Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...think that August Strindberg is a hot new agent, but Streep played Miss Julie at Vassar. Beginning her professional stage career in New York only four years ago, she conquered prized roles in Shakespeare (Measure for Measure, Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew), Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard) and Brecht-Weill (Happy End), as well as in works by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. This repertory training came to Meryl because she was ready for it; her education went on in public, but critics and audiences did the learning. Director Arvin Brown expresses what threatens to become a bromide when...
...Brecht, an incredibly ambitious and fecund playwright, borrows Eastern and particularly Indian techniques for Chalk Circle. The inserted songs, somewhat reedily rendered by Stark; the stage-manager as chorus, marvelously narrated by clarion-voiced Andrew Garrett; the use of scene titles--all wed form with geography to good effect. Director Thomas Seoh might have exploited this exotic influence more extravagantly with stilts or wire-hoops. Seoh seemed a bit diffident about taking such directorial prerogatives...
...CAST, although generally competent, particularly warms to their roles during the last scene, which-appropriately enough for a law school audience--takes place in a courtroom. From an epic style in the earlier portion of the play. Brecht shifts nimbly to parable. Grusha must contend with the haughty mother over who will gain possession of the child. Azdak, the magistrate-rogue, played with animation by David Miller, gives the "chalk-circle test." Grusha lets go of Michael because she doesn't want to hurt him "I brought him up! Should I tear him apart...
...school performance follows Brecht's script faithfully, but does not venture into new or experimental theatrical terrain. The result is a bit spare, even stingy. In a major omission, Seoh leaves out the celebratory dance at the end of the play, perhaps because of the limited size of the auditorium. Such a formalistic rendering of the play shortchanges the audience...
...BRECHT'S Caucasian Chalk Circle is yet another of his sagas of strong proletarian women fighting for a better world, women who retain their belief in goodness despite bourgeois disorder and chaos. One sees echoes of Grusha's stamina in Brecht's Mother Courage and St. Joan. If the world is to be saved in Brecht's eyes, it will be saved by Women--suffering pours iron into their veins. They have been through hell and back, yet they come out smiling...