Word: brecht
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Galileo. Bertolt Brecht believed that historical forces rendered the individual obsolete and, paradoxically, wrote plays in which flawed, split, and roguishly tenacious personalities like Mother Courage and Galileo exhibit a passion for survival that dwarfs history and dominates the stage. Galileo, offered last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, is like a formal ballet of the mind in which the prince of science and the princes of the church dance out their accustomed roles. But for Western civilized man, Galileo's recantation before the Cardinal Inquisitor (Shepperd Strudwick) has the power and poignance of Socrates drinking hemlock...
...Brecht's vision of the theater as a classroom works ideally in Galileo. To the audience, the great astronomer plays teacher, a kind of intellectual locksmith picking at the rusty encrustations of habit, custom and tradition as he elucidates his proofs that the earth revolves around the sun. This Galileo is a glutton of food, wine and ideas. As one character says, he has "thinking bouts." As Brecht sees it, this very appetite is Galileo's fatal flaw. His desire to save his skin ranks above any devotion to a pure priesthood of science, any will to suffer...
...decided that horses really were not the answer. When Vanessa turned down a minor part in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lynn jumped at the chance to play it. In 1963, Olivier took her on at the National Theater, and she found that she could play for pathos (Brecht's Mother Courage) as well as waddle through twaddle (Coward's Hay Fever). Big things were expected of her?but not quite the sort of big things that actually happened...
...group called the Commu- nist Party, claiming to be the vanguard of the workers, rejected the clear class privilege (though illusory, though temporary) of 2-S. They would be amazed if such a group did not urge other radcials also to defend 2-S. After all, as Brecht says: When the leaders speak of peace The common folk know That war is coming. And shouldn't revolutionaries act just like the exploiting class they would, allegedly, overthrow? Let us not act in the interest of the collective! Selfish opportunism is what capitalism trains people to expect. Don't scare...
Blau and Irving had tried too hard with too little. Their company (including their own wives) was unseasoned, their stage-an apron affair-was too difficult, and their repertory (Brecht, Sartre, Lorca) too demanding. By last week, with all of their efforts widely panned, Blau resigned, wrote the center's trustees: "The climate is no longer right for me to do what I came to do. Perhaps my going will clear the atmosphere so the theater may move freshly in whatever course of action it must take now." Irving will stay on as sole director at least until...