Among the traditional theater arts of Asia, Indonesia's wajang kulit shadow theater has long beert one of the most admired. For information about it the Western theater artist has turned to scholarly research by Dutch and, more recently American, ethnologists, anthropologists, archeologists, and musicologists, who wrote about wajang kulit primarily as it relates to the other arts (especially music) or as an ethnographic phenomenon through which the culture of Java or Bali might be elucidated. To date no general study has been written in English of wajang kulit as a theater art. Within this decade a number of new Javanese sources have appeared in print, especially play texts and analyses of theatrical form. The purpose of this book is to make use of these new materials and to present English versions of three plays from the Standard Javanese wajang kulit repertory. The plays have been approached in a creative spirit and it is hoped the general play reader will find them enjoyable and theater artists will be stimulated to perform them on the stage.

There are well over two hundred plays in the wajang kulit repertory, and three cannot" represent" this great wealth of dramatic literature. But I have tried to select plays which dramatize different periods in the lives of wajang's Pandawa heroes and illustrate some of the wide ränge of wajang's subject matter, thematic content, mood, and theatrical techniques. Beyond this, they were chosen because they appealed to my dramatic Imagination. The Reincarnation of Rama is based on the pub-