Kaspar and Other Plays

"Kaspar," Peter Handke's first full-length drama--hailed in Europe as "the play of the decade" and compared in importance to "Waiting for Godot"--is the story of an autistic adolescent who finds himself at a complete existential loss on the stage, with but a single sentence to call his own. Drilled by prompters who use terrifyingly funny logical and alogical language-sequences, Kaspar learns to speak "normally" and eventually becomes creative--"doing his own thing" with words; for this he is destroyed. In "Offending the Audience" and "Self-Accusation," one-character "speak-ins," Handke further explores the relationship between public performance and personal identity, forcing us to reconsider our sense of who we are and what we know.