"As one of Egyptian theater's leading contemporary playwrights, Alfred Farag has had a profound influence on shaping Arabic drama and Egyptian cultural politics during the past five decades. In the first book-length examination of his work in English, Dina Amin chronicles Farag's career and offers a critical perspective on his creative output and the condition of Eyptian theater in the 1970s through the 1990s." "Farag is best known for the folkloric and neo-realist plays he produced during the sixties, but critics haw consistently overlooked the immense body of work produced in the thirty years that followed. Filing that gap, Amin offers an account of the sophisticated development of his later work, revealing his bold experimentation and successful embrace of modernist, absurdist, and postmodern styles. With fresh insight, Amin contextualizes these works within Farag's own creative history and the larger history of Arabic theater. This critical text includes four complete short plays and a monologue translated for the first time into English and will bring a much-deserved wider audience to the work of this extraordinary dramatist."--Jacket.