Петер Хандке: 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.