Mayakovsky: Plays includes Mystery Bouffe, a mock medieval mystery written in 1918 to celebrate the first anniversary of the Revolution;The Bathhouse, a sharp attack on Soviet bureaucracy subtitled "a drama of circus and fireworks"; andThe Bedbug, in which a worker with bourgeois pretensions is frozen and resurrected fifty years later, when the world has become a material paradise. The collection also includes Mayakovsky's more personal first play,Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy.