Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Brecht's theme was the revolutionary farmers' takeover of what was best in the past, its songs and the belief in personal and communal dignity that lay behind them. So he showed the roots of the farmers' anti-fascist slogans and collective ambitions in simple, legendary stories, and the way the values of the stories made the anti-fascist slogans make sense, like Azdak's Solomon-like decision that Grusha keeps the governor's child because she won't try to pull him from a circle in a tug-of-war with the governor's ambitious widow. As a result...
...scenes before the last, and be more simply sincere at least in his initial revulsion at mistakenly helping the grand duke escape and in his questions to the defendants he plans to acquit. But he turns in a virtuoso performance, and the most important thing shines through it: Brecht's call to action, for another Azdakian era of disorder at the end of which Azdak won't have to apologize for not being a hero or address his Ironshirted attackers as "Fellow dogs," for a dialectical revolution like the one the Ironshirts announce when they first dress Azdak in judicial...
...Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle ranks with the greatest plays ever written. It's based on an old legend about a wise judge who has to decide which of two mothers a child belongs to, and it has a tender quality that blends with the acerbic honesty you expect from Brecht. The Winter's Tale is the only other play I know with as deep a feeling for dialectic change and the hope it makes possible. With any kind of production, it should be a good play not to miss. Opens tonight, 7:30 p.m. at the Loeb...
Like Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch, Switzerland's Friedrich Duerrenmatt is one of those didactic dramatists who regard the theater as a classroom, the stage as a blackboard, the pen as a pointer and the playgoers as barely educable dolts. These playwrights take a dim view of man, dividing the species into two arbitrary categories: predators and prey, the fleecers and the fleeced. No one would deny that such characters are abundantly present in life, but to see the entire pattern of human behavior in these terms is one-eyed vision. As propounded in The Visit, currently being revived...
...CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE, by Bertolt Brecht. This is being done at Dartmouth this weekend and next, which is pretty far afield to be listed in The Crimson. The play is the most moving socialist statement I have ever read, so I'm listing it, just in case you have friends at Dartmouth...