Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Salvation Army preacher (name unknown) whose skin is so thick "it bends anything you stick into it" lets a man spit in his face as a condition to a donation, and later shoots himself, uttering somebody else's last words. These people have the poetic, imaginative quality of other Brecht characters, but the fantasy Chicago of this early Brecht play doesn't confront the issues of the usual Brechtian world...
...Brecht had read a German novel about Chicago and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle just before he started to write In the Jungle of Cities. A jungle is an apt, if overused, metaphor for the most grotesque, competitive aspects of a city--John D. Rockefeller, invoking Darwin to describe his goals for the capitalist economy, suggested how apt the comparison can be--and Brecht populates his jungle with Baboon and another henchman cleverly named Worm to emphasize the point. But otherwise he ignores the real psychology of city life in order to concentrate on the petty idiosyncracies of his characters...
Setting up another framework for his play, Brecht wrote in a short prologue, "You will witness an inexplicable wrestling match between two men and observe the downfall of a family that has moved from the prairies to the jungle of the big city." 369's production takes this prediction literally, using a boxing ring instead of a stage, calling the scenes "rounds" and ending each with a bell, and having a ring announcer (who seems more like a circus ringmaster) read the introductory phrases that Brecht wanted shouted like newspaper headlines. Subtlety--never the strongest point of a Brecht play...
...play is so strained to begin with that it can't survive such treachery. A high point occurs when one of the rival "wrestlers" gives away his business--presumably so that the fight will be fair. With one irrational stroke Brecht thus dismisses class conflict as a factor of any interest in his jungle war. The older Brecht would never have abandoned his moral sense, as Brecht does here. In the Jungle of Cities shows the immature Brecht as a stylist without purpose, a mere player on words, the sort of playwright who would not be able to defend himself...
...first prime minister of England. From time to time, the characters explain that they are at least more honest than England's unpunished rich people, but mostly they're too busy trying to sell each other out. At the end, Macheath the highwayman--the original of Weill's and Brecht's Mack the Knife, in their updated Threepenny Opera--stands with a rope around his neck while a beggar-narrator explains that for strict poetical Justice he'll have to be hanged and all the other characters hanged or transported, but that as in operas it doesn't matter...