Enda Walsh is an Irish-born playwright, a fact immensely bothersome to those seeking to place him alongside his birth nation's similarly defined theatrical forbears.  Great acrobatic skill goes into locating the Synge in his characters' souls, the Keats in their speech.  For Walsh is sim

The back jackets of much of Thomas Bernhard's English-language translations are burdened by such qualifications as "near genius" or "second only to Kafka and Beckett."  This, of course, is no small praise: there is no shame in being second to Kafka or Beckett; there is no shame in being a "ne

Melissa James Gibson is at once an anomaly among contemporary playwrights and a sterling emblem of her contemporary theatrical period.  As anomaly, she imbues each work with a singular integrity that seems almost defiant of the current overriding trend of theatrical collectives and hive-minde

As with any movement of which its title and ideological thrust is foisted unwittingly and often unwarrantedly upon its supposed members, the Theater of the Absurd is as awkward and uneasy a fit for Eugène Ionesco's literary and artistic endeavors as they are for Samuel Beckett or Jean Genet