Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Lincoln Square Theatre, which will be completed by 1961, will house a repertory drama group, plus a four year acting school. It will produce new plays and some contemporary classics of Shaw, Ibsen, and Chekov. Whitehead hopes to model the Lincoln Square Theatre after the East Berlin Brecht Theatre. This German theatre has its own company of writers, actors, and producers...
...better company, and the celebration of the sexual instincts which they represent borders, at its best, on comic poetry. But this erotic yea-saying degenerates in lesser moments into remarkably explicit single-entendre that is crude without being funny. Crudity seems, generally speaking, to be the defect inherent in Brecht's attempt to simplify life to the point where it can be described in his almost-allegorical terms. His characters are often lifeless stick-figures whose only identity is a label, and his political and social pronouncements are over-stated, over-emphasized, over-dramatized past the point of exasperation...
This harsh, shrill, constantly-hammering quality in Brecht's writing has led Alex Horn, who directed, to impose upon his cast a degree of rough broadness in their playing that they cannot convincingly sustain. Ray Reinhardt plays Puntila with considerable authority (he can actually look like a dying deer while somebody is telling him not to); Anne Meara as his daughter has a high-spirited charm that shines out of everything she does. But even they have strained and labored moments, and certain minor cast members have no moments of any other kind. John Lasell plays the hired man with...
...frame, and the effect is never more Brechtian than when substantial sections look as if they were made out of old packing-crates. The folkish songs composed (or, sometimes, borrowed) by Caldwell Titcomb, and sung mostly by Johanna Linch, are also highly atmospheric. These are the familiar devices of Brecht's "Epic Theatre" staging, but it seems to me that in this production they are fused in a new way with the words of the play, to create an ambience none the less real for being more vivid, perhaps, in memory than actuality...
...always with Brecht, there is the sense of an original, individual talent, undiverted and uncompromising, stubbornly being true to itself. This sounds like a moral rather than an aesthetic virtue, but it insures that Puntila, though often repetitive and clumsy, sometimes even boring, is seldom commonplace...