Synopsis
Dance of Death
Richard Greenberg from August Strindberg
Published by Dramatists Play Service
3 Male 3 Female
Their latest maid has just quit; their children have abandoned them; and they can't keep company with any of the locals on their remote island because they despise them
After twenty-five years, they can't abide one another either. Their miserable lives get a jolt when Alice's cousin Kurt arrives, newly stationed on the island
Kurt becomes the pawn used by Edgar and Alice to finally get the best of each other in what truly becomes a dance of death
Strindberg's 1900 masterpiece was the first naturalistic portrait of a marriage in modern drama, and the trail it blazed made possible Long Day's Journey into Night and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
" beneath Strindberg's portrait of marriage as a minefield is something subtler and more enduring, an elegiac meditation on the trauma of existence and the mystery of death " ~ Variety "I can't think of a more profound or unsettling study in denial in my theatre-going experience" ~ NY Times