Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...BERTOLT BRECHT is one of those playwrights about whom there can be no equivocation. In his plays, like it or not, one must take a side, either with the rapacious, self-centered capitalists or the downtrodden but gritty workingmen. Brecht's drama, to borrow Lionel Trilling's phrase, takes place at that "bloody crossroads where art and politics meet...
...twenties, lean, slight, light-skinned, freckled, pale-eyed, sharp-faced. He wears round wire-rimmed spectacles like Bertolt Brecht's and a bush of red hair teased out as if in ongoing electrocution. His chin and lips are hairless. No hippie he, his clothes are rumpled but clean, plain, even severe: in Ambrose's phrase, he dresses like a minor member of the North Korean U.N. delegation...
Wedekind was undeniably an influence on Brecht, who has the same disdain for interior logic, presents characters as symbols, and portrays a similarly seamy and exploitative world. But Wedekind's people lack the earthiness of Brecht's; their passions seem forced and silly. Brecht managed to create recognizable, if exaggerated, people. But Wedekind's characters are pale and disembodied ghosts. This failure flaws the play and riddles it with inconsistencies that make the characters hard to portray, the play hard to follow, and leaves it ultimately insubstantial. Wedekind brilliantly creates an atmosphere; he simply cannot create people to inhabit...
DIED. Paul Dessau, 84, East German composer of operas and incidental music best known for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht (Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle); in East Berlin. Following a career as a violinist and conductor of the Staädtische Oper in Berlin, Dessau fled the Nazis in 1939 for America, where he began writing the dissonant scores that so effectively complemented Brecht's scripts. An old-line Communist, Dessau returned to East Germany after...
...vehicles for individual talent and egos, we will see style and 'razamataz', we will see anything but theater that probes or investigates, links an intellectual insight to an emotionalism with talent and style to produce a work of true theater, a work in the tradition of Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, Beckett, and many other great writers...