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, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, further explores the relationship between public performance and personal identity, forcing us to reconsider our sense of who we are and what we know.