Theater Abroad: Another Victor Hugo?

Few Americans have ever heard of Jacques Séraphin Audiberti, but in Europe his fame is that of a Tennessee Williams or an Arthur Miller. At 63, Audiberti is considered by some critics to be France's best postwar playwright and a prime candidate for the Academic Française. He is also turning out to be somewhat controversial for a man who claims that he is "very bourgeois" and "not at all avant-garde." Last week Audiberti was in seclusion at a country house 60 miles outside Paris after one of his plays had shocked old-line Paris society down to the roots of...