Word: bertolt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...emotions explain the need for dramatic art," Bentley stated in discussing the psychology of identification with characters on the stage, and tracing the roots of this identification to infancy. Referring to Bertolt Brecht at the conclusion of the lecture, Bentley described the aims of the playwright's epic theater" as an attempt to break down emotional identifications and create an intellectual distance between the audience and the stage...
Eric Bentley, at the University for the year while on leave from Columbia, where he is Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature, is a forty-four year old Englishman whose name is intertwined with that of Bertolt Brecht. Through his translations, and explanations of the complex Brechtian theories of epic drama, he has been chiefly responsible for the German playwright's recent surge of popularity. An anthologizer, translator, producer, and director, Bentley today looms as one of the most respected and acute commentators on the theatrical scene...
...apartment as launching pad for some fairly sordid affairs, the picture takes on a hard, unwinking look of irony. Again and again, Wilder seems to speak in the accents of one of his favorite cities, prewar Berlin, a tough, sardonic, sometimes wryly sentimental place whose intellectual symbol was Bertolt Brecht. Is Billy trying to say something serious about men and women, heels and heroes? Is he as a sort of puritanical pander, trying to instruct as he entertains...
Though Mr. Miller has expressed admiration for Bertolt Brecht, he is unwilling to follow him into the openly, almost abstractly, political drama. His play centers on three carefully humanized beings--a triangle, in fact. One would not expect adultery to be vitally involved with a matter so superficially asexual as the Salem witch trials, especially in the works of so high-minded an author. But the fact that his hero John Proctor has in times recently past "sweated like a stallion" after the slut who is now crying "Witch!" at his wife, adds to the play's intensity without detracting...
...Good Woman is a preposterous "parable" that demonstrates you can't reconcile good and evil. The flame of goodness, however flickering, never expires. Yet evil is everywhere; so pervasive is evil that it lurks in goodness itself--in the blundering unwittingness of goodness. Specifically, Bertolt Brecht has written the story of an angelic prostitute (you never meet any other kind, on the stage, at least) who finds the wordly threats to her integrity so great she must mask herself as a loud-mouthed male. Thus better equipped to operate amid the avarice and lecheries of people, she can more effectively...