The story features characters and events following the raising of Lazarus of Bethany from the dead by Jesus. As Lazarus is the first man to return from the realm of the dead, the crowd reacts intently to his words. Over and over again he declares to them that there is no death, only God's eternal laughter. The more Lazarus laughs, the younger and stronger he becomes. The more he laughs, the older and weaker his wife Miriam (who trusts him but does not understand his laughter) becomes. The subsequent scenes portray a series of tests (perhaps similar to those trials of Job) by the Jews, Romans and Greeks to try the faith of Lazarus. Consequently, members of his family are taken from him, but Lazarus continues always to laugh, even as Miriam is poisoned by the Roman Emperor Tiberius and continuing on to the very end, when Tiberius burns him at the stake. --Wikipedia.com.

 The plays of Eugene O'Neill testify to his continued search for new dramatic strategies. The author explores the Nobel Prize winner's attempts at creating a new Modern play. He shows how, moving away from melodrama or "the problem play," O'Neill revisited the classical frames of drama and reinvented theater aesthetics by resorting to masks, the chorus, acoustics, silence or immobility for the creation of his dramatic works.

Francis Fergusson was one of the foremost American literary critics and scholars of the twentieth century. A man of the theater as well as a man of letters, Fergusson's versatility and mastery traversed a wide range of intellectual disciplines. As George Core notes: "one of the most remarkable aspects of Fergusson's criticism is that it stands comfortably, at ease, with the best work stemming from diverse schools of criticism that are sometimes in conflict—the New Critics, the New York intellectuals, the myth critics and various distinguished critics of the modern theater." Though allied with the New Critics, Fergusson was intellectually capacious enough to be associated with many critical schools of vastly different persuasions. R.W.B. Lewis once remarked of this respected original that "his critical theories and practices possess a severely beautiful purity." Sallies of the Mind is a collection of Fergusson's essays drawn from a variety of virtually unattainable works. It incorporates Fergusson's representative criticism on such major authors as Dante, Shakespeare, James, and Eliot; on myths as well as action; on the modern stage; and on the modern novel. Essays in this collection include: "T.S. Eliot and His Impersonal Theory of Art" "Humanism" "Maritain's Creative Intuition" "Two Perspectives on European Literature" "Two Acts from Dante's Drama of the Mind" "The Divine Comedy as a Bridge across Time" "Hamlet" "Measure for Measure" "Eugene O'Neill" "Exiles and Ibsen's Work" "Oedipus According to Freud, Sophocles, and Freud" "The Theater of Paul Valery" "D.H. Lawrence's Sensibility" and "The Drama in The Golden Bowl." Francis Fergusson's criticism endures not only owing to its originality, depth, and range but also to its classically austere clarity of style. Looking at the present-day critical scene, we see few who match Fergusson's intelligence, learning, and verve. Sallies of the Mind is a tribute to his legacy as well as to the themes he treats.

In this volume, Amnon Kabatchnik provides an overview of more than 150 important and memorable theatrical works of crime and detection between 1925 and 1950. Each entry includes a plot synopsis, production data, and the opinions of well known and respected critics and scholars.