Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Bertok Brecht was a magnificent failure. Better known in this country for his notions of what the theater should be than for his plays themselves, his plays, with the exception of The Threepenny Opera, are too rarely produced. We prefer arguing about Communism, the didactic theater, the epic theater, the A-effect, and the V-effect (alienation or Verfremdungseffekt, depending upon your degree of snobbery). As John Hancock's superb production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle demonstrated, Brecht was too much an artist to be seduced by his own theories. The stage of the Loeb Drama Center was from more...
...must go to those who use them best. Mr. Hancock's cutting of everything dealing with the collective farm is silly politically and dramatically, for the last three lines of the play, "And the valley to the waterers, that it bring forth fruit," becomes poetically lewd in a way Brecht wouldn't have appreciated...
...lower half of the stage; an enormous revolve turns as Grusha and the soldiers march; music comes from offstage to accompany the songs; and scenery is moved in a public and unabashed way. The tension between the formality of the staging and the tenderness of the story makes for Brecht's tough beauty, and Hancock understood and used it with joyful discrimination...
...Brecht's most basic plot revisions are of the end of the movie. The gallows scene and reprieve are cut, and instead Mack the Knife escapes from jail and becomes the head of a prominent banking house which Polly has bought for him. He takes as partners Polly's father, old Peachum, the organizer of London's beggars, and Tiger Brown, who has been deposed as London's police chief. Both of these old criminals have been stripped of their respectability by an enormous demonstration put on by thousands of crippled beggars during Queen Victoria's coronation parade...
...spite of this compliance with Brecht's wishes, his objections to the movie were well founded. The idea which shapes Pabst's direction is not a condemnation of capitalism, but rather the dehumanization which accompanies the acceptance of any social values. The first character to under-go embourgeoisement is Polly. When she first falls in love with Macheath, she is the epitome of innocence; when she is about to sleep with Macheath for the first time, she runs up the hotel stairs like a kitten chasing a ball of yarn; and when she sings her song about the circumstances under...