"Concerned with the extent to which political commitment (or the lack of it) influences drama, Julian Wulbern examines the polemics, dramatic theory, and theatrical practice of Brecht and lonesco to help resolve the confusion which has resulted in part from lonesco's misunderstanding and criticism of Brecht's theories concerning 'epic' theater. Drawing heavily on his direct experience of the plays as performed in the original languages, as well as on his work with the Berliner Ensemble and on personal contact with lonesco, Wulbern seeks to put the special form of commitment adopted by each author into the context of his creative works. Focusing on the later works of each man, Wulbern first analyzes the play which makes the clearest statement of each playwright's particular viewpoint: Brecht's The Measures Taken and lonesco's Rhinoceros. He show that both of these works are more than topical statements or sententious documents, for both deal ultimately with the situation of man in twentieth-century mass society. In an examination of Brecht's The Life of Galileo and lonesco's Exit the King, Wulbern shows further how intentions often get lost in the process of creating a work of art. Despite Brecht's clearly polemic intentions, his later works function dialectically; they pose fundamental questions concerning the conduct of human life. And despite lonesco's aspiration to universality, his works are so conditioned by his obsessive view of life's absurdity that they become reduced to his own unique form of polemic."- Publisher

This book analyzes the acting aesthetic of Brecht, Ionesco, Pinter, and Shepard and presents a detailed methodological approach to the performance of their plays. The originality of the book lies in the systematic and critical analysis of both the process of preparing a role and the shifting assumptions on matters essential for a coherent acting methodology for each playwright. The book is distinctive in that it focuses almost exclusively on the playwrights' published remarks concerning theatre and acting, supplemented with observations by actors and directors who were close collaborators with the playwrights on productions. The analysis begins with a chapter that examines and questions the applicability of the Stanislavsky system that still dominates the post-World War II theatrical scene. The following four chapters are devoted to the playwrights' construction of a coherent view of theatre and acting. An approach to acting is critically examined from the standpoint of the function, means and manner in which the role is realized with regard to the relationship of the actor to self, to the text, to the character and other characters, to the director, and to the audience. At the end of each chapter, a summary of the essential elements for an approach to the role is offered, accompanied by a proposed acting methodology. In the conclusion, an analysis is presented that recognizes what may be applied through Stanislavskian methods and the divergences which demand particularized responses to the plays of Brecht, Ionesco, Pinter, and Shepard.

Modern plays are strikingly diverse and, as a result, any attempt to locate an underlying unity between them encounters difficulties: to focus on what they have in common is often to overlook what is of primary importance in particular plays; to focus on their differences is to note the novelty of the plays without increasing their accessibility. In this study, first published in 1985, Austin E. Quigley takes as his paradigm case the relationship between the world of the stage and the world of the audience, and explores various modes of communication between domains. He asks how changes in the structure of the drama relate to changes in the structure of the theatre, and changes in the role of the audience. Detailed interpretations of plays by Pinero, Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett and Pinter question principles about the modern theatre and establish links between drama structure and theatre structure, theme, and performance space.