Modern(ist) Drama: Essays in Criticism is a casebook of ideas and arguments about Western modern as well as avant-garde drama. In this volume, the author gathers together a uniquely wide ranging selection of original essays whose subjects span the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century and reach forward into the twenty-first. He thereby provides access to the thinking behind much of the most stimulating playwriting (and performance) the modernists had to offer, in addition to supplying guidelines to understanding current drama’s most adventurous developments. Treated in this volume, in chronological order by date of their work, are such modern dramatists as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, J.M. Synge, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O'Neill, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Brendan Behan, David Hare, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet; and such seminal avant-gardists as Alfred Jarry, Georg Kaiser, Fernand Crommelynck, Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht, Carlo Terron, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Joe Orton. The work of these men, and one woman, illuminates the modern tradition together with the astonishing daring of avant-garde dramatists in wrenching drama out of its old habits (including ‘modern’ ones) and creating a new, distinctive, and free-standing artistic vocabulary.