Eric Bentley – författare

The play is a parable inspired by the Chinese play Chalk Circle. Written at the close of World War II, the story is set in the Caucasus mountains of Georgia, and retells the tale of King Solomon and a child claimed by two mothers. A chalk circle is metaphorically drawn around a society misdirected in its priorities. Brecht's statements about class are cloaked in the innocence of a fable that whispers insistently to the audience.

This play, written during Brecht's exile to the United States and set in pre-Communist China, is a parable of a young woman torn between obligation and reality, between love and practicality, and between her own needs and those of her friends and neighbours.

Eric Bentley's Round 2 is a gay version of La Ronde set in New York in the 70s at a time when homosexuals were becoming increasingly visible and confident - in this series of encounters, sex overturns, even if for a short time the social and economic orde "Gay Plays 4 reflects the rich diversity of both gay writing and gay experience" Michael Burton, Gay Times

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.

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.

BEFORE BRECHT: FOUR GERMAN PLAYS CLOTH

The complete play scripts to: The Misanthrope by Moliere, English version by Richard Wilbur; Phaedra by Racine, English version by Robert Lowell; The Cid by Corneille, English version by James Schevill; and Figaro's Marriage by Beaumarchais, English version by Jacques Barzun.

An anthology of four classic Italian plays edited by Eric Bentley. Also includes directorial and technical notes. Includes the title work by Goldoni as well as The King Stag (Gozzi), The Mandrake (Machiavelli), Ruzzante Returns from the Wars (Beolco).

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.

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.

This wonderful collection of Spanish drama from the golden age features four plays translated into English by Roy Campbell, and expertly edited by Eric Bentley: Siege of Numantia (Miguel de Cervantes), Fuente Ovejuna (Lope de Vega), The Trickster of Seville (Tirso de Molina) and Life Is a Dream (Calderon de la Barca). Includes an introduction by Bentley.

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

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.