The Marriage of Figaro

By Hais Beaumarc and Beaumarchais

A Count's valet prepares to marry the Countess' chambermaid--until it becomes clear the Count wishes to revive an old law that will allow him to take advantage of the bride before the wedding. The valet's schemes to thwart the Count show the growing French endorsement of an aristocracy of merit and wits rather than birth, in Pierre Beaumarchais' 1784 play.

"...the very talented American playwright Richard Nelson [has undertaken] a new and emphatically idiomatic adaptation...Nelson's dialogue proves resolutely contemporary."
Clive Barnes, New York Post

"The Beaumarchais/Nelson/Serban FIGARO is a pleasure to see, to talk about, to remember."
Julius Novick, The Village Voice

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0881450995
• ISBN13: 9780881450996
• Release Date: December 1991
• Publisher: Broadway Play Publishing
• Length: 100 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Ibsen's Most Operatic Play

Too operatic, I think, to be successful on the stage today, in the 'theater of realism' that Ibsen himself did so much to invent! "The Lady from the Sea" demands to be read as a 19th C melodrama, replete with stilted language and conventions of stagecraft that a youthful audience in 2009 will find embarrassing; it's uncomfortably halfway between realism and 'magic realism', that is, between a plausible psychological drama and a ghost story. Still, there are depths in this odd play, which is not what it seems. It is definitely not a love story with a happy ending. Rather it's about the unbroachable wall between men and women in a society of strict gender roles. It's Ibsen's most radical statement of feminism, very close to Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley's declaration that marriage is merely monogamous prostitution. There are five overlapping amorous attractions in the play, and all of them are painfully out of balance. Happy ending or not, this play is tragic. I seriously think that only music could successfully express the underlying grief that Ibsen is ascribing to all male-female relationships. It would make a superb opera! I wish I had the talent to write it.