The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!

Since 1959, Derek Walcott has directed and written for the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. The Joker of Seville, a comedy based on Tirso de Molina's El Burlador de Sevilla, was commissioned by England's Royal Shakespeare Company. Walcott's sensitivity to the pacing, meter, and lyricism of the original makes his first attempt at adaptation an extraordinary accomplishment. O Babylon! brings life the Rastafarian sect in Jamaica, which grew during Marcus Garvey's exile to that country and has recently been popularized through the lyrics of reggae music.

Mr. Walcott's plays have been produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and the Negro Ensemble Company. Dream on Monkey Mountain, the title play of his earlier collection, won the Obie Award for a Distringuished Foreign Play when produced in New York in 1971. It was deemed "a masterpiece" by Edith Oliver in The New Yorker. "Dream on Monkey Mountain," she wrote, "is a poem in dramatic form or a drama in poetry, and poetry is rare in the modern theatre. Every line of it plays....there is a sound psychological basis for every action and emotion."