Before Büchner wrote Woyzeck , (Cutting Ball’s second show this season), he created Danton’s Death, a searing exploration of the French Revolution, offering some of Büchner’s darkest thoughts about the human condition. “We know very little about each other. We are lumbering, thick-skinned animals, we reach out our hands to touch but the strain is pointless, we blunder about rubbing our coarse skins up against each other. We are very much alone.”

Lorca called The Public “the best thing I’ve written for the theater,” and acknowledged, “this is for the theater years from now.” Using surrealistic techniques worthy of his good friend Salvador Dalì, Lorca tests the limits of theater in this exciting and challenging play.

Quartet is Müller’s riff on Les Liaisons Dangereuses set in the surprisingly combined spaces of a drawing room before the French Revolution and an air raid shelter after World War III. The Task follows the the course of a letter from its haphazard delivery during the French Revolution to its appearance in a modern office building where a nameless employee works for a boss named Number One. Two of Müller’s most interesting pieces in the same evening. Both plays were strongly influenced by Büchner’s Danton’s Death (see October 3).

One of the most important plays from Spain’s Golden Age of Drama, Life is a Dream explores what shapes one Prince’s identity by exploring the life that he actually led versus the life he could have led. It is a wonderful companion to our production of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew because the question of identity is at the core of both.

A classic in Italy, It is so (if you think so) is rarely performed in the United States. This is arguably Pirandello’s most powerful exploration of the nature of truth. If two people tell conflicting stories about the same event, can they both be right? It is high stakes philosophy in a hilarious comedy.

Taking place in on a wistful Christmas Eve, The Black Glove boasts among its list of characters: a Christmas Spirit, a Christmas Fairy, a Taxidermist trying to order the universe, and a lost child who is found again. It is a side of Strindberg we almost never get to see, sensitive, delicate, and ultimately hopeful.

Yes, this is the play that caused riots in Paris. Yes, this is the play that prompted Yeats to say, “After us, the Savage God!” We will attempt to rediscover this ground-breaking piece in a new translation that works to get beyond the initial shock of the first performance and capture the uncanny genius of Alfred Jarry.