are also angels.
Winner of 2006 Village Voice OBIE Awards Lifetime Achievement Award
In this collection, Eric Bentley presents Concord, a comedy adapted from Kleist's The Broken Jug;The Fall of the Amazons, a tragedy written in response to Kleist's Penthesilea; and Wannsee, a tragic-comedy which is Bentley's rendering of Kleist's Cathy of Heilbronn.
Bentley sets Concord in a courthouse during the early days of the Republic. Convened to discover who broke an irreplaceable jug symbolic of the chivalric age of Sir Walter Raleigh, Judge Adam's madcap court flounders in hilarious chaos induced by huge lies to cover comic lust.
Fall of the Amazons is the story of Achilles and the Amazon queen, Penthesilea. Through this pagan play, Bentley explores improbably love, which he exemplifies in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac: "In seeming to be cruel to both father and son, God has enabled them to find, in total vulnerability, total love," a theme that also pervades Wannsee.
Bentley's Wannsee is a play of pageantry: emperors, counts, dueling knights, a young beauty of seemingly low birth, cherubs, and witches masked in loveliness. A fabulous love story ostensibly designed to dissuade Kleist from self-destruction, Wannsee demonstrates with a flourish that, though devils roam the earth, there are also angels.
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The Playwright as Thinker
A Study of Drama in Modern Times, Fourth EditionEric Bentley
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
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.
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Thinking about the Playwright
Comments from Four DecadesEric Bentley
Northwestern University Press, 1987
Essays discuss Ibsen, Strindberg, O'Neill, Brecht, Shaw, acting styles, theater controversies, translation, regional drama, and the nature of theater.
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