Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...chorus-jury files in, and the four figures turn into leaders explaining their reasons for the execution of a certain "Young Comrade." A series of scenes portrays Young Comrade's repeated betrayals of the group. Brecht never takes long to come to the point, and soon the moral is clear: pity for the oppressed is not always in order, revolutionary action is not always in order, doing what is human is not always in order. What is necessary for the Revolution is distance: heroes cannot make the Revolution; only the party can, through the objective truth of its ideology...
...sheer dramatics as well as theatrics, Brecht is the great modern master of distancing, the inventor of the so-called "alienation effect," which seeks to keep the auditor from mere emotional involvement, which rationalizes the theater in order to teach rational lessons. He sets his plays in a real but simpler world. The setting here is Mukden, the revolutionary leaders come from Moscow; yet the focus is not on these real-world places but on the wider-reaching lessons involved...
...first moments, the action is set off as a play within a play. Each scene played by the agitators, moreover, is set off by their explanations, and directors Martin Andrucki and Frank Kinahan are careful to have each actor preserve the particularity of each of his different roles. Brecht is a master at building convincing symmetry into a play, and here the recurrent exclamations and questions of the chorus, either individual or collective, are set into dialogue with the group of leaders...
...Brecht is best produced with the simplest of scenery, as the current production illustrates amply. The stage takes on two foci: the massed chorus and the red box which the leaders use as a multi-purpose prop for their scenarios. Three objects make up a sort of backdrop. A sign-board carrying the number and title of the current scene expresses the movement of the play and places each scene in the whole. A map of Mukden and environs locates the action in space. A poster of Lenin indicates the dominating ideology, and shows that the whole dramatic inquest...
...BECAUSE Brecht builds distance into his plays, because dramatic language has become propaganda and ironic formula, acting can more effectively be recitation than it can be effusion. "The word has become a weapon in the class struggle," one leader says. This might also mean that it is hard to mis-act a Brecht play, since the current production, only fairly acted by normal standards, succeeds splendidly both as theater and as lesson. Produced by Humanities 96v, The Measures Taken represents a bona-fide learning experience. For the work of a playwright who sought always to give perspective, to express totality...