Condition: Acceptable. Please see the images for more details. May show signs of wear such as:
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Cover art: Cover photo by Anthony Wolff showing John Heffernan as Galy Gay
Blurb: “BAAL, A MAN'S A MAN, & THE ELEPHANT CALF
THREE PLAYS BY BERTOLT BRECHT
Edited and with Introductions by Eric Bentley
The remarkable early plays of Bertolt Brecht have now begun to share the attention and applause formerly reserved for his more recent works. A Man's A Man earned wide acclaim when it was recently staged in New York. Critics have found in it a prophetic anticipation of brainwashing and the "'organization man." In its probing of individuality and social roles, however, it transcends locality and topicality. In this play and in The Elephant Calf, Brecht draws for the first time upon the specifically modern resources of comedy - the style of the music hall, the technique of the film, absurdity raised to an art-to give the theater its new Brechtian dimension that has loomed so large on the modern stage.
Baal, Brecht's first play, written when he was twenty, is a work at once brutal, coarse, and tender that pictures an "amoral" life ruthless in its consistency.
Martin Esslin has called it "a passionate acceptance of the world in all its sordid grandeur"; and Herbert Lüthy describes it as "careless, joyous, and with genuine spiritual depth. What is presented here in the language of decomposition is the life-process itself, the great orgiastic metamorphosis of nature." "For better or for worse," says Eric Bentley, "a new era in dramatic art dates from this play."