Thirst

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 “lim