The Playwright as Thinker: A Study of Drama in Modern Times

by Eric Bentley

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.
 

Genres: Drama, Theatre, Writing, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

He was a theater critic and translator.

Taught freshman English at UCLA for a year. And that is where he met the "German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who had recently immigrated to the United States after fleeing Nazi Germany and was unknown in this country. The two of them became close, and it was Bentley who translated a lot of Brecht's work into English and helped establish his career in America."

source - American Public Media

Reviews

[Julian Munds · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good piece of theatrical criticism. I particularly enjoyed the chapter comparing Wagner and Ibsen. There is wonderful insight here. However, his dislike of what he terms "Broadway" shows its age (as does his disregard for O'Neill as a dramatist of note.) I can understand the lack of depth he accuses the Broadway (or commercial) stage of being. This problem persists today. It is a shame a Bentley rep theatre never came to be.