Who wrote the stage plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, the source of Lulu’s story?

Frank Wedekind wrote the stage plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, the source of Lulu’s story.

Wedekind was a German playwright whose Lulu drama was published and performed in two parts: Earth Spirit in 1895 and Pandora’s Box in 1904. Together, the plays trace the rise and ruin of Lulu, a figure whose sexuality and independence challenge bourgeois social rules.

The character later became famous in other media. Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1929 film Pandora’s Box adapted the plays, with Louise Brooks playing Lulu. Alban Berg’s opera Lulu also draws on Wedekind’s dramas, although its music and structure transform the source material.

Wedekind’s title Pandora’s Box invokes the ancient myth but does not reproduce its plot. Lulu is not the mythological Pandora, and the plays do not focus on Hesiod’s gods or the release of evils from a jar. The connection is thematic and symbolic, centered on danger, desire, and consequences.