Introduction: Avant-garde drama and theatre in historical, intellectual, and cultural context / Bert Cardullo
On the marionette theatre (1810) / Heinrich von Kleist
The tragic in daily life (1894) / Maurice Maeterlinck
On the futility of the "theatrical" in the theatre (1896) / Alfred Jarry
Prefatory note to A dream play (1901) / August Strindberg
The stylized theatre (excerpt, 1907) / Vsevolod Meyerhold
Realism and convention on the stage (1908) / Valery Briusov
The founding and manifesto of futurism (1909) / Filippo Tomasso Marinetti
Epilogue to the actor (1913) / Paul Kornfeld
A few words about the role of the actor in the theatre of pure form (1919) / Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
On humor (1920) / Luigi Pirandello
Lecture on dada (1922) / Tristan Tzara
Surrealism (1922) / André Breton
The dehumanization of art (1925) / José Ortega y Gasset
Postwar German drama (1928) / Ernst Toller
New state forms (1928) / Daniil Kharms
The theatre of cruelty: first manifesto (1932) / Antonin Artaud
The myth of Sisyphus (1942) / Albert Camus
Epilogue: There is no avant-garde theatre (1962) / Eugène Ionesco.
