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Washington

The Gardener’s Year 

Alaska

War With the Newts

Karel Capek

Paul Selver

Nigel Playfair

Ohio

One of the classics of twentieth-century theater, this brilliantly conceived and exquisitely executed play by Czech playwright Karel Čapek (1890-1938) looks to a future in which all workers are automatons, or "robots" -- a word this play made a permanent part of the language. The robots revolt when their manufacturing formula is changed to make them more irritable and to give them the human ability to hate, and the resulting catastrophe makes for a powerful and deeply moving theatrical experience.
"It is murderous social satire, done in terms of the most hair-raising melodrama," wrote Alexander Woolcott in his 1922 review of the first U.S. performance of this universally admired play. Heywood Broun wrote, "Čapek is potentially one of the great men in the modern drama. He has devised a scene at the end of the third act as awesome as anything we have ever seen in the theatre." This is the scene in which one of the last remaining humans, knowing himself and his species to be doomed, muses: "It was a great thing to be a man. There was something immense about it."

R. U. R.

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Norma Comrada

New York

Translated from the Czech by Norma Comrada A grand collection of tales and fables from one of Czechoslovakia's most respected writers that approach great events and figures of history, myth and literature in startling ways. Jesus's loves and fishes miracle is described from the viewpoint of a baker. Townspeople argue about who's to blame for the approaching hordes of Attila the Hun. Humorous, thought-provoking, and sometimes frightening, they show Capek at his very best.

Apocryphal Tales

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Karel Capek

The Gardener’s Year

Karel Capek

War With the Newts

Karel Capek; Paul Selver; Nigel Playfair

R. U. R.

Karel Capek; Norma Comrada

Apocryphal Tales

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Save this search

Karel Capek

The Gardener’s Year

Karel Capek

War With the Newts

Karel Capek; Paul Selver; Nigel Playfair

R. U. R.

Karel Capek; Norma Comrada

Apocryphal Tales