No Exit and Three Other Plays/Jean-Paul Sartre/281 pp.

A friend saw that I was reading this book and asked, "Why are you reading Sartre? Life too pleasant for you right now?" I responded that I'd heard a lot about Sartre, but had never read any of his work and wanted to try him out. This volume left me with mixed feelings toward the author.
This collection consists of four plays written by Sartre: The first, No Exit is a conversation among three people who have recently died and found themselves in hell. However, instead of the whips and torture they expected, their punishment is to sit in a locked drawing room and talk with each other for eternity. The second play, The Flies, takes us to the ancient Greek city of Argos, where Orestes has returned to take his vengeance on his stepfather and mother for killing his father, Agamemnon. He meets his sister, Electra, the Furies, and even Zeus himself. The third play, Dirty Hands, takes place in a small Eastern European country during World War II; a member of the local Communist group is given the mission of assassinating a fellow party member. Finally, in the fourth piece, The Respectful Prostitute, a young woman in the 1940s American South is asked to testify that a black man tried to rape her. If she doesn't, she will be exposed as a prostitute and run out of town.
Of the four works, I enjoyed No Exit the most. All the action takes place in one room, as the three characters reveal the causes of their deaths, and the actions that have led them to their punishment in hell. The play that I least liked was The Flies; the concept that the residents of Argos are ritually punishing themselves for the murder of their king, and that Zeus and the Furies are feeding off of their self-loathing and depression, was disturbing to me. Also, the play assumes a familiarity with the Orestes/Electra story that I didn't already have.
Two of the works (The Flies and The Respectful Prostitute) mention specifically that they were translated by others; if Sartre himself translated the other two plays, or if he wrote them in English, both he and the other translators did a good job of putting them into language that fits well with the locale and personalities of the characters.