The Visit

Friedrich Dürrenmatt is considered one of the most significant playwrights of our time. During the years of the Cold War, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. In this ALTA National Translation Award–winning new translation of what many critics consider his finest play, Joel Agee gives a fresh lease to a classic of twentieth-century theater. Dürrenmatt once wrote of himself: “I can best be understood if one grasps grotesqueness;” and The Visit is a consummate, alarming Dürrenmatt blend of hilarity, horror, and vertigo. The play takes place “somewhere in Central Europe” and tells of an elderly millionairess who, merely on the promise of her millions, swiftly turns a depressed area into a boom town. But the condition attached to her largesse, which the locals learn of only after they are enmeshed, is murder. Dürrenmatt has fashioned a macabre and entertaining parable that is a scathing indictment of the power of greed and confronts the perennial questions of honor, loyalty, and community.