By Gabriel Marcel | Translated by Michial Farmer

Prompted by her stepmother, Stella Chartrain delves so frantically into family history that her father is forced to reveal the full truth about the past—regardless of its implications for the present. Instead of setting her free from fear, however, the truth further provokes Stella’s obsession and casts its cloud of accompanying anxiety over her father and stepmother and her fiancé and his family. In this new translation (the very first into English), Michial Farmer brings out the intensity and conversational spirit of the prose to provide a highly readable—and actable—edition of Marcel’s play.

Set in a single room across three acts, the drama takes on a close, almost suffocating, atmosphere as the Chartrain and de Puygerland families wrestle with their dread and disquiet in the face of a suspect past and an uncertain future. In this setting, as Farmer notes in his Introduction, Thirst stands among the best of Marcel’s dramas, as it “limns that suffocation and points beyond it, however tenuously and ambiguously.”

Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) was a French philosopher and dramatist, a convert to Roman Catholicism, and the most distinguished proponent of Christian existentialism of the twentieth century. His works in English include The Philosophy of Existence, Being and Having, and The Mystery of Being.

Michial Farmer (PhD, University of Georgia, 2013) is the author of Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction (Camden House, 2017). His poems and essays have appeared in America Magazine, Front Porch Republic, FORMA, and elsewhere. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Paperback: 212pp.

ISBN: 978-1952826689