Since his breakthrough on the stage in 1971 Peter Turrini has continued to write plays that have escalated him into the forefront of the Austrian theater scene.Although the forms, styles, and problems have steadily changed and increased in complexity over the more than twenty years of his literary career, one aspect of his writing has remained constant: his commitment to conceiving his works and specifically language as a means of unmasking his society through his analyses of representative individuals. Like most of Turrini's characters, the characters in Alpine Glow are seeking personal freedom from a consumer society that dominates their lives and, as they insist, prevents them from living an authentic rather than a false, synthetic existence.