The remarkable early plays of Bertolt Brecht have now begun to share the attention and applause formerly reserved for his more recent works. A Ma's A Man earned wide acclaim when it was recently staged in New York. Critics found in it a prophetic anticipation of brainwashing and the "organization man."In its probing of individuality and social roles, however, it transcends locality and topicality. In this play and in The Elephant Cafe, Brecht draws for the first time upon the specifically modern resources of comedy - the style of the music hall, the technique of the film, absurdity raised to an art - to give the theater its new Brechtian dimension that has loomed so large on the modern stage. Baal, Brecht's first play, written when he was twenty, is a work at once brutal, coarse, and tender that pictures "amoral" life ruthless in its consistency. --- excerpt from book's back cover - from Amzon