Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...POSSIBLE that no dramatist of similar stature could match the sexual activity of Frank Wedekind; it was characteristic of him that he would bring this personal obsession to the stage. "His greatest work," Brecht eulogized, "was his own personality." Wedekind was the first playwright of the polymorphous perverse, and his sexual emphasis and stylistic departures from photographic naturalism opened the door for Brecht, as well as all of the modern drama that followed. Somewhat simian in appearance, Wedekind was the Missing Link in German drama between the mad prodigy Georg Buchner and the Twentieth Century, the first one to come...
Sidney Hook's attack on certain popular figures [April 28] brings to mind another false idol of our time: Bertolt Brecht. Brecht's purpose was not to bring down the Nazis but that tender sprout of democracy, the Weimar Republic. Rather than undermine the Nazi movement, Brecht et al. made the brown-shirted thugs acceptable to millions of middle-class Germans ("Somebody's got to do something!"), and thus contributed to the eventual rise of Hitler...
HAPPY END is schizophrenic--an anomalous lark. The biting, sardonic music of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht don't fit the sitcom plot. The play's as far from Brecht & Weill's Three penny Opera as a Keystone Kops film is from Little Caesar. Both plays recount the daring misdeeds and romantic entanglements of a gangster, but Threepenny Opera's sordid outlaws become Happy End's petty, bumbling bullies. Despite a denunciation of capitalism tacked on at the end, Happy End is insubstantial fluff, a romantic comedy expertly staged and acted by the American Repertory Theatre Company...
While Happy End is not--and should not necessarily be--a Threepenny Opera, Brecht and Weill's songs suggest that Happy End could have another face. The gang's pettiness and cowardice, the naivete and condescension of the Salvation Army sermons, Bill's amorality, Lil's sexuality--these elements of Feingold's adaptation should have been emphasized in the production. The Brecht and Weill characters, as revealed in their songs, are not the cute bumblers of Jones' production. The two paint a much crueler, darker world, a world in which the little guys squander their energies fighting each other instead...
...hippie communes of the late 1960s, have struggled with the reality of individual self-interest. Sixty years of Soviet efforts to make workers more productive and innovative through slogans, medals, bonuses and threats have not overcome the basic problems of the U.S.S.R.'s inefficient agriculture and erratic industry. Bertolt Brecht, the Marxist German dramatist, said sardonically after the 1953 workers' riots in East Berlin that in view of the system's problems with its subjects, it might be easier to "dissolve the people and elect another...