This masterful translation of four tragedies by Antonio Buero-Vallejo (1916 -2000), Spain 's most important dramatist since the 1930s, will allow English-speaking audiences to experience the most deeply moving and intellectually rich works of one of the twentieth-century 's great authors. Patricia W. O'Connor complements vivid translations with generous supporting materials, including a reader-friendly introduction to the playwright's life and work, commentaries on the plays, and photographs of productions and playwright.Buero-Vallejo's emblematic first play, Story of a Stairway (1949), chronicling decades in the lives of struggling Madrid families, catapulted the young author into prominence. Appearing here for the first time in English, Before Dawn (1953) is a whodunit and the riveting odyssey of one woman 's search for truth that recalls Greek tragedy. The Basement Window (1967), an Orwellian science-fiction experiment, portrays the moral climate of the late twentieth century as judged by ethically enlightened researchers of a distant future. In the first English translation of the author's poignantly relevant final play, Mission to the Deserted Village (1999), a wartime attempt to save an El Greco painting raises questions about how much of its own treasure a culture will destroy to keep it out of enemy hands.Readers who know Buero-Vallejo's plays will celebrate O'Connor 's sparkling translations. Those who haven't yet read Buero-Vallejo will find a very moving introduction in this collection.

Product Description: El estreno de Las Meninas, de Antonio Buero Vallejo, tuvo lugar en el 9 de diciembre de 1960, en el teatro Espanol de Madrid; en el mismo escenario, veintiun anos antes, habia obtenido el exito que lo consagro como el innovador de la dramaturgia espanola de posguerra, con su Historia de una escalera...read more

Product Description: Book by Antonio Buero Vallejo

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Product Description: Written in 1964, then banned and only staged in Spain 12 years later after Franco's death, Buero's powerful play tackles the controversial question of political torture. Daniel Barnes is a family man who works as a member of the Political Police in an imaginary country called Surelia...read more

Product Description: most elegant moving and spectacutar

In these two plays, one of the leading contemporary playwrights shows the conflicts that still went on in Spain, ten years after the Civil War, as well as those that existed when the great artist Velazquez painted