Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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PRESENTING a show with the full title The Seven Deadly Sins of the Lower Middle Class to a Cambridge/Loeb Drama Center audience risks a failure of communication: the gulf between Brecht's selfish characters clawing away at each other on the stage and the dainty gourmet shops sitting outside on Brattle St. seems wide enough to swallow Seven Deadly Sins' compact message. The great virtue of Alvin Epstein's American Repertory Theatre production is its dextrous explication of Brecht's easily garbled multiple ironies. Epstein uses his performers, music, dance, mime and even neon signs to illuminate Brecht's critique...
Inverting the scheme of the traditional morality play, Brecht has his characters--a pair of sisters trying to earn money for their family home--avoid the traditional deadly sins so they can practice far worse ones more efficiently. One sister (both are named Anna) serves as guardian spirit to her suffering sibling: as they travel from city to city, climbing a ladder of fortune, the worldly temptations of Anna 2 are warded off one by her moralizing sister...
...production also succeeds in recreating the detail of Brecht's fanciful vision of America as a Babylon on wheels. Sordid vulgarity falls from the garish costumes, the trashy props, and the giant neon arch--inscribed with the names of the seven sins lighting up in succession like a stage-wide slot machine that lands on whichever sins is being acted out below. In this world, beauty becomes a painted go-go dancer, so it's no wonder lust, pride and anger should seem more virtuous than the alternatives of self-denial, hypocrisy and quiescence...
Instead, the "new realists" proposed something more detached, skeptical and hardheaded: an art of the street, the cafe, the factory line, the docks and brothels. Some of its collective character might be gleaned from the title Bertolt Brecht gave one of his poems: "700 Intellectuals Pray to an Oil Tank." It was a pessimistic movement. Nobody involved with Neue Sachlichkeit believed in the machine-utopias that were an article of faith among the romantics at the Bauhaus. When an artist like Carl Grossberg (1894-1940) painted factory installations, he gave them a deserted, haunting quality, as though some German...
...Brecht might be said to be the cynosure for the contemporary theatre, so is Wedekind, as Brecht's mentor, a star ascendant in the night sky. This is Wedekind year at the Loeb; the American Rep is scheduled to perform Lulu early next year, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Drama Club started its season last week with an auspicious production of Spring's Awakening, Wedekind's first work...