Thirst

by Gabriel Marcel, Michial Farmer (Translator)

Prompted by her stepmother, Stella Chartrain delves so frantically into family history that her father is forced to reveal the full truth about the past—regardless of its implications for the present. Instead of setting her free from fear, however, the truth further provokes Stella’s obsession and casts its cloud of accompanying anxiety over her father and stepmother and her fiancé and his family. In this new translation (the very first into English), Michial Farmer brings out the intensity and conversational spirit of the prose to provide a highly readable—and actable—edition of Marcel’s play. Set in a single room across three acts, the drama takes on a close, almost suffocating, atmosphere as the Chartrain and de Puygerland families wrestle with their dread and disquiet in the face of a suspect past and an uncertain future. In this setting, as Farmer notes in his Introduction, Thirst stands among the best of Marcel’s dramas, as it “limns that suffocation and points beyond it, however tenuously and ambiguously.”

191 pages, Paperback

Published May 13, 2021

About the author

Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) was a philosopher, drama critic, playwright and musician. He converted to Catholicism in 1929 and his philosophy was later described as “Christian Existentialism” (most famously in Jean-Paul Sartre's “Existentialism is a Humanism”) a term he initially endorsed but later repudiated. In addition to his numerous philosophical publications, he was the author of some thirty dramatic works. Marcel gave the Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen in 1949–1950, which appeared in print as the two-volume The Mystery of Being, and the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1961–1962, which were collected and published as The Existential Background of Human Dignity.

Reviews

[Andrew Weitzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent play. All the fiction I have read that was a Cluny Media publication has been great. I don't know why exactly, but mid 20th century French Catholics just scratch all of my itches in the right way

[Christina “6 word reviewer” Lake]

Better than expected but sooooo French.