Four Plays, Vol. 2

by Carl R. Mueller, Carl L. Mueller (Translator)

Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) is one of the undisputed forerunners of the modern stage. An arch radical, he has been described as a master of the shock tactic and the terror of the German bourgeoisie, a lunatic and a criminal who wrote plays of such filth that they are best performed in the gutter. Others invoke him as God's fool, and yet one thing is He stirs the emotions, pro and con, as deeply as it is possible to imagine. He is also modern in the sense that as a man he finds himself torn between two poles, conventional morality and liberated morality, especially in regard to the subject of sex, which informs much of his dramatic work. Wedekind lived in a repressed age and sought to open the windows to the stuffy hothouse atmosphere of his world by showing its hypocrisy - and for this he was severely criticized by the bourgeoisie of his time.

Paperback

Published January 1, 2002

About the author

Carl R. Mueller has since 1967 been professor in the Department of Theater at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has taught theater history, criticism, dramatic literature, and playwriting, as well as having directed. He was educated at Northwestern University, where he received a B.S. in English. After work in graduate English at the University of California, Berkeley, he received his M.A. in playwriting at UCLA, where he also completed his Ph.D. in theater history and criticism. In addition, he was a Fulbright Scholar in Berlin in 1960-1961. A translator for more than forty years, he has translated and published works by Georg Büchner, Bertolt Brecht, Frank Wedekind, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Friedrich Hebbel, to name a few. His published translation of Ödön von Horváth's Tales from the Vienna Woods was given its London West End premiere in July 1999. For Smith and Kraus, he has translated volumes of plays by Arthur Schnitzler, August Strindberg, Luigi Pirandello, Heinrich von Kleist, and Frank Wedekind, as well as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, Parts I and II. In addition to translating the complete plays of Euripides and Aeschylus for Smith and Kraus, he has also co-translated the plays of Sophocles. His translations have been performed in every English-speaking country and have appeared on BBC-TV.