Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Lowell House Junior Common Room, of all places, Renato Rosaldo put Odets' Waiting for Lefty into a double-header with Geoffrey Fox's version of Brecht's The Measures Taken. The Reds won the first game, 4-2, but blew the nightcap when the Yankees came from behind...
...hard to imagine two plays in such contradiction. Lefty attributes to Communists a humane approach: "the man who got me food in '32 called me comrade. The one who picked me up where I bled--he called me comrade, too." On the other hand, Brecht's play warns that Communists who indulge in isolated acts of human kindness are actually working against the process by which the hated system must fall, and therefore must not submit to the temptation of short-range goodness...
...some reason, each director used only two weeks in rehearsal (and Mr. Fox devoted one to providing his cast with informal lectures on Marxism), The Odets worked because you can learn to shout properly in two weeks; but Brecht calls for real stagecraft and can't be slapped together. Fox staged the play without humor, without sense of place or time or color; he chose to emphasize only its religiosity and dogma. If Charles Breyer hadn't sung one of Hans Eisler's didactic ballads so meaningfully, the production wouldn't have been worth much...
Topicality becomes a problem for both directors, since each play was written with a timely, instructive purpose. Does Rosaldo really think Odets' desperate whining retains its topicality in these days of labor-management picnics and Taft-Hartley happiness? Does Fox think the strategic lessons which Brecht wants to impart in The Measures Taken are lessons which the Common Room audience could or should take seriously? If the answer in either case is yes, the directors failed on stage to explain why. Without that explanation their two weeks' toil seemed flat and offensive, or cute and inapplicable. Fox didn't sense...
Appearing on the panel with Morgenthau were Wassily W. Leontief. Henry Lee Professor of Economics, and Arnold Brecht, Professor Emeritus of the New School for Social Research in New York...