Gas I A Play in Five Acts by Georg Kaiser

Gas I, artistically and intellectually a play complete in itself, advances the argument from a private issue to a group experience: the son of the "billionaire" has become a social revolutionary, dedicated to the realization of the "new man". He offers his workers the opportunity of a humane life if they will agree to abandon the production of gas upon which the huge machinery of capitalism depends but which threatens from time to time to destroy the workers' community. At the risk of their happiness the workers prefer the "system" to "life", the new man is not yet.