Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...kings and governments through their work. Yeats, unpolitical as anyone could look in his fluffy neckties, wrote stinging political lines. As did Robert Lowell. As does Seamus Heaney. W.H. Auden's September 1, 1939 is a beautiful muddle of a poem on Europe in the shadow of war. Bertolt Brecht's To Posterity, about Germany under the Nazis, is clear as a bell...
Indoors, Ashland's shows range from Brecht's Threepenny Opera to a contemporary American comedy, Eric Overmyer's On the Verge, which has never been staged in New York City but has been taken up by a dozen or so regional theaters. This puckish story of three 19th century women explorers who find themselves jolted forward to the 1950s needs a more eventful second act and a quicker ending, but it muses beguilingly about culture shock, imperialism and the meaning, or meaninglessness, of language...
...being silly," a great friendship was born. She gave him class; he gave her sexy roles. Sigourney played a murderous multiple schizophrenic Electra figure in Durang's Titanic, a woman who dates a bisexual analysand in Beyond Therapy. Together they wrote and performed Das Lusitania Songspiel, a deliciously rancid Brecht-meets-Broadway parody, and Naked Lunch, a fake interview with Voracious Starlet Sigourney Weaver that, in expanded form, may soon be a major motion picture. "She is a very strong collaborator," says Durang. "The furthest-out ideas come from Sigourney. I, however, type faster." Of their paldom, Weaver says...
...madang-gut, literally, "openyard festival," has been compared by western critics to the epic drama of Brecht, in its recovery of neo-primitivism as the starting point of "experiemental" drama. Brecht's influence is especially evident in the elimination of the stage. Instead, the audience participates in the illusion. The drama begins with an appuri, an opening act whose typical function within the epic form, as Marxist critic George Lukacs observes, is to create "the sphere of life" where "a loosening of the bonds that tie men and objects to the ground" can spontaneously occur...
This savagely funny scene, as momentarily plausible onstage as it is < preposterous in the retelling, is the central event of Edward Bond's Restoration, a stunning leftist anthem masquerading as a literary curiosity. The play marries the style of, say, Congreve or Farquhar with that of Bertolt Brecht: it blends a knowing pastiche of early 18th century comedy of manners with a 20th century call for revolution. Bond, 51, author of such dramas as Saved (1965) and The War Plays (1985), has for two decades been described as one of Britain's most promising playwrights. Yet his work has remained...