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Peter Weiss was a writer whose entire life was dominated by feelings of alienation and deepseated insecurity. As a youth he made frequent attempts to escape from the social conventions into which he was born and to free himself from his parents' demands...

Peter Weiss's play Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean-Paul Marats, dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade (1964; translated as The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by...

Hey, things are looking good and weird out there! This fall brings Bebe Neuwirth in a surreal textual experiment, Isabelle Huppert in a suicidal frenzy, Patti LuPone hauling around a tuba, and talking sea creatures from the deep. Plus? Snoopy’s dead, man! After her delectable...

Hey, things are looking good and weird out there! This fall brings Bebe Neuwirth in a surreal textual experiment, Isabelle Huppert in a suicidal frenzy, Patti LuPone hauling around a tuba, and talking sea creatures from the deep. Plus? Snoopy’s dead, man! After her...

World War II service shaped the lives and careers of authors Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut, and in turn their works were profoundly influential in the Vietnam era.Vonnegut turned his ordeal as a POW during the 1945 allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, into his 1969...

A play of high caliber has finally ended [the postwar sterility of German Theater]. Time for unreserved applause arrived in May 1964 with the Berlin premiere of Peter Weiss' [Marat/Sade]. (p. 163) Critics found themselves praising an author hardly expected to father the new masterwork of the German stage. They considered Peter Weiss a novelist….

The stereoscopic vision of [Marat/Sade] … enables the modern spectator to see 1793 and 1808 simultaneously…. Our interpretation of history is determined by the politics prevailing in our time. Weiss, then, attempts to define both the object viewed and the standpoint from which it is viewed. The effect of this is Brechtian Verfremdung—one cannot give oneself up to the events of the play. Rather, one is forced to watch the relationship between the two time schemes, and whatever meaning on...

Unlike Weiss's earlier plays (including Marat/Sade … which were either totally or partially imaginative, his latest dramatic works are "documentary dramas" based exclusively on factual reality. Weiss describes his new medium as a "theater of reportage" which "refrains from any sort of invention. It takes authentic material and mirrors it from the stage, unchanged in content, [but selected and] adapted in form."… Weiss wants to inform his audienc...