Feeling the heat at Aurora’s Arsonists

My first encounter with Swiss playwright Max Frisch was in college when my Drama as Literature class read his Biedermann and the Firebugs, a 1953 radio play that was expanded into a stage play in 1958. The subtitle of that version was the clunky "a learning-play without a lesson." Alistair Beaton delivered a new translation to London's Royal Court Theatre in 2007 with the much zippier title – The Arsonists – and a subtitle: "a moral play without a moral." Happily, that's the version now on stage at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company under the customarily energetic direction of Mark Jackson.

The time is now, and Frisch's take on the wishy-washy morals of the privileged middle class is as astute as ever.