Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Richard Brecht...
When Richard D. Brecht was denied tenure in the spring of 1979, he took the unfinished 500-page manuscript of his book on tense in Russian grammar and packed it in a box on shelf. It has remained there ever since, although the shelf is no longer in Cambridge--Brecht's home since 1965--but at the University of Maryland, where he is now chairman of the department of Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures...
...Mary's retinue assembles, the pace quickens, and the play resembles a Marx brothers script co-authored by Genet and Brecht. As ladies in waiting attend the Queen, they are addressed from the rear by fornicating lackey-lovers. When Mary calls for her dogs, a bevy of stuffed canines are propped up before her. She chooses to disremember that she once had a hound killed for losing the scent in a foxhunt. Like unskilled pickpockets, her attendants try to plunder her last remaining jewelry. A marvelously comic doctor-apothecary team (John Bottom and Ron Faber) get the Queen deliriously...
...morality play and spectacle both, the A.R.T. production well serves this idiosyncratic work; it fails only on a final count. Brecht's aesthetic of the theater allowed for no catharsis; his works end by posing the question of the world to the audience and waiting for the answer. The fault does not seem to lie with anyone in particular--Epstein, the performers, or Gary Fagin's energetic conducting but somewhere towards the end of this Seven Deadly Sins an alchemical transformation fails to take place: the dilemmas facing the characters fail to become the dilemmas facing the audience. It understands...
...worthwhile experiment; but on a double bill it undercuts its competition, turning its audience from theater-goers into listeners. Between the stern, subterranean gloom of the Requiem and the moral topology of The Seven Deadly Sins, the evening of theater becomes oppressive--more oppressive than necessary, even to portray Brecht's oppression-filled world...