Methuen world dramatists

World-renowned historian Howard Zinn has turned to drama to explore the legacy of Karl Marx and Emma Goldman and to delve into the intricacies of political and social conscience perhaps more deeply than traditional history permits. Three Plays brings together all this work, including the previously unpublished Daughter of Venus, along with a new introductory essay on political theater, and prefaces to each of the plays.“The first act of ‘Emma,’ Howard Zinn’s play about Emma Goldman, is a small miracle. Here is a drama that holds down the heroics, polemics and didacticism to which works about heroes and heroines are prone. True, Emma is idealized; she is loving, honest, selfless, daring, but she is also human and believable.”—Walter Goodman, New York Times“[Marx in Soho is] an imaginative critique of our society’s hypocrisies and injustices, and an entertaining, vivid portrait of Karl Marx as a voice of humanitarian justice — which is perhaps the best way to remember him.” —Kirkus Reviews“[Daughter of Venus’s] central concerns — personal and social ethics; the balance of obligations to ourselves, our families, and our fellow citizens; the uses and abuses of political and scientific power — remain as timely as ever. . . . Zinn not only displays a fluid and passionately committed style but also is attempting to do something interesting with it: to interweave a story of familial tensions and national politics, and in doing so to remind us that the way we live our lives on the small, local, day-to-day scale of family life can have repercussions and implications for the life of the nation at large.”—Louise Kennedy, Boston Globe

Racine was one of the greatest dramatists. The five plays included in this volume represent all phases of his career -- the first masterpiece, two plays of his middle period, the last great secular play, and the greater of the two biblical plays. In these modern and previously unpublished translations Professor Muir has made a delightful and important contribution. The translations, in blank verse, are intended not only for the general reader but for those who have long lamented that there are no versions of Racine suitable for production. - Back cover.

"Mother and Child is the intense journey of two individuals trying to connect. Like strangers on a first date, mother and son stalk each other, confronted with a shared history they cannot ignore. In Sleep my Baby Sleep, three people are in a strange unnamed place: through visual and linguistic association they try to decipher their predicament. In Afternoon, characters come and go in a flat that is for sale: they will never understand each other; someone will always see one thing, while others will insist on something else. In Beautiful, the past disrupts the present when a man and his family go back to his childhood valley. Conflicts simmer when husband and wife punish each other by courting his best friend, while his daughter meets a local boy. Death Variations explores different aspects of the theme of death: death of love, death of relationship, death of happiness, and finally the death of a young person. As the characters in Fosse's plays search for meaning or even just familiarity in their ruptured lives, their struggles find an echo in the rhythms and repetitions of their speech."--BOOK JACKET.