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Set in late 19th century Germany, it concerns teenagers who are discovering the inner and outer tumult of sexuality. The plays performance was threatened with closure when the city's Commissioner of Licenses claimed that the play was pornographic, due to its portrayal of abortion, homosexuality, rape, child abuse, and suicide, but a New York trial court issued an injunction to allow the production to proceed.
Search the extensive U - X - L "World Religions Reference Library" with ease with this cumulative index to the entire set.
Wedekind's expressionist plays influenced the whole course of modern drama A moralist who wore the mask of an immoralist, Wedekind was the terror of the German bourgeoisie. His work was censored and the original Lulu play was not even published during his lifetime; Wedekind toned it down and adapted it to make two plays: Pandora's Box and Earth-Spirit. The version in this volume, Lulu: A Monster Tragedy, is based on the first manuscript, presenting the original sexually voracious heroine to a British audience for the first time. The volume also contains Spring Awakening, "a work of great compassion that still has a lot to teach us about the dangers of battening down adolescent sex..." (Guardian). The translation of Spring Awakening ("scrupulously faithful both to Wedekind's irony and his poetry" The Times) was commissioned by the National Theatre and that of Lulu: A Monster Tragedy ("the Bonds' version is sharper and funnier than its predecessors" Guardian) was toured nationally. Both plays are complemented by the translators' historically illuminating introductions.
"The complete script to Frank Wedekind's symphony - or rather a cacophony - of deotic sexual rhetorics. Eric Bentley's achievement here as translator is a beautifully playable and juicy English; his larger gift is the opening to us of what must be ranked as among the supreme masterpieces of nineteenth-century theater." - Donald Lyons, The New Criterion