Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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These esoteric oddities remind one that Brecht wrote this unusual play forty years ago, when he was in his early twenties. The young dramatist's Communism was as yet embryonic: The Chicago slums provide the location for his play, but only occasionally does he instruct his well-fed audience to "Look life straight in the eye." The play is less political and more metaphysical than maturer works like Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle...
...this speculative emphasis, In the Jungle of Cities is not a dated period piece. The Theatre Company of Boston expertly stages the play as it was meant to be produced in the twenties, and the result is contemporary drama as entertaining and puzzling as Genet, Ionesco, or latter-day Brecht...
...Brecht's foreword urges the viewer to "watch now the inexplicable wrestling match between two men . . . Don't worry about the reasons for this fight but make yourself share in the human stakes." The advice is well-taken, because the reasons for the struggle seem decidedly artificial from the start. Shlink a Chinese timber dealer, purposely provokes a fatal quarrel with George Garga, an employee in a moth-eaten lending library. When Garga refuses to sell his opinion of a book to Shlink and his three thugs, the Chinaman concludes that he is a man of spirit an man worthy...
HAPPY END (Columbia) is the puniest of the four small operas written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. While it lacks the dramatic and social force of Three penny Opera, it can nearly match its songs. The work has never been better performed than in this version. Lotte Lenya, Weill's widow and faithful interpreter, memorably croaks Surabaya Johnny, Bilbao-Song, and other dirges from the shadows...
Painter Lindner grew up in the era of Brecht's social satire, of Max Beckmann's razor-sharp realism, of the street-fighting Weimar Republic, where a mark was worth less than a match...