Word: bertolt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lessons. Lincoln Steffens had famously seen the future in the U.S.S.R. and proclaimed that it worked. It was less well known, notes the author, that Steffens "had previously seen it in Italy . . . where he thought it had also worked. His praise for Mussolini was as glowing as for Lenin." Bertolt Brecht told Hook that the status of defendants in the Soviet dock was irrelevant: "The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot." Hook dryly comments, "I never saw him again...
During the '30s Hollywood became a roost for an astonishing assortment of wanderers and political refugees. Playwright Bertolt Brecht despised Hollywood but scuttled about trying to get work (his evil city Mahagonny, a net for pleasure lovers, gives Friedrich his title). Igor Stravinsky, Friedrich relates, tried to write movie music but never succeeded. When Producer Irving Thalberg offered $25,000 for a score for The Good Earth, the distinguished and threadbare atonalist Arnold Schoenberg demanded $50,000 and the right to direct the actors, who, he felt, should chant their lines...
...against kings and governments through their work. Yeats, unpolitical as anyone could look in his fluffy neckties, wrote stinging political lines. As did Robert Lowell. As does Seamus Heaney. W.H. Auden's September 1, 1939 is a beautiful muddle of a poem on Europe in the shadow of war. Bertolt Brecht's To Posterity, about Germany under the Nazis, is clear as a bell...
This savagely funny scene, as momentarily plausible onstage as it is < preposterous in the retelling, is the central event of Edward Bond's Restoration, a stunning leftist anthem masquerading as a literary curiosity. The play marries the style of, say, Congreve or Farquhar with that of Bertolt Brecht: it blends a knowing pastiche of early 18th century comedy of manners with a 20th century call for revolution. Bond, 51, author of such dramas as Saved (1965) and The War Plays (1985), has for two decades been described as one of Britain's most promising playwrights. Yet his work has remained...
Galileo: by Bertolt Brecht, Kresge Little Theatre, MIT, Friday and Saturday...